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Hearing from our communities is critical to the success of this work to improve equity inside our schools and classrooms. We've actively and regularly been listening to staff, students, parents and partners and this ongoing communication and dialogue is shaping the work we do. We will continue to engage and work with our communities while constantly reflecting on and revising our strategies as necessary to best serve and support our students.
Choice of Program – This ranges from choice of course content to method of delivery, students are asking for more comprehensive choices than what has traditionally been available. There was a focus on personal finance, skills that are immediately relevant in the lives of students at a young age.
Quality of Instruction – We have heard many comments about the quality of instruction. Students also mentioned favoritism in class and some gender inequity; lack of differentiation that is meaningful; teacher seen as holder of knowledge and a gatekeeper to next level, but not necessarily a partner for students.
Access to Opportunity – This includes physical access to all aspects of school and learning, and also access in terms of all students receiving the same opportunities, as opposed to what currently happens - only the "chosen few" are selected, leaving others out consistently.
Focus on Equity – Students appreciate the recent focus on equity in schools, but want to see this go deeper and be more inclusive. Not enough has happened to get our schools into a truly equitable place, and they know it, and they want to know how to improve this. | {
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Arts & Sciences,
College of Osteopathic Medicine,
Anatomy,
John Misak, Photographed by Rick Wenner.
While William Shakespeare's Hamlet is a requisite for most literature classes, students can easily get lost in the vernacular. On the other side of the academic spectrum— the sciences— understanding concepts in physics, biology, and anatomy can be equally as challenging.
To address the daunting task of engaging students in complicated subject matter, four New York Institute of Technology faculty members are leveraging creative approaches and drawing on improvisation, video games, and popular culture to teach their areas of expertise. They've also found ways to integrate these innovative methods into their research and scholarship.
Marrying the Virtual World with Science and Literature
Most people would not dare mention Shakespeare and video games in the same sentence. Not John Misak, assistant professor of humanities, who recently developed the game Perchance: An AR Hamlet Mystery (AR stands for augmented reality) with Kevin LaGrandeur, Ph.D., former New York Tech professor of English. After noticing his students' lack of engagement with Hamlet during class, Misak saw a unique opportunity to take his passion for video games to the next level while enhancing his students' in-class experience. He taught himself some basic coding and animation skills, then brought in undergraduate students from the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences to help integrate more advanced technology into his new-age approach to literature.
"We saw an opportunity to create a high-impact classroom exercise. Having theorized based on student sentiment toward Shakespeare, it was time to put our thoughts into practice. Perchance is the result of this desire to actively engage students in texts they often have an aversion to. Their response has been overwhelmingly positive," he says.
In 2018, Misak and his team developed a beta test for students to experiment and provide feedback. Since then, a mystery component has been added and improvements have been made. "Students indicated a preference for a traditional game with AR sprinkled in," he says.
Misak also has students collaborate on design, having them provide coding, writing, and graphic support. Ultimately, he wants students in New York Tech's science technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors to use these recognizable skills in his classes, another move that could help to remove the barriers created by preconceived notions about classic literature and students' abilities to enjoy these works. "I see our work as a balance between traditional and cutting-edge technology. Our app is designed to encourage reading—not replace it."
Akinobu "Aki" Watanabe, Ph.D., Photographed by Rick Wenner.
Akinobu "Aki" Watanabe, Ph.D., assistant professor of anatomy in the College of Osteopathic Medicine, is also taking his research into the virtual realm. As part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award, Watanabe plans to integrate virtual reality into his world—an ideal marriage because of the 3-D aspects of anatomy that virtual reality (VR) can convey.
Using VR, Watanabe is working to develop a fun learning experience that combines birding and anatomy. In the program he proposes, people would match bird skulls with bird brains to highlight differences between bird species and their brain sizes and skulls. When there's a match, the player "collects" the bird—similar to how birders record the birds they see on their life list—and learns more about the bird species. His target audience is middle and high school students as well as the general public interested in VR and science. Through this game, he also hopes to make science more inclusive. "Science is overwhelmingly communicated through sound and images, which tend to exclude individuals who are deaf and/or blind," he explains. "The VR experience is an immersive and portable way that can engage individuals who have hearing disabilities." Watanabe and his lab will also be harnessing the 3-D printers at New York Tech's Center for Biomedical Innovation to build a tactile puzzle game using bird brains and skulls that could be enjoyed by vision-impaired individuals.
And just as Misak brought art to technology, Watanabe—who minored in music during his undergraduate years and performs violin with the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra in New York City—also has plans to integrate science into art by using some of the NSF funding to create a musical composition using scientific data. He notes that while there are compositions in music, dance, and other disciplines that are inspired by science, he plans to use different data and metrics to guide the musical composition. For example, he will transform the diversity of anatomical structures and shapes into the pitch and geological time into the beat of the music. Ultimately, Watanabe hopes to debut his musical score with the help of a string quartet.
"Although the media tend to be brushed aside as distractions, they are a constant source of fresh ideas for me when it comes to how I approach and communicate my research."
Akinobu "Aki" Watanabe, Ph.D.
And when he's not composing music from science data or making VR games with skulls and brains, Watanabe also likes to draw on popular culture, such as films and shows. When crafting his presentations and manuscripts, he often looks for ways to deviate from standard presentations, which typically include a familiar sequence of a title slide, background, materials and methods, results, and conclusions. However, some studies may be presented more effectively if the conclusions come first, like how some films and shows reveal the ending first and then tell the story of how they got there. For example, the presentation can open with a striking image to invite the audience to wonder how the study will be introduced. Watanabe believes that incorporating aspects of one's favorite pieces of media into a presentation significantly expands the potential of scientific communication. "Although the media tend to be brushed aside as distractions, they are a constant source of fresh ideas for me when it comes to how I approach and communicate my research," he says. In his lectures, Watanabe also likes using popular culture and instantly recognizable media like Jurassic Park, because it's "another kind of strategy you can use to pull people into learning about science."
Learning through Communication
While Misak and Watanabe are leveraging the virtual realm to reframe their disciplines, Sophia Domokos, Ph.D., and Eve Armstrong, Ph.D., both assistant professors of physics, have been taking different approaches to help students improve their science communication skills.
Domokos's nontraditional method of allowing students to work together and solve physics problems as a group has yielded positive results. Students learn to communicate with one another on a high level as they tackle problems and collaborate to turn their findings into a final report. "I think it's very important for all scientists to be able to communicate about their work to other scientists and the public," Domokos says. "Also, learning how to communicate about your subject is integral to actually understanding it deeply."
Sophia Domokos, Ph.D., Photographed by Rick Wenner.
In her former role as editor in chief of The Cooper Square Review, Domokos worked to demystify the world of science so that scientists are seen as human. "Humanizing scientists is one of my goals as an instructor," she says. "I want students to understand that science is done by human beings because it increases the chance that they will become scientists themselves one day." In one series she edited, scientists spoke about their doubts, passions, and failures, including a piece by Justin Moscarello, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University, who wrote about his realization that he may not be suited as a therapist but found neuroscience instead.
"I think nonfiction science writing (or telling stories) is a way to link science to everyday experience that makes it both more interesting and easier to absorb. I use similar principles in class," says Domokos. In one of her classes she introduced the concept of acceleration—the rate of change of position. "I started by talking about Usain Bolt's record time in the 100 meter. We watched a video of Bolt running the race; then I asked students to sketch a graph of his velocity as a function of time. We all agreed that sometimes his velocity is changing (like at the start and end of the race), which means he was accelerating."
In addition to her work with The Cooper Square Review, Domokos finds lessons in science communication when she learns the Argentine tango. "The instructor tells you what you're supposed to be doing with your body, and you're trying to make it happen with your brain, but it's just not happening," she says. This experience helps her better understand her students who are learning new concepts. "It takes some time to incorporate a new skill, and physics is really a new way of using your brain. I think dance makes me more conscious of trying to use physical experience to help cement concepts for students. Anything you can feel in your body sticks with you. For example, the feeling of being pushed against the side of a car when the car takes a sharp turn. Students know what that feels like, and it's a gateway to understanding the physical phenomenon, the centripetal force that keeps them moving on their circular path."
Domokos also makes a point of incorporating real-world physics problems into her lectures, some of which are practical while others are pure fun. For instance, to teach static electricity, she has students rub balloons on their heads to show how electrical charges transfer to the balloons, which then creates "this cool effect, kind of like Van der Graaf generator, crazy scientist hair," Domokos explains.
But Domokos's approach is not limited to the classroom. Together with Armstrong, who is also a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, she organized the Math and Physics Student Research Symposium, a science communication program for New York Tech students in 2020. The virtual symposium gave students who completed research in physics and math the opportunity to present their work.
"We started this program because knowing how to give a talk is a key skill for any scientist," says Domokos. "It's often through talks that other scientists first learn about your work. Explaining your own research to others is also a great way to understand it better yourself. There are so many topics in my own research that I only understood clearly while preparing my own talk."
While helping students learn how to communicate about science is key to both Domokos's and Armstrong's work, Armstrong also brings a bit of theater and art into the mix. Swearing off science as "boring" as a student in grade school, she was overcome by emotion after watching the 1996 movie Apollo 13 and was mesmerized by how humans found a way to travel into space. She also realized her science classes were not telling some important stories that needed to be told.
Throughout her career, she has worked to bring the worlds of science and theater together in unexpected ways. Before she finished her Ph.D., she and her now-husband started Reality Aside Theatre, developing science education sketch comedy and performing at schools. They once used comedy to teach the structural differences between graphite and diamond in a sketch where a man proposes to his girlfriend with a hunk of graphite rather than a diamond ring.
"I think nonfiction science writing (or telling stories) is a way to link science to everyday experience that makes it both more interesting and easier to absorb. I use similar principles in class."
Sophia Domokos, Ph.D.
While Armstrong stepped away from the theater group in 2009 to finish her doctorate, she has not abandoned the theater. She began teaching at New York Tech in 2019, and when the pandemic hit in 2020 and teaching went virtual, she started to use innovative techniques to get students to talk more during classes. She returned to her theater days and incorporated improv techniques to help students connect and share their thoughts. Notes Armstrong: "Everyone is afraid to make mistakes or ask a stupid question, but the improv game is intended to get people to be as ridiculous as you possibly can." While she was initially nervous about how students would react, they took to it well. She had students play the classic improv game Yes, And! One person comes up with an idea, such as "We're at the farmer's market," and the second participant says, "Yes, and the kale is expensive," and so on. So each person acts out the story as it evolves from person to person.
But improv games are not just about making classes more interesting. For Armstrong, it's important to foster connections between students because "it's really, really hard to learn alone. Science itself is a collaborative endeavor, and you work with other researchers."
She also likes to bring satire and parody into her work. Armstrong has written stories about science topics, some for general readers and others for more technical audiences. She usually publishes something for April Fool's Day on Archive.org and recently wrote an article parodying machine learning—a subset of artificial intelligence—and got some great feedback from people in the field.
Armstrong uses this technique in the classroom as well and asked her summer research students to do both a scientific write-up and a spoof of their work: "If you can make fun of something, then that means you understand it." She looks forward to the time when she can hold an in-person showcase with creative performances by students about science using sketch comedy, stand-up, or parody talks.
Inserting humor into science is "kind of like tricking people into learning something. Making them loosen up, making them laugh. It just makes learning easier and more enjoyable," Armstrong explains.
Whether it's using VR or AR, satire, storytelling, or staged improv, these educators have all discovered creative connections with their disciplines and with their students. Domokos sums up why it's important to do things just a little bit differently: "What's important is to engage students [and the general public] through different projects and learning strategies to help them learn new skills."
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of New York Institute of Technology Magazine.
By Elisa Shoenberger
News Byte: Cybersecurity Graduate Students Compete at GeekPeek Hackathon
Master's in Architecture, Computational Technologies Program is Taking Architecture into the Future
Collaboration with Red Hat Offers Students Real-World Linux-Based Training, Certification
Remembering Herb Fox, Ph.D. | {
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Oh my gosh. it's a bunny with a bow. I want a bunny with a bow!
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Six Centuries Of Painting, by Randall Davies.
"A thousand fantasies begin to throng"
As a result, she has a child. In 1528, the same story appears in print for the first time, in Paris, in a book of romances called Perceforest.
Detail from the portrait of Young Woman with Servant by Stephen Slaughter. | {
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Q: Add a query parameter when a page gets bookmarked Is it possible to add a query parameter to a page when it gets bookmarked via Chrome?
So that when you add a bookmark at https://www.example.com, it gets bookmarked as https://www.example.com/?bookmarked?
I think I need to add JavaScript or a browser script to detect if the page is about to get bookmarked. I've tried with the window object but it has only the window.history which I don't need.
A: You can not detect bookmark events in browser, if you wish, you can handle that somehow creating your Chrome Extension (that could be written in js). There you can get permissions to bookmarks, and access them through 'chrome.bookmarks'. And then you can update URL using 'chrome.tabs.update'
More info about bookmarks and tabs.
| {
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Browse: Home / Michel Foucault and "the problem of war", 1981
Michel Foucault and "the problem of war", 1981
Therefore, if you like, I never stop getting into the issue of law and rights without taking it as a particular object. And if God grant me life, after madness, illness, crime, sexuality, the last thing I would like to study would be the problem of war and the institution of war in what one could call the military dimension of society. There again, I would have to cross into the problem of law, the rights of people and international law, etc… as well as the question of military justice: what makes a Nation entitled to ask someone to die for it.
☛ "What Our Present Is?" an interview with Michel Foucault by André Berten, tr. by Lysa Hochroth, Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e), 1997, pp. 167-168. For more detail about the source of this interview, see below.
By the time he did this interview, Michel Foucault had already explored the problem of war in two of his lectures at the Collège de France. First in a discussion of civil war during the 1973 course La Société punitive. Second, in a more exhaustive analysis of the concept of war in his 1975-76 course Il faut défendre la société (translated as Society Must Be Defended, 2003).
In an entry he wrote for The Foucault Lexicon (forthcoming April 2014), John Protevi provides an excellent synthesis of Foucault's views on war, especially in the 70s:
In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault uses "war" (or at least "battle") as a "model" for understanding social relations. But this epistemological use of "war" did not last. In consulting the Collège de France lecture courses, we see him conduct a genealogy of the war model in "Society Must be Defended" (1975-76). As a result of this investigation, the use of "war" in History of Sexuality, volume 1 (1976) is no longer epistemological, but practical: "war" is seen as a "strategy" for integrating a differential field of power relations. Then, toward the end of the 1970s, perhaps in dismay at discovering in his genealogical investigation a deep relation of the war model and state racism, in Security, Territory, Population (1977-78) Foucault drops "war" to move to "governmentality" as the "grid of intelligibility" of social relations. ("War" in The Foucault Lexicon, ed. Leonard Lawlor and John Nale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2014; PDF, cited with permission)
In the second volume Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), war is hardly mentioned by Michel Foucault after 1976, especially has the main topic of his research. In 1977, when he mentions it in interviews, it is in relation to the problem of the meaning of "struggle" and "class struggle" (item 195, p. 206; item 206, p. 311; item 215, p. 391). In 1980, it is in relation with his dislike for polemics (item 281, p. 914), and in 1983 with his childhood and also in relation with pacifism (item 336, p. 1347; item 337, p. 1357). Finally, in 1984, he commented again on why he was not fond of polemics (item 342, p. 1410-1411). This brief list is based on the edition's index, which I know not to be perfectly reliable (few are).
And yet, as the excerpt quoted above suggests, Foucault was still very much interested by the topic of war in the beginning of the 80s. This would have been, he tells his interviewer, his last major topic of research. One is left wondering what happened with this research, and if any unpublished material exist that would provide some insight about it. Hopefully, Stuart Elden's ongoing project about Foucault's Last Decade may soon bring some answers to those questions.
In 1981, Michel Foucault was invited by the School of Criminology (l'École de criminologie) at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium. There, he gave a series of seminars titled "Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l'aveu en justice". It was during this time that he was interviewed by Professor André Berten. The interview was filmed by the university's audiovisual services. The complete video recording is available online at various location (the video is also embedded below).
The French transcription was first published in 1988, in Les Cahiers du GRIF (Volume 37, Issue 37-38, pp. 8-20). The PDF of this transcription is made available online under a Creative Commons license by the Persée program: see "Entretien avec Michel Foucault". This interview is not included in the Dits et écrits, but it is listed as a posthumous work (see Paris: Gallimard, 2001, tome II, p. 1662).
The text of the seminar was published in 2012, in French, under the title Mal faire, dire vrai: fonction de l'aveu en justice : cours de Louvain, 1981 (ed. by Fabienne Brion and Bernard H. Harcourt, Presses universitaires de Louvain/University of Chicago Press, Google Books with preview). The English translation is said to be on its way: for more information see "Quand Michel Foucault donnait cours à Louvain".
The text of the French transcription as it appears in Les Cahiers du GRIF was translated to English by Lysa Hochroth and included in Foucault Live Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer: see "What Our Present Is" (pp. 407-415). It was first published in 1989 by Semiotext(e), and reprinted in 1996 (Amazon, MIT Press). Semiotext(e) gives 1983 as the date Foucault was at the Université Catholique de Louvain (see p. 478): this is a mistake.
The same English translation was also included in The Politics of Truth, another collection of texts by Michel Foucault edited in 1997 by Sylvère Lotringer for Semiotext(e) (Amazon, MIT Press). This is the edition I quote in the beginning of this post.
• By Philippe Theophanidis on January 29, 2014 ― Published in Communication | Tagged: community, Foucault, interview, law, politics, power, war | {
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A year in the property market
% Statistics
With 2014 now behind us it is time to reflect on the events and figures that have shaped the UK property market in the past 12 months.
January 2014 was kick-started by a robust increase in both properties 'Sold' and properties coming on to the market. Historically January is among the quieter months for the UK property market; however the Agency Express Property Activity Index highlighted that year on year January 2014 saw an unseasonal increase across the nation. Figures for properties 'Sold' increased by 98.4% and by 37.6% for new listings 'For Sale'.
Moving in to February the buoyant trend continued across the nation. During February reports from the Council of Mortgage Lenders stated that year on year number of first-time buyers taking out mortgages was up by 41%, reaching a record high since 2008. The Property Activity Index reported further increases for properties 'Sold' by rising by 69.74%, reaffirming the growth and strength of UK property market. Regional data recorded by the Agency Express Property Activity Index also highlighted a thriving Welsh property market, post the successful launch of the Welsh 'Help to Buy' scheme on 2nd January 2014. Figures recorded by the index highlighted an increase of 89.44% on properties 'Sold' and an increase of 67.73% in new listings 'For Sale'. This marked the region's best February since the index's first records in 2007.
On the 26th April 2014 the UK property market saw the launch of the Mortgage Market Review (MMR) where both homebuyers and mortgage providers faced tougher checks before being granted mortgages. In May statistics from the British Banker's Association also showed that the overall value of mortgage borrowing continued to increase; reaching a six year high, but the number of mortgage approvals had fallen. During these months property market figures remained stable. Figures recorded by the Property Activity Index reported that properties 'Sold' nationally had only marginally declined by 0.20%. Regional month on month data reported by index also highlighted that Central England had recorded their best figures for properties 'Sold' in May since the index's first records; rising by 18.50%.
The outcome of fewer mortgage approvals and the MMR process took a few months to show full effect on the market but by July a downward trend occurred. Reports from the Property Activity Index showed national figures starting to plateau. The number of residential properties achieving a 'Sold' status UK wide decreased by 2.70% and new listings 'For Sale' also dropped by 1.20%. In fact during July figures reported by the index revealed marginal declines across the majority of the UK market.
Later in July the Council of Mortgage Lenders revealed that gross mortgage lending reached £17.5 billion in June, and the Bank of England reported mortgage approvals to be 7.5% higher than those in May. The steadier flow of mortgage approvals now started to positively impact the market. August's figures from the Property Activity Index reflected national growth with properties 'Sold' rising by 1.90%. The positive trend continued across the rest of the UK with one prominent performer, the East Midlands who reported record best figures for August. Properties 'Sold' increased by 20.20% and new listings 'For Sale' by 16.50%.
National figures showed further growth in to September with both new listings 'For Sale' rising by 4.6% and properties 'Sold' by 3.2%. Although the figures recorded were modest in comparison to figures for September2013, where new listings 'For Sale' rose by 11.2% and properties 'Sold' by 17.2%. Throughout July and August historically seasonal adjustments are not uncommon, with an increase in figures again in September. Although the activity recorded over this period in 2014 was subdued in comparison to 2013.
October through to December figures remained modest and the Property Activity Index showed signs of an early seasonal slowdown. In November the index also showed for the first time figures for both new listing 'For Sale' and 'Sold' fall to equal or below those recorded in 2013.
Looking across the nation year on year figures recorded by the Property Activity Index highlights the following regions as top performers for properties 'Sold' in 2014:
Annual increase %
West Midlands 60.13%
Wales 59.83%
South East 51.02%
Yorkshire & Humber 36.65%
North West 34.18 %
Central England 32.05%
East Midlands 29.47%
Commenting on the latest index results, Stephen Watson, Managing Director of Agency Express said:
As the UK's largest estate agency board service provider we are the first to witness growth in the UK property market. The services we deliver are closely tracked and monitored via our estate agency board management system Signmaster3, and data is collated 24hrs a day 7 days a week, from a property being placed on the market to completion of sale. As a result we are able to share this information with you and compare what is happening on the streets to what is being reported by financial institutions. The past 12 months we've witnesses stringent lending and slower activity throughout the second half of the year. While seasonal adjustments are anticipated the Property Activity Index has highlighted year on year declines for both properties 'For Sale' and 'Sold', with the downward trend beginning in July. Although it is equally important to state that these figures are compared to those recorded in 2013 when we had an exceptionally robust market. We have witnessed some year on year declines in 2014 but overall the market remains in good shape.
Monthly % Changes for December 2014
% Changes for Oct - December 2014
% Change over last 12 months vs Previous 12 months
New Listings Properties Sold
Dec 14 Dec 13 Dec 14 Dec 13
NATIONAL -41.1 -36.3 -26.5 -27.8
Central England -46.9 -44.6 -25.8 -34.3
East Anglia -40.5 -37.8 -30.7 -30
East Midlands -27.3 -39.6 -16.3 -27.8
London -60.1 -51.4 -26.9 -18
North East -30.5 -34 -31.5 -34.2
North West -35.9 -33.9 -28.5 -30.6
Scotland -36.2 -22.6 -24.7 -30
South East -41 -44.5 -14.8 -27.8
South West -39.1 -32.9 -29.6 -27.3
Wales -41 -30.4 -25.7 -32.2
West Midlands -35.3 -35.4 -27.4 -35.1
Yorks & Humber -35.7 -19.5 -28.3 -18.3
Jan 14 Oct -
Dec 13 Oct -
NATIONAL -20.7 -17.8 -12.6 -9.9
Central England -16.6 -20.7 -14 -11.9
East Anglia -23.1 -18.1 -14.4 -10.9
East Midlands -20.8 -16.5 -8.9 -7.3
London -21.4 -15 -11.6 -8.9
North West -18 -17.8 -10.5 -4.9
Scotland -20.4 -21.5 -16.1 -16.4
South East -22 -18.4 -8.3 -9.2
South West -23 -18.1 -11.4 -8.8
Wales -18.4 -17.5 -12.6 -19.7
West Midlands -19.8 -17 -15 -9.6
Yorks & Humber -21.5 -13.9 -14.6 -9.4
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This document was last updated on 15th May 2018 | {
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Our vision is the development of a reference centre on modern marine tourism with the provision of the latest high level security and protection services to the yachts and guests. Our scope is to make Rhodes Marina the starting point of major events and an attraction point for fun and recreation, a place for shopping and also a place that serves every day and luxury needs. We want our customers to trust us and develop longtime mutual and enjoyable cooperation. | {
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Las artes marciales, también llamadas artes militares o artes castrenses, son prácticas y tradiciones cuyo objetivo es someter o defenderse mediante una técnica concreta.
Hay varios estilos y escuelas de artes marciales que habitualmente excluyen el empleo de armas de fuego u otro tipo de armamento moderno. A su vez, lo que diferencia a las artes marciales de la mera belicosidad o violencia física (pelea callejera) es la organización de sus técnicas y tácticas en un sistema coherente; la adhesión a una filosofía de vida o código de conducta y la codificación de métodos efectivos probados en la antigüedad. En la actualidad, las artes marciales se practican por diferentes razones: La salud, la protección personal, el desarrollo personal, la disciplina mental, la forja del carácter y la autoconfianza. El significado estricto es el de 'artes militares', por extensión se aplica a todo tipo de estilos de artes de lucha cuerpo a cuerpo y al uso de armas tradicionales tales como la esgrima antigua.
Introducción
En lo que respecta a las artes marciales de origen oriental, se establece un comienzo a partir de la visita de Gautama el Buda (500 a.C. aprox.) a China, donde él bendice a los desarrolladores con el conocimiento del Qí, principio activo de la cultura china tradicional que forma parte de todo ser vivo y que podría traducirse como "flujo vital de energía". Esto los invitó a reflexionar en una nueva manera de movimientos armónicos donde el Qí circulara correctamente a través del cuerpo y se manifestara al exterior con belleza, suavidad, facilidad y potencia. A partir del conocimiento de la energía inicia uno de los desarrollos más antiguos de las artes corporales como herramienta marcial.
Sin embargo, hasta el no surge el concepto y término moderno de artes marciales, el cual deriva de los caracteres chinos wǔ shù 武術 y wǔ yì 武藝. Por su parte, el nombre marcial proviene de Marte, el dios de la guerra romano. Las artes marciales orientales, en algunos casos, se practicaban en círculos cerrados o eran distintivas de una élite relacionada con la milicia y la nobleza, como fue el caso de los guerreros samurái, y su contenido iba mucho más allá de lo que constituía el entrenamiento de las tropas.
El diccionario chino-inglés Chinese-English Dictionary (1882), de Herbert Giles, traduce wǔ yì como 'artes militares'. Por su parte, no se emplea el término wǔ shù hasta 1931, en el Chinese-English Dictionary de Mathews. El término también aparece en 1920, en el Japanese-English Dictionary, de Takenobu, en la traducción del japonés bu-gei (武芸) o bu-jutsu (武術), como "el oficio o desempeño de los asuntos militares". Otras pronunciaciones comunes del par de caracteres 武術 son: mou seut, en cantonés, y võ-thuật, en vietnamita. En China, durante el Periodo Republicano, de 1928 a 1949, los sistemas de lucha chinos se denominaron guoshu o kuoshu (國術, "habilidad nacional").
El origen del concepto de artes marciales está relacionado con la irrupción de la Edad Moderna en el este de Asia en el . Este fenómeno supuso la transformación de las estructuras sociales feudales; el inicio en el empleo de las armas de fuego, las cuales hacían perder vigencia a las formas tradicionales de lucha y la desaparición de los principios por los que se regía el mundo oriental. En China y en Corea, por el contrario, durante el y comienzos del se veía con desprecio a las artes marciales y a sus practicantes debido al auge del confucionismo como parte de las políticas del Estado. En consecuencia, el componente militar de la nación quedó debilitado.
Cuando las artes militares tradicionales perdieron su lugar crucial en el dominio de la sociedad y la defensa del país, se transformaron en una opción para el desarrollo físico y moral de la nación, con objeto de mejorar física y espiritualmente a la población, lo que contribuyó a que se perdiera gran parte del conocimiento de las aplicaciones prácticas de las mismas.
En la actualidad, las artes marciales tradicionales orientales aún incluyen la práctica de un código ético preciso que tiene sus raíces en las filosofías de Oriente, como el confucionismo chino, el sintoísmo japonés y el budismo zen (chan 禪). Además, algunas artes marciales, como el taichí chuan, se preservan hoy día como una práctica para mejorar la salud física y mental.
En China, por su parte, se inventó el chuan fa o kung-fu, que dio lugar más tarde al wushu. En Japón, en cambio, aparecieron los do (o 'caminos') como el karate-do, el judo, el aikido, el kendo y el kobudo. A través de estas disciplinas, se desarrollaron más tarde en Corea el taekwondo, el tangsudo, el hapkido y el hankido.
El éxito de las artes marciales tradicionales, que surgieron como una re-interpretación de las artes militares históricas, propició que se recuperasen en diversas culturas los sistemas de lucha con y sin armas clásicas. Así, en Japón se diferencian las antiguas escuelas clásicas conocidas como "koryu budo", en relación con las artes marciales tradicionales modernas, surgidas tras la restauración Meiji (1868) o "gendai budo", y en China, las artes marciales han derivado en el wushu moderno.
Algunas artes marciales, y en particular las artes marciales originadas en China, Japón y Corea, van más allá de las aplicaciones físicas, e incluyen conocimientos de traumatología, regulación psicofísica ("chi kung" o "qigong"), terapéutica (acupuntura, digitopuntura, herboristería) y otras áreas relacionadas con la medicina china tradicional. Esto es una extensión natural del arte marcial, debido a que, a un nivel avanzado, las técnicas sacan provecho de un detallado conocimiento de la fisiología y del funcionamiento energético en el organismo del adversario, con objeto de incrementar la eficiencia de las mismas.
Además, los practicantes de diversas artes marciales tradicionales han comenzado a redescubrir los diferentes métodos de construcción de armas antiguas, desde la forja de espadas hasta la ensambladura de catapultas y la elaboración de las torres de asedio, incluida la reproducción de armaduras y vestidos; y a investigar acerca de las costumbres y conocimientos tradicionales originarios de estas técnicas.
Otras artes marciales tienen otros orígenes, como por ejemplo el capoeira, de origen afro-brasilero.
También el boxeo es considerado un arte marcial por algunas corrientes.
Clasificación
Una de las clasificaciones generales de las artes marciales es la división entre sistemas sin armas y sistemas con armas.
La mayoría de artes marciales están especializadas en un tipo de armas o un tipo de técnicas a mano desnuda (sin armas). Sin embargo, algunas se declaran sistemas completos con y sin armas. Ejemplos de estas son la mayoría de las artes marciales clásicas de China, como el kung-fu tipo shaolín o los estilos taoístas; algunas artes marciales japonesas como el ninjutsu, e incluso artes modernas como el hapkido.
Los sistemas con armas incluyen como armas principales:
El arco
La lanza
La espada
Los bastones de diferentes longitudes, grosores y materiales
Existen asimismo múltiples armas secundarias como cadenas, mazas, hachas y cuchillos.
Las técnicas desarrolladas en los sistemas sin armas pueden consistir en golpes como puñetazos, golpes de mano abierta, patadas o técnicas de lucha, como los agarres, las luxaciones, las estrangulaciones, las proyecciones y las inmovilizaciones, y pueden atender a la existencia o no de armadura por parte del oponente.
Métodos
Un procedimiento común de entrenamiento consiste en la práctica de un grupo de técnicas encadenadas y codificadas en una serie. Se conoce como estructura o, más popularmente, como forma (kata, poomse, chuan tao, kuen, tao lu, hyung o tul). La práctica de formas es un método de aprendizaje y entrenamiento de técnicas con una aplicación específica.
Otro sistema de entrenamiento es el de lucha simulada con un compañero o ejercicios por parejas (sparring, randori, kumite, tui shou, rou shou, chi sao, san shou), en el que se entrenan técnicas de lucha con un compañero con el objetivo de aprender, a diferencia del combate o la competición, donde el objetivo es la victoria.
Historia
Egipto, Grecia, África y Roma
No existen documentos que ayuden a ubicar con exactitud cuándo se originaron las artes marciales, debido a que esto conlleva un largo proceso de desarrollo. Sin embargo, se puede decir que el método de combate más antiguo del que se tiene conocimiento en diferentes civilizaciones es la lucha.
En las tumbas de Beni Hassan, en Egipto, se encuentran pinturas que datan del 2000 a. C. En estas, se muestran luchadores practicando toda una serie de movimientos, como lanzamientos y sumisiones. Los luchadores de Nubia, en África, eran tenidos en alta estima por su habilidad. En las tumbas egipcias de Amarna, que datan del en el 1350 a.C., aparecen pinturas que muestran luchadores egipcios practicando la pelea con bastones cortos, haciendo uso de protecciones en los antebrazos, además de la lucha. En murales del arte de Mesopotamia, aparecen imágenes de personas practicándola también.
Los guerreros zulúes del sur del continente africano desarrollaron tácticas y técnicas para la pelea con armas como el garrote, la lanza y el escudo. El guerrero Shaka (siglos y ) revolucionó las técnicas de guerra en masa, con la adición del assagai (una lanza para apuñalar, con un mango más corto), así como la manera en que entrenó a su ejército y las tácticas utilizadas contra otras tribus africanas y posteriormente contra los ingleses.
En Grecia, se practicaban tres tipos de sistemas de combate que no solo tomaban parte en los juegos de Olimpia, sino que también servían para mantener el estado físico de sus ciudadanos y prepararlos para la guerra: El boxeo, la lucha y el pankration, todos ellos métodos de combate. En diferentes expresiones artísticas griegas, se observan diferentes técnicas de pelea, inclusive el uso de técnicas «sucias», como ataques a los ojos y mordiscos. A su vez, debieron de desarrollar técnicas para el uso de armas. En Esparta, por su parte, se enfatizó la práctica marcial desde una edad temprana. Como ejemplo de su aplicación, está el uso de la falange, una formación de combate, que le sirvió al ejército griego para la expansión de su imperio. Algunas personas han sugerido que durante la ocupación de la India (326-321 a. C.) por parte del emperador Alejandro Magno (356-323 a. C.), las técnicas de lucha griega fueron absorbidas en las técnicas indias y estas, a su vez, fueron introducidas en China por el monje Bodhidharma. Sin embargo, estas hipótesis no tienen hasta la fecha ningún soporte histórico serio.
En la Roma antigua existía la lucha, practicada incluso con armas, en espectáculos como los combates de gladiadores en el Coliseo romano, entre otros. El ejército romano hacía énfasis en la pelea en grupos; mientras que los gladiadores eran entrenados en la pelea individual. Estos guerreros eran esclavos que debían ser eficientes en el uso de un gran número de armas, así como en combate a mano desnuda. Dos tipos de gladiadores famosos son el tracio y el retiarius. Al primero se le armaba con una sica (espada tracia), con un yelmo y con un escudo pequeño rectangular (parma), del que se publicaron manuales de entrenamiento. Al retiarius se le armó con un tridente o arpón, una red y una daga. A su vez, los gladiadores fueron expertos en boxeo (usaban el caestus) y en la lucha, como se ve en frescos del período.
China, Corea y Japón
Artes marciales en China
Referencias sobre las artes marciales de China ubican su origen en el 2100 a. C., aunque no se tiene certeza sobre su antigüedad real. La razón de la supervivencia de las artes marciales ha sido el desarrollo de métodos de defensa y ataque en enfrentamientos de tipo físico, preponderando el uso del cuerpo, puños, manos, codos, rodillas, etcétera, con su máxima expresión en los conflictos bélicos. La asociación con métodos y filosofías religiosas en países como China se dieron a finales de la dinastía Ming, debido a la aparición de las armas de fuego, lo que causó que las técnicas del uso de armas blancas, así como la pelea con armas, comenzaran a perder su importancia en el teatro de la guerra.
Durante el fin de la dinastía Ming y durante la dinastía Qing, las artes marciales chinas comenzaron a verse como métodos para mejorar la salud y empezaron a combinarse con las prácticas calisténicas taoístas (daoyin), además de verse como formas de alcanzar la iluminación.
Ya aparecen referencias al shoubo ("técnicas de pelea"), al wuji ("técnicas de guerra") y al ji ji ("habilidad de pelea") antes de la construcción del monasterio shaolín y de la supuesta visita de Bodhidharma a China. La primera mención de la participación de monjes budistas en la guerra proviene de los trece monjes que ayudaron a capturar al sobrino de Wang Shichong. Tras lo que Li Shimin, primer emperador de la dinastía Tang, 618 a 907 d.C., recompensó al monasterio. No obstante, no existe ninguna referencia que mencione un estilo particular practicado por estos monjes.
Monjes budistas
La participación de monjes budistas en actividades de guerra hace pensar que estos no eran monjes en el sentido estricto de la palabra. Las enseñanzas budistas consideran el matar a otro ser humano como la ofensa más seria y con el peor karma. La novela Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn (Bandidos del pantano o A la orilla del agua) menciona a un personaje llamado Lu Zhishen ("Lu, el Sagaz"), un oficial del ejército que, por haber asesinado a un hombre, se vio obligado a ocultarse en el monasterio de la montaña Wutai. Sin embargo, este «monje» que bebía vino, comía carne y al que le gustaba pelear fue enviado a otro monasterio, a causa de su mal comportamiento.
Este tipo de «monjes» aparecen en otras obras literarias como en el caso de Ji Gong. A su vez, en el , se mencionan muchos «monjes» que vivían en los alrededores del monasterio shaolín, violando las reglas y doctrinas budistas. Esto podría explicar la razón por la que algunos «monjes» no tenían ningún reparo en tomar una vida o comportarse de una manera opuesta a la de un monje budista. Durante las campañas en contra de los piratas japoneses o "wako" en la dinastía Ming, se hace la primera mención de un sistema de combate originado en el monasterio shaolín. Las técnicas de bastón fueron consideradas por el general Qi Jiguang, mientras que fueron criticadas por el general Yu Dayou (compañero de armas del general Qi), quien reclutó a un pequeño grupo de monjes y les enseñó sus propias técnicas de combate con el bastón, para que a su vez estos se las enseñaran a sus compañeros.
Dinastía Ming
Durante la dinastía Ming, el general Qi, en su libro Ji xiao xin shu (Libro de disciplina efectiva), menciona que las técnicas de combate a mano desnuda son una preparación para las técnicas de combate con armas. En este libro, Qi dedica secciones a la lucha con bastón y espada a dos manos que fueron copiadas de las armas usadas por los piratas japoneses, quienes las emplearon con mortal efectividad. Otras secciones incluyen la lucha con lanza, tridente, sable y escudo, armas de fuego, entre otras.
Qi creó la primera rutina por escrito de técnicas de mano desnuda. Esta combinó técnicas de una docena de otros sistemas conocidos en su tiempo. También ideó la formación de combate pato mandarín, que incluía a un líder, a dos soldados armados con sables y escudos, a dos con lanzas de bambú con muchas puntas (langxian), a cuatro con lanzas largas, a dos con tridentes o sables de dos manos, y a un cocinero. Si el líder de la unidad moría, los soldados de toda la unidad eran ejecutados.
Dinastía Qing; período Republicano (1912-1947); Revolución China (Mao Zedong)
Durante la dinastía Qing, se difundieron historias que consideraban a Bodhidharma, al templo shaolín, a Zhang Zanfeng y al general Yue Fei, entre otros, los fundadores de muchos estilos marciales. En este período, se usaban prácticas esotéricas y encantamientos, con la creencia de que estos les darían a los miembros de las sectas pseudo-religiosas/marciales el poder de resistir las armas de fuego. La revolución de los boxeadores aumentó aún más este tipo de ideologías como inspiración ante la intervención extranjera en China. Durante el período Republicano, se intentó eliminar este tipo de mitos y se comenzó a usar un método más elaborado y técnico. Historiadores como Tang Hao escriben acerca del origen de las artes de combate chino y refutan las creencias que hasta el momento se tenían sobre estos sistemas. La práctica marcial de este período también se caracterizó por el rechazo de aquellos elementos de exhibición y su enfoque en la aplicación práctica en combate. Se inauguró la Academia Central de Artes Marciales de Nankín, Zhongyang Guoshuguan (en 1928), cuyo objetivo era el de fortalecer a la nación mediante la práctica de las artes marciales. En este período, a los sistemas de combate chino se les llamaron guoshu ("habilidad nacional").
La Revolución China, impulsada por Mao Zedong en 1949, cambió todo esto y enfocó la práctica marcial a la exhibición, con lo que se crea el wushu moderno.
Artes marciales en Japón
La historia de la evolución de las artes marciales del Japón es escasa; los registros más antiguos provienen de fuentes chinas.
En la Historia del reinado de Wei (Weizhi), del año 297 d.C., se menciona a cientos de poblaciones que viven en paz en las islas japonesas. En la Historia de Han (Hou Hanshu), en cambio, se lee acerca de un período de gran inestabilidad y guerra.
El sumo
La referencia más antigua acerca de la práctica del sumo podría encontrarse en el 23 a. C., pero la primera mención como arte marcial se registró más recientemente en el 720 d.C., en el Nihon soki. Sin embargo, utiliza la palabra china jueli. En el 682 d.C., se utiliza la palabra xiangpu, en chino ("sumo").
Dinastía Tang en Japón;
Durante la dinastía Tang, Japón tuvo el mayor contacto cultural con China. Durante la primera mitad del , los piratas japoneses atacaron las costas del este de China, sus técnicas de sable a dos manos y la habilidad del tiro con arco demostraron su alto desarrollo técnico, mientras que los usos del sable sembraron el terror entre las filas chinas. Los métodos diseñados por Qi Jiguang se introdujeron en Japón, y aparecieron publicados en el Heiho hidensho (okugisho), un libro de estrategia escrito por Yamamoto Kanasuke, en el .
Conquista de China (Manchú); siglos y
Durante la conquista de China por parte de los manchú, muchos emigrantes viajaron a Japón; entre ellos, Chen Yuanyun (1587 a 1671) o Chen Gempin, en japonés. En los pergaminos de la escuela Kito-ryu (1779), localizada en los precintos de la capilla Atago, en Tokio, se lee: «La instrucción en kempo comenzó con el emigrante Chen Yuanyun.»
: karate
En el , se modificaron los sistemas de jiu jitsu, lo que dio lugar al judo, de Jigorō Kanō (1860 a 1938); al aikidō, de Morihei Ueshiba (1883 a 1969), y a las técnicas de la isla de Okinawa o tuidi / to-de y tegumi. Estos fueron organizados, y promovieron la creación del karate, método divulgado por Gichin Funakoshi (1868 a 1957).
Combate con bayoneta; década de 1930
Los métodos de combate con bayoneta japoneses o "juken jutsu" fueron estudiados por los miembros de la Academia de Guoshu, en Nankín, y se incluyeron como parte del entrenamiento tanto militar como civil en los años 30. En Japón, la clase guerrera japonesa o samurái unía la práctica del budismo zen con la de las artes de guerra, en el llamado camino del guerrero o Bushido, una tendencia que ha continuado hasta nuestros días.
Restauración del período Meiji
Durante la restauración del período Meiji, se originó el código del guerrero japonés Budo. Así, el budismo zen y las artes marciales japonesas sirvieron de apoyo e inspiración en el nacimiento del movimiento nacionalista que conllevó al inicio del expansionismo agresivo japonés y a la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
[[Archivo:Korean staff.jpg|thumb|right|Escena del Manual ilustrado de las artes marciales del , impreso en Corea, el Muye Dobo Tongji.]]
Artes marciales en Corea
En la península coreana, la evidencia más antigua de la práctica marcial aparece en tumbas cercanas a la frontera noreste de China durante el reino de Koguryo (37 a. C. a 668 d.C.). Corea fue colonizada y quedó bajo el control militar chino entre el 108 a. C. y el 313 d.C. En algunos frescos se aprecian escenas de lucha (jueli, en chino; kajko, en coreano).
El rey Sunjo (1567 a 1608) ordenó a sus oficiales el estudio del libro escrito por el general chino Qi Jiguang, y la preparación de un libro similar, copiando los métodos de los soldados de la dinastía Ming. El rey Jungjo (1776 a 1800) ordenó expandir el manual usado por el ejército para incluir las técnicas de combate propias de los japoneses. Este libro se titula Muye Dobo Tongji (Manual ilustrado de artes marciales). En la introducción de este libro, el rey Jungjo escribió que el único sistema de combate oficial desde el reinado del rey Kwanhaekun (1608 a 1623) era la práctica del tiro con arco.
Los sistemas de combate coreano como el tang soo do (mano de la dinastía Tang), hwa rang do, taekkyon, neikung, kumdo, kuk sool won, entre otros, afirman ser totalmente coreanos y con cientos de años de antigüedad. Sin embargo, el Muye Dobo Tongji los contradice, considerando el nacimiento de las artes marciales coreanas actuales bajo influencia china o japonesa en su gran mayoría.
Otros países
Un ejemplo de otros sistemas de combate que también ayudaron en la formación de imperios es el método de lucha bökh de Mongolia. Los ejércitos mongoles utilizaron la práctica de la lucha, los juegos a caballo y las competencias del tiro con arco para mantener a sus tropas en perfecta forma física. En la actualidad aún se practican estas habilidades durante la celebración del festival de verano conocido como naadam.
En 1295, se publicó en Alemania el manual más antiguo del que se tiene conocimiento el cual contiene técnicas para el combate con espada y escudo, entre muchas obras de este tipo publicadas en el continente europeo. En la Edad Media en Europa se publicaron manuales de combate como el Flos duellatorum (la flor de la batalla) en 1410, en la cual se describen técnicas con y sin armas. En las sagas vikingas se discuten, por su parte, tácticas de combate además de estrategia.
En Tailandia y en Camboya, se originaron lo que hoy en día se conoce como muay thai o boxeo tailandés, y el bokator. Sin embargo, no existen fuentes fiables que narren los orígenes de este método de pelea. Otra forma de lucha que comparte el origen tailandés es el krabi krabong el cual se enfoca en el uso de armas como el bastón, el escudo o los sables dobles, entre otros.
En la India existen dos tradiciones marciales consideradas como las más importantes. La tamil (dravidiana) y la sánscrita del Dhanur-veda ('verdad sobre el arco'). En la primera, se tienen poemas escritos entre el 400 a.C. y el 600 d. C. donde se mencionan conflictos bélicos en el sur del país. Los guerreros se entrenaban en el uso de la lanza (vel), la espada (val) y el escudo (kedaham). Por otro lado, en la tradición sánscrita, el uso del arco y la flecha se consideraba como la más importante, como se lee en los escritos indios del Majabhárata y el Ramaiana. En los capítulos del Dhanur-veda, en cambio, se exponen temas tales como la organización de divisiones militares con carruajes de guerra, elefantes y caballos, infantería y lucha. También se describen cinco tipos de armas. A su vez, algunas tradiciones que han sobrevivido hasta la fecha son el varma ati (ataque a puntos vitales) y el silamban (pelea con bastón) de la tradición tamil nadú; el kalaripayatu, de la provincia de Kerala, que en la actualidad no incluye el combate libre, sino que se realizan combates preestabecidos y el mushti (lucha), dandi (pelea con bastón) del norte de India. Otras sistemas de pelea del continente indio son aquellos practicados por los sijes, a los cuales se les llama gatka.
En Rusia, la necesidad de enfrentar diversos enemigos bajo condiciones adversas de clima y terreno llevó al desarrollo de técnicas de lucha versátiles e instintivas por parte de los cosacos. Así se empezó, durante la primera mitad del , una acumulación de conocimientos marciales que dio origen al método sambo.
Asimismo, existen otros sistemas de combate de reciente divulgación como el arnis / eskrima / kali (en Filipinas) y el silat (en Indonesia), que aún no han sido divulgadas, estructuradas en profundidad o promocionadas como deportes de combate en occidente debido a su gran variedad de estilos, y a que su principal enfoque sigue siendo la defensa personal y el uso en el combate armado.
El enfoque de las artes marciales en el
A finales del surgieron diferentes sistemas híbridos, es decir, derivados de las artes marciales tradicionales, que abarcan el combate militar o los deportes de combate. Algunos de reciente creación y desarrollo son: El krav magá israelí, el jiu-jitsu brasileño, el lima lama samoano, el kickboxing japonés, el hapkido coreano, el jeet kune do (creado por Bruce Lee) y las artes marciales mixtas o AMM (en inglés: MMA). En el caso del systema ruso este fue recuperado ya que durante la época soviética fue prohibido a la población siendo enseñado solo a los Spetsnaz.
Véase también
Artes marciales por continente
Artes marciales de África
Artes marciales de América
Artes marciales de Asia y Oceanía
Artes marciales de Europa y Oriente Medio
Anexo: Artes marciales
Organismos Internacionales
Federación Internacional de Evaluación Marcial
Referencias y notas
Bibliografía
Obras clásicas de estrategia y filosofía de las artes marciales
Lao Tse: Dào dé jing.
Miyamoto, Musashi: El libro de los cinco anillos.
Tzu, Sun: El arte de la guerra
Tsunetomo, Yamamoto: Hagakure el código del samurái.
Carl von Clausewitz: De la guerra.
Libros, historia y ensayos
Hyams, Joe, El zen en las artes marciales. México: Universo México, 1990, 147 págs.
Jullien, François: Tratado de la eficacia.
Lee, Bruce: El tao del jeet kune do.
Ratti, Oscar; y Westbrook, Adele: Los secretos del samurái. Las artes marciales en el Japón feudal.
Suzuki, Daisetz T.: El zen y la cultura japonesa.
Enlaces externos
Artes Marciales Japonesas.
Portal de Wing Tsun Kung Fu.
Site de Wing Chun en Madrid España.
Portal de Artes Marciales.
Portal de Kung Fu Tradicional. | {
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You are here: Home > All News > Newsletters > Knox United Welcomes Community
Knox United Welcomes Community
Oct 28, 2013 | Newsletters
Knox United Block Party
By Alisa Pothier-Merrett
Four hundred people recently attended a free block party at Knox United Church in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia. The event featured a bouncy castle, live music, face painting, a balloon artist, games and more. At the concession there were hamburgers and hot dogs, snow cones and cotton candy.
Many people were amazed that everything was free said Rev. Dr. Ross Bartlett, minister of Knox United, "They didn't expect free stuff from a church." This reaction surprised him and, after much thought, he's came up with two potential reasons for this reaction.
"In our society there is, in fact, very little that is truly free," he noted, "Also, churches have a reputation, deserved or not, of asking for money. If it had been a different sort of day, "I would have liked to discuss this response with some of the people who had voiced it."
According to Bartlett, the main goal for the event was to make the community aware of Knox United and to let people know that the church was open to them. A secondary goal was to determine which method of advertising would provide the best results.
Aside from the church sign and a note in the local paper, the church also sent letters home with the congregation, and mailed out 5,000 postcards to the community.
Bartlett commented that "the results [of the advertising experiment] weren't as clear" as they had hoped. This was because participants didn't readily disclose how they'd heard about the event. Coupons and postcards were not brought to the event, as anticipated.
For those who may wish to try a block party, the cost was $850. The largest expense was the food followed by the bouncy castle; rented
from a local party store.
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My 5 year old all of a sudden started having separation anxiety. I had grandma come to our house to watch her for an hour so I could do some quick errands and she screamed and cried begging me not to go. I didn't go.. Any ideas?? | {
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You can support Kehilla's accompaniment teams through a donation to Kehilla marked NEAT in the memo line. Send check to Kehilla, 1300 Grand Avenue, Piedmont, CA 94610.
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News bites: November 23, 2022
November 26, 2022 kay_luv
tvN has my full attention with their latest poster for Alchemy of Souls 2 and be still my heart because December isn't even here yet and Lee Jae-wook (Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol) is already making me blush. Go Yoon-jung (Law School) is holding her own as well, but I'm afraid that all I can see is Lee Jae-wook. That look! Those hands! Even with less than three weeks to go, part two of the series can't come soon enough on December 10. [News1]
A potential Kim Ji-won (My Liberation Notes) and Kim Soo-hyun (One Ordinary Day) pairing is on the horizon with both actors now currently in talks to star in Queen of Tears. Still in the planning stages, production for the drama is in the talented hands of writer Park Ji-eun (Crash Landing on You, You From Another Star) and PD Kim Won-hee (Little Women, Vincenzo). [Newsen]
As seen in the newest poster, our lovable drinking buddies Lee Sun-bin (Team Bulldog: Operation Off-duty Investigation), Han Sun-hwa (Undercover), and Jung Eun-ji (Blind) – as well as tag-along Choi Siwon (Love is for Suckers) – will be taking some time out of the city for TVING's Work Later Drink Now 2. But, rest assured, our heroines will still be clinking glasses and drunkenly returning to our screens this coming December 9. [Sports Kyunghyang]
Over on Disney+, character posters have come out for the creepy fantasy Connect, featuring leads: Jung Hae-in (Snowdrop), Go Kyung-pyo (Love in Contract), Kim Hye-joon (Inspector Koo), and Kim Roi-ha (Kingdom: Ashin of the North). Directed by filmmaker Takashi Miike (The Great Yokai War: Guardians), we can strap in for a gory ride when the mystery-horror releases all 6 episodes on December 7. [News]
After (over)paying his dues in supporting roles, Seo Ji-hoon (Revenge of Others) has been cast in the lead role for a new mystery-fantasy about fortune telling. Titled King of Destiny (roughly translated), the web novel adaptation will be written and directed by Park Sun-jae – with Lee Sun-joo co-writing. Filming is set to begin early next year. [Sports Chosun]
Yoon Ji-on (Tomorrow) has been added to the cast of Is It a Coincidence, joining Kim So-hyun (Love Alarm 2) and Chae Jong-hyeop (Unlock the Boss). The coming-of-age romance is planning to start filming before the year ends with PD Song Hyun-wook (Golden Spoon, The King's Affection) at the helm and scripts by Park Geu-ro. [News1]
The first stills have dropped for KBS's Brain Cooperation, featuring our ~genius~ neuroscientist Jung Yong-hwa (Sell Your Haunted House). Also starring Cha Tae-hyun (Police University), Kwak Sun-young (Behind Every Star), and Yeh Ji-won (So Do Sol Sol La La Sol), the comedy will be ringing in the new year with a January 2 premiere. [News1]
Tags: Cha Tae-hyun, Chae Jong-hyeop, Choi Siwon, Go Kyung-pyo, Go Yoon-jung, Han Sun-hwa, Jung Eun-ji, Jung Hae-in, Jung Yong-hwa, Kim Hye-joon, Kim Ji-won, Kim Roi-ha, Kim So-hyun, Kim Soo-hyun, Kwak Sun-young, Lee Jae-wook, Lee Sun-bin, news bites, Seo Ji-hoon, Yeh Ji-won, Yoon Ji-on
Tagged Cha Tae Hyun, Chae Jong-hyeop, Choi Siwon, Drama Casting & News, Go Kyung Pyo, Go Yoon-jung, Han Sun Hwa, jung eun ji, Jung Hae In, Jung Yong Hwa, Kim Hye Joon, Kim Ji Won, Kim Roi-ha, Kim So Hyun, Kim Soo Hyun, Kwak Sun-young, Lee Jae Wook, Lee Sun Bin, news bites, Seo Ji-hoon, Yeh Ji-won, Yoon Ji On
NCT's Jaehyun, TWICE's Sana, And THE BOYZ's Juyeon Stun Fans In New Prada Campaign
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Russian Girls Marriage: 32 sites are listed in this category.
Welcome to the category Russian Girls Marriage where we are listing 32 dating sites. These sites we found in the Google Search Engine top 100 by keyword Russian Girls Marriage and ranking them by our own popularity formula. It's page number 1 and 1st place here takes the site Girls-ru.net with 1424 unique visitors daily.
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Keanu Reeves in talks for Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese Hulu series 'The Devil in the White City'
By Michael Balderston published 4 January 22
Keanu Reeves is in talks for what would be his first leading TV role.
(Image credit: Steve Jennings/Getty Images)
A trip to the fair could be in store for Keanu Reeves, Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, as The Matrix Resurrections actor is in talks to star in the Hulu series The Devil in the White City that DiCaprio and Scorsese are producing. Deadline was the first to report that Reeves is in negotiations for the show.
The Devil in the White City is based on a non-fiction 2003 book of the same name by Erik Larson that tells the story of the 1893 Chicago's World Fair, particularly how two men impacted it — the fair's architect and planner Daniel H. Burnham and Henry H. Holmes, a doctor who used his hotel near the fair as a location to seduce, torture and murder a number of women. Using these two men as framing devices, the book explores how the Chicago's World Fair was a changing point in history. Burnham's fair featured new technologies like the light bulb and the Ferris Wheel as well as different world cultures, while Holmes' actions previewed some of the dangers of this new world. The Devil in the White City was a bestseller and National Book Award finalist (I can personally attest that it is a fun and fascinating read).
It is not known at this time who Reeves would be playing should he officially sign on for the show, though we can guess that it would be either Burnham or Holmes. Either way, The Devil in the White City would mark his most high-profile TV role (he had some single episode appearances on a variety of shows early in his career, voiced Ted Logan in an animated Bill & Ted spinoff and had a supporting turn in a short-lived Pop comedy series, Swedish Dicks).
Leonardo DiCaprio has been trying to develop The Devil in the White City for a number of years, having acquired the rights to the book in 2010 with the intention of making it into a movie that Martin Scorsese would direct. However, in 2019 it was announced that they were switching it to a TV series on Hulu, with DiCaprio and Scorsese executive producing and Todd Field (Little Children, In the Bedroom) directing the first two episodes, featuring scripts from Sam Shaw (Castle Rock, Manhattan). It is unclear if DiCaprio is also planning on taking on a role in the series.
DiCaprio and Scorsese have worked together multiple times before, memorably in films like The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street. They also have the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon expected to be released in 2022. This would be their first TV project together, though Scorsese is no stranger to producing big TV shows, having helped with HBO's Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl, to name a few.
When The Devil in the White City may come to be is still TBD, but fans of Keanu Reeves can see him right now in The Matrix Resurrections, playing in theaters and on HBO Max (for the next couple of weeks at least). He'll also voice a character in 2022's animated movie DC League of Super-Pets and has the next chapter of John Wick coming in 2023. | {
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Q: getFragmentByTag() never returns null I've five fragments in my activity. On the click of fragment drawer list, I'm calling setFrament() method.
It removes the previous fragments from the activity, and adds the new one as per the requirement.
Here's my code for setFragment method.
protected void setFragment(final int position) {
// Remove currently active fragment
if (mActiveFragment != null) {
Fragment previous;
while ((previous = mFragmentManager
.findFragmentByTag(mActiveFragment.toString())) != null) {
mFragmentManager.beginTransaction().remove(previous).commit();
Log.e("in loop", "stuck");
}
}
// It's enum, generated according to position
FragmentType type = getFragmentType(position);
Fragment fragment = mFragmentManager.findFragmentByTag(type.toString());
if (fragment == null) {
fragment = createFragment(type);
}
mFragmentManager
.beginTransaction()
.replace(R.id.containerFrameLayout, fragment,
type.toString()).commit();
// Sets the current selected fragment checked in
// Drawer listview
mFragmentDrawerList.setItemChecked(position, true);
// set Actionbar title
getActionBar().setTitle(type + "");
mActiveFragment = type;
}
Here, while changing the fragment, it keeps prining "stuck" in while loop forever,
my question is,
why remove(Fragment) method doesn't remove the previous fragment from the activity ?
A: commit() is an asynchronous call that is only executed when the Android system regains control. The fragments won't be removed until some time after you leave the method.
If you want to remove the previous fragment (assuming there's only one), then you can add them to the backstack. Then you can call popBackStack(null, 0) which will pop everything on the back stack. The side catch though is pressing the "back" button will also pop the backstack if the user were to do that. You'll have to override the onBackPressed() and handle it yourself if you don't want that to happen.
EDIT:
One method would be to keep track of all IDs or TAGs and call remove on them individually.
LinkedList<Integer> fragmentIds = new LinkedList<Integer>();
/*** Add fragment to FragmentManager ***/
fragmentIds.add(/** ID of fragment */);
/** Removing all fragments from FragmentManager **/
FragmentManager fm = getFragmentManager();
FragmentTransaction transaction = fm.beginTransaction();
Fragment fragToRemove;
for(Integer id : fragmentIds)
{
fragToRemove = fm.findFragmentById(id);
transaction.remove(fragToRemove);
}
transaction.commit()
fragmentIds.clear();
However, you don't have to call remove on any of them so long as you use replace() method on the same container. replace() will pop the previous fragment and add in the new one. So long as the transaction isn't pushed to the backstack, the previous fragment is detached from the Activity and discarded.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} |
A rich fruity taste and smooth finish make ruby red Taylor Port the perfect choice to pair with your favorite dessert. New York. Est. 1880. A rich, moderately sweet, ruby red port. Delicious with dessert or for evening sipping. The Taylor Wine Company, makers of superior ports and sherries, with a tradition dating back to 1880, skillfully blends the best grapes from New York to create a unique taste and depth of character. Taste the difference. Comments? 1-800-487-3417 M-F 9 am - 8 pm EST. www.taylordesserts.com. Alcohol 18% by volume.
Arbor Mist Sangria Zinfandel is the refreshing and fruity new way to enjoy wine. Its combination of Zinfandel wine and the juicy flavor of ripe orange, lemon, lime, and cherry makes this a perfect beverage for relaxing with friends and all social get-togethers.
Family owned & operated. Founded 1933. Gallo Family best taste promise. See details on back. It's pretty simple really. We're an American family that's been making quality wines for American families since 1933. For four generations, Gallo Family Vineyards has been dedicated to giving you the best tasting wines at the best tasting price. We call it our best taste promise. Learn more about our Best Taste Promise at www.GalloFamily.com or call toll free: 1-877-425-5696. Our Moscato is bursting with delicious flavors of peach, honey and ripe citrus in a delightfully light-bodied style. White wine. Alc. 9% by vol. Vinted & bottled by Gallo Family Vineyards, Modesto, CA.
Port wine. 200 years: 1815-2015. Cockburn's, one of the greatest names in Port, led the development of vineyards in Portugal's Upper Douro valley in the 19th and 20th centuries. The company is owned by the Symington family. Port producers for more than 130 years. Cockburn's Fine Ruby is a full-bodied Port with ripe red-fruit flavours, balanced with a fine structure. Perfect at the end of a fine dinner or simply to enjoy with friends. Symington family. Member of PFV: Primum Familiae Vini. www.pfv.org. Leading wine families. For more information, visit us at www.cockburns.com. Alc 19% by vol. Bottled by Symington Family Estates, Vinhos LDA, V.N. Gaia, Portugal. Product of Portugal.
Family owned & operated. Founded 1933. Rose wine. It's pretty simple really. We're an American family that's been making quality wines for four generations. Our Pink Moscato is light-bodied and bursing with aromas of fresh citrus and peach, followed by hits of fresh red berries and orange blossoms. Great paired with an array of foods from spicy dishes to sweet desserts. Alc. 10% by vol. Imported & bottled by Gallo Family Vineyards, Modesto, CA. Product of Argentina. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
package com.shaojun.utils.plog.formatter;
import android.text.TextUtils;
import com.shaojun.utils.plog.util.ObjectUtil;
/**
* This class just formats msg
* Created by muyangmin on Sep 09, 2016.
*
* @author muyangmin
* @since 1.5.0
*/
public class StringFormatter implements Formatter {
//For empty message but with object params
private ObjectFormatter FMT_OBJECT = new ObjectFormatter();
@Override
public String format(String msg, Object... params) throws Exception {
if (TextUtils.isEmpty(msg)) {
if (params == null || params.length == 0) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Neither msg nor params provided!");
}
return FMT_OBJECT.format(msg, params);
}
Object[] objects = new Object[params.length];
for (int i = 0; i < params.length; i++) {
Object obj = params[i];
//Wrapper classes shouldn't change to String, because maybe we need format numbers;
// e.g %.2f
if (obj instanceof Boolean || obj instanceof Byte || obj instanceof Short
|| obj instanceof Integer || obj instanceof Long || obj instanceof Float
|| obj instanceof Double) { //Void is useless
objects[i] = obj;
} else {
objects[i] = ObjectUtil.objectToString(params[i]);
}
}
return String.format(msg, objects);
}
@Override
public boolean isPreWrappedFormat() {
return false;
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} |
Q: Searching in excel sheet using java basic script I am not sure how to go about with the task. so i'll just elaborate the things i need/want in this scenario..
*
*I want to search a record in the excel sheet based on some criteria( 4 criteria specified)
*so based on it i may find 4 to 5 records matching the criteria. I want to display these records row by row in the search window itself ( like adding a excel object if i'm not wrong)
*Then when i click a particular record from the search result in the search window, the complete details of tat record should be displayed in the main screen (i.e it should retrieve the entire record from excel sheet into the GUI console.)
This is the task. Any idea how to do it? If the excel rows can be added as excel object, then how do i do it? any tutorials..suggestion would be very helpful.
By the way iam using java swing and excel sheet as backend.
A: Apache POI is a popular framework for working with Office files (word, excel, powerpoint). Check it out.
A: In order to read Excel documents in Java, I suggest you use a third-party library like Apache POI.
You will have to read the records from the Excel and probably create instances of your own model for these records. Build some model logic for searching based on the criteria. Put the ones matching the criteria into a JTable model.
Handle mouse events or selection events in the table and use your model again to located the selected record and display the full record where you have to.
A: It looks like you need some lib to read and search Excel files on the fly in Java.
I recommend using Apache POI.
Have a look at the Quick Guide and Getting the cell contents.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} |
Blue & Gold Macaws
You may also know the Blue Gold Macaw as Blue and Yellow Macaw or the Blue Macaw, which is quite accurate considering their color combination. The best stage of keeping Macaws is when they are hand-fed babies. Their impeccable intelligence and mischievous attitude make them appealing among pet owners. They are comical and lovable because they have a natural talent for speaking. But keep in mind that Blue and Gold Macaws don't mimic human voices.
Other birds, such as Amazons and African Greys, are more proficient in doing so in terms of inflection and tone. This Blue Macaw have a unique voice that they love using to speak. Blue and Gold Macaws can live as long as 60 or 80 years and grow over nearly 32-34 inches measuring from the top of their head to their tail feathers. For a lifespan like that, they require proper nutrition and diet. Since these birds are bigger in size and joyful in nature, they require a spacious environment to play. Expert pet owners suggest getting King Size cage models to better accommodate them so they can flap their wings freely and move around.
They also require outdoor playtime for a change of scenery where they can explore a different environment. Giving the Blue Gold Macaw for sale plenty of toys makes them happy as spending a few out hours outside the cage is good for the Blue Gold Macaw.
Call us today (732-764-2473) to find out which Macaw for sale will be perfect for you.
Catalina Macaws
The Catalina Macaw is a crossbreeds between the Blue and Gold Macaws and Scarlet Macaws. As offspring of the most appealing Macaw bird families, they inherit the physicality of the male birds. They also carry the same size as the male birds of the parent breeds. The colors on the Catalina Macaws depend on the male bird parent, i.e., whether it's a Scarlet or a Blue and Gold Macaw. Most bird sellers use Scarlet Macaw males for breeding with Blue and Gold Macaw females. That's why typically a Catalina Macaw for sale will have an appearance resembling the Harlequin Macaw.
Since Catalina Macaws are a crossbreed between two different Macaw breeds, they inherit personality traits from both of them. The softness and friendliness in their nature come from the Blue and Gold Macaws, which overcomes the hard-strung and aggressive tendencies of the Scarlet Macaw. Overall, Catalina Macaws are extremely playful, good talkers, and eager to learn.
These Macaws are also very large and therefore, require a much larger cage. For instance, going for a King Model Cage is the right approach since it will offer durability and will withstand the activities of the big Catalina Macaw inside. The hatches also have to be bird-proof because Macaws are extremely playful and often cunning.
For most pet owners, handling a baby Catalina Macaw is important because that's what determines the type of characters those birds have when they grow up. Setting proper boundaries and limits can control their aggressive behavior in various instances.
Greenwing Macaws
While another name for these birds is Greenwing, their name can be misleading for many. These birds are highly beautiful due to the blend of blue, green, and red colors all over their wings. People also confuse these birds with Scarlet Macaws because of their primary color, which is red. However, that's the only similarity between the two different breeds. Both Macaw breeds have quite noticeable differences in their temperaments and appearances. Greenwing Macaw showcases green wings across its wings, while the Scarlet Macaws have a yellowish color across their wing feathers, especially the center.
Also, the Greenwing Macaw carries red lines of feathers across their faces, where a Scarlet Macaw has bare facial patches. The average lifespan of a Greenwing Macaw is around 60-80 years, given that pet owners meet their nutritional requirements in terms of quantity and quality. Their length is somewhere around 32-36 inches. Like other Macaws, the Greenwing Macaw for sale also requires larger cages, such as King Model Cages. They reach maturity at around 4-5 years after birth.
Apart from their gentle and friendly nature, Greenwing Macaws also have a mischievous side that often causes them to wreak havoc unpredictably. Therefore, most pet owners try to calm and occupy these 'gentle giants' using large chewy toys.
Hand raised baby Macaw for sale is available - call us (732-764-2473) or come in and visit anytime.
Hahns Macaws
Hahn's Macaw is a subspecies of the Red-Shouldered Macaws. The Red-Shouldered Macaws have three subspecies, including the Noble Macaws, Long-Winged Macaws, and Hahn's Macaws. The Hahn's Macaws are the smallest subspecies of the larger breed and measure only around 12 inches in length. Following that, the Noble Macaws measure around 13 inches, whereas The Long-Winged Macaws measure around 14 inches in length. The main difference between the subspecies is that the Hahns Macaw possesses a black-colored beak whereas the Long-Winged Macaws and the Noble Macaws have horn-colored beaks.
People often regard the Hahns Macaw as mini macaw because of their length. The Hahns Macaw lifespan is around 20-25 years compared to the 60-80 years lifespan of larger Macaws. Since these Macaws aren't loud and noisy, they are suitable as apartment pets. Considering their highly social and friendly nature, pet owners can easily handle them, provided that they have experience in taking care of birds. The best Hahns Macaw for sale are hand-raised ones, which are great for family-sized pet ownership. With the same attributes as a larger Macaw, the mini macaw is an ideal choice for many bird lovers.
Harlequin Macaws
These Macaws are the result of breeding Blue and Gold Macaws with Greenwing Macaws. Like some other subspecies and crossbreeds, Harlequin Macaw also inherits the physical size and build from their male parents. If the male is a Blue and Gold Macaw, the crossbreed will share the same physical features. Most special bird sellers keep Harlequin Macaws that have Greenwing Macaws as male parents and Blue and Gold Macaws as female parents.
The offspring of such crossbreeding results in red-orange chest Harlequin Macaws with a big head and physical build like Greenwing Macaws. Since both parent breeds are friendly and social in nature, the Harlequins inherit the best out of both breeds. The Harlequin Macaw has a playful, easy-going, slightly mischievous, and intelligent personality. They are also affectionate and highly social, which helps them blend in with their surroundings quite well. Besides, they are also good talkers, which is by far one of the best qualities of the Harlequin Macaws.
See what makes Birds by Joe the perfect place to find your Macaw bird for sale, unsurpassed care and quality of bird.
The Hyacinth Macaw
If you are looking for one of the most popular and majestic Macaw breeds in the market, then the Hyacinth Macaw for sale is your best bet. The Hyacinth Macaw is a highly sought-after parrot among bird lovers. They can measure up to an enormous length of 42 inches from the head to their tail feathers. Carrying strong beaks, these Macaw birds can even snap the cage welds off. Regardless of their strength and unique physical build, bird lovers call them 'gentle giants' because of their calm nature. They are quite affectionate and loving towards their owners.
That's not all. In fact, most of the Hyacinth Macaws are also generally friendly towards strangers. Despite that, their price is appearance-based. These birds are incredibly beautiful, with vivid bluish-violet colors across their body. The Hyacinth Macaw also has tapered and long tails. Their wing undersides have a sleek black color, whereas their eyes have bold yellow rings with brown eyes. Near their beak, the Hyacinth Macaw has a small yellowish lower pat, and their tongue has a stripe as well. While their feet are grayish, their overall body hue is yellow.
Military Macaws
Military Macaw has green colors over their body, but their head comprises a pale shade compared to the rest of their body. These birds have a bare white facial area that comprises a red frontal patch. You may notice blushes on the bird's face when it appears excited. The facial skin isn't entirely naked. It carries lines of black feathers. They also have a red tail that carries blue borders, while the flight feathers feature a beautiful bluish shade.
The Military Macaw has a strong beak that is blackish-grey in color. This bird has yellow irises, but it might not be as impressive as other Macaw breeds in terms of appearance. This is because the Military Macaws don't have various colors all over its body. However, the Military Macaw for sale is quite popular among bird lovers. These bird species are quite similar to Bufons Macaws, except for the smaller size and bright green shade.
The lifespan of a Military Macaw is around 50-60 years. They are inquisitive and good at talking, which allows them to entertain their owners and themselves with several tricks. While they are very social because of living in large flock inside the wilderness, they are quite intelligent even when raised in captivity.
Red-Fronted Macaws
When you look at the Red-Fronted Macaws, you will see that they are neither small nor big in comparison to other Macaws. However, their length is generally around 19-21 inches. These birds are perfect for bird lovers who lack the experience of handling larger Macaws but want a bigger bird than mini-Macaws.
When they're younger, these birds have the most appealing and attractive coloring on their body. However, as they grow mature, their looks only become more refined and appealing. The beauty of the Red Fronted Macaw is absolutely striking and hard for a bird lover to miss. Their red legs, shoulders, patches, crowns, and wings, combined with orange wing undersides, make these birds look absolutely gorgeous.
The wing and tail feathers have a beautiful blue color near the end, which are among the most remarkable physical features of this bird. One of the most interesting things about the Red-Fronted Macaws is that they can keep hovering over an area in a similar way as hummingbirds. They have an intense ability to instantly change their direction while moving in the air. These birds offer plenty of entertainment for owners, especially when they fly around a spacious area.
The Red Fronted Macaws for sale is also intelligent and speak countless contexts with proper training and guidance. But like larger Macaws, they are mischievous, and therefore, most bird lovers regard them as a smaller version of the larger and more cunning Macaws. For big or small families, these not-so-loud birds are one of the best options.
Scarlet Macaws
Scarlet Macaws have bright yellowish bands across their wings. The Scarlet Macaw for sale is on popular demand because they are strikingly beautiful. They feature a blend of red shades across their upper wings and bodies. The lower wing areas of these birds have a royal blue shade that makes for a contrasting color.
Most bird lovers often confuse Scarlet Macaw with the Greenwing Macaws due to the color red, which is the primary color for both of them. However, that is the sole similarity between the two. There are many differences with regard to the looks and behaviors of both birds. The Scarlet Macaws have yellowish feathers, while the Greenwing Macaws have feathers carrying a green band. Additionally, the facial features of both Macaws are quite different. The Scarlet Macaws have bare facial patches, while Greenwing Macaws have red lines of feathers over their face.
Apart from their stunning appearance, Scarlet Macaws are quite nippy, especially when you make quick movements around them. Moreover, they are quite high-strung in their behavior. While their aggressive behavior might appear hostile to some bird species and types of owners, owners must have proper knowledge about bird handling information and psychology to deal with these Macaws.
Severe Macaws
The Severe Macaw is in the "mini-Macaws" category but is the largest of all mini-Macaws. The maximum length of this bird can be as high as 18 inches from the tip of the tail feathers to the head. Among all the mini-Macaws, only this Macaw has feathers over its bare face patches. This feature shares a resemblance with that of larger Macaws.
The color range of this bird species is mostly green but may have a reddish-blue blend on the wings. It has a blue crown and chestnut-brown head patch around the beak. During the immature stage of their life, the Severe Macaw has a dull plumage compared to other Macaws, and also have a dark iris. However, the iris of this bird species changes from dark to orange as they mature. Being native to the Panama and Brazilian regions, their lifespan is around 30-80 years in captivity. Furthermore, the Severe Macaw breeds quite rapidly and can have several clutches in a single year. These can easily lead to more than a dozen egg hatches.
The Severe Macaw for sale are social, enjoy playing with toys, and can mimic the speech and voices of the people around them. These birds love playing with woody and chewy toys. Their talkative nature keeps them, and their owners occupied. The Severe Macaws are quite active and love to play around. In fact, if they feel bored, they can become quite aggressive and destructive as well. Therefore, it is advisable to get a King Sized cage for them. But while they may be aggressive at times, they are ideal for family ownership as house pets that entertain and play with you.
Yellow-Collared Macaws
These are also mini-Macaws with a smaller size but larger personalities. The Yellow Collared Macaw is an ideal choice if you are looking to adopt Macaws that aren't too large but rather active and talkative like larger Macaws.
The Yellow-Collared Macaws, despite their name, are green in color. Their native regions include Argentina, Brazil, and some other countries in between. According to their name, they do have a yellowish collar around their neck. However, this yellow-collar appears only when they mature.
On the other hand, they have brown cheeks, crowns, and foreheads. The tail and wing feathers (primary) have a bluish color around the tip and edge. But, the base side of the tail appears reddish-brown when you observe clearly. On their wings and tail, Yellow-Collared Macaws have a yellow underside.
The face of the Yellow Collared Macaw is distinctive because they have a darkish-grey color on the beak that grows lighter towards the end. Moreover, they have a white-colored bare facial patch. This bird species is only 15-17 inches in length.
The Yellow-Collared Macaw is available for sale if you want a bird that is social and will remain quite active throughout their lifetime. They can talk using several phrases and words but are unaware of the context. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} |
Just over six months after entering the e-commerce space of other physical goods through internet in Brazil, Amazon will soon begin to sell books, making its debut in the country in the segment that Amazon has revolutionize the way business is done.
When it reached the country– back in December 2012 — Amazon sold 13,000 digital books in Portuguese. Today there are 35 000, considering other languages, reaching more than 2 million. These titles will now have to share shelf space from Amazon with over 150 000 physical titles that the company will begin selling.
"We've already sold millions of books since our history began here 20 months ago," said Alexandre Szapiro, vice president of Amazon in Brazil. "Two years ago, the digital book market represented less than 1% of the total. Today, the segment of digital books, according to what publishers believe, should close the year 2014 between 4% and 5%," says executive.
The entrance of Amazon in online trading of physical items occurred in February, when the company began selling the Kindle e-reader. "When I sell a Kindle, I'm taking between 4% and 5% of the readers. Now, we shall meet the other 95% who have no interest in digital,", said Szapiro.
In the catalog — which the executive claims to be the largest in Brazil — will showcase 2,100 publishers such as Record and Companhia das Letras. The country is the first in Latin America where the Amazon will begin selling books. The company has just arrived in August 2013 to Mexico, other Latin where it is present. The last country where Amazon does not books is Australia.
With Amazon finally entering the Brazilian publishing market, questions will soon arise around its aggressive price policy. The latest move in the conflict between writers and publishers had Amazon in one side and, on the other, 909 writers who signed a letter to The New York Times last week, asking Amazon to stop making things difficult for the writers.
via G1 – Amazon starts selling books in Brazil with a catalog of 150,000 titles – News Technology and Games. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
Toward a more diverse student body.
An executive producer who lives on Old Campus.
Some postdocs get in on the amateur-theater act.
A musical about the legendary Robert Johnson, written and performed by students. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
York Region Transit route 18 'Bur Oak'
18 Bur Oak
Number of Branches 1
Types of buses used New Flyer D40LF/R , New Flyer XD40 , Nova Bus LFS , Orion V
Division Southeast (Markham)
Related routes 303, 304
18 Bur Oak is a local route operated by YRT in Markham, ON.
1 Basic
4 Major Stops
6 Route Maps
Route 18 mainly serves Bur Oak Ave.
This route has 1 branch:
18 Angus Glen Community Centre - Markham Stouffville Hospital (Monday to Saturday)
This route serves the Angus Glen, Berczy, Wismer, Greensborough, and Cornell communities. It also serves Pierre Elliott Trudeau High School, Bur Oak Secondary School, Mount Joy GO Station, and Cornell Community Centre.
Route 18 connects to Viva Purple at Markham-Stouffville Hospital.
Service on route 18 first commenced in September 2002, along Bur Oak Ave. between Kennedy Rd. and the (then) new Mount Joy GO Station. There was an on-street loop at Kennedy, while buses used the bus loop at Mount Joy for the east end of the route. Many extensions followed, as the land to the east was developed. Service first was extended east to Markham-Stouffville Hospital, heading south at 9th Line. Service was rerouted east along White's Hill Ave., south on Bur Oak Ave, west on Riverlands to the hospital. Later, service was provided along Bur Oak between 9th Line and 16th Ave, but a jog remained between 16th and White's Hill via 9th Line until late 2006, when service was finally routed south on Bur Oak to Church. In the west end, the on-street loop at Kennedy was replaced by an extension to Angus Glen C.C. on Major Mackenzie Dr.
Initially, service on this route was only during peak periods, but was expanded to include all day weekday and Saturday service.
2012 saw one weekday morning and afternoon trip extended south from the hospital to serve the Grand Cornell community during school times.
Route 18 was declared fully accessible in December 2012.
Route 18 was re-routed away from Major Mackenzie on April 19, 2015. Buses now use Angus Glen Blvd. to reach Angus Glen Community Centre. School trips and diversions for Bur Oak Secondary School and Pierre Elliott Trudeau High School were replaced by route 402 as of the 2015-2016 school year.
In January 2018, the Whites Hill Ave. limited service diversion was eliminated from the route.
Route 18 is primarily a 40ft route and uses New Flyer D40LF/D40LFR, New Flyer XD40, and Nova Bus LFS. Orion V can be spotted operating various trippers.
Angus Glen C.C. (Major Mackenzie/Warden): Western terminus. Connections to routes 25, 68B.
Kennedy Rd.: Connection to route 8.
McCowan Rd.: Connections to routes 129A, 304.
Roy Rainey Ave.: Connections to routes 45, 304.
Mount Joy GO Station (Highway 48): Connections to routes 102D, 301, 303, 304.
9th Line: Connections to routes 9, 303.
Markham-Stouffville Hospital: Eastern terminus. Connections to Viva Purple and routes 1, 9, 16, 25, 201, 303, 522.
Branch Weekdays Saturday Sunday
AM Peak Midday PM Peak Early Evening Late Evening Early AM Day Evening Early AM Day Evening
18 26 70 26 Not operated. 65 Not operated.
Schedule during peak periods is timed to connect with the GO Train at Mount Joy GO Station.
2012 - April 2015
BRT (TOK Transit) - North (TOK Transit) - Southeast (Miller) - Southwest (Transdev)
Bernard - Canada's Wonderland - Cornell - Finch - Highway 407 Station - Markham-Stouffville Hospital - Newmarket - Pioneer Village - Promenade - Richmond Hill Centre - SmartCentres Place - Vaughan Mills - York University
404 Town Centre - Davis Drive & Hwy 404 Park & Ride - Don Mills Station - Humber College - Islington Loop - Markville Mall - Seneca College King Campus - Sheppard West Station
1000-1999, 2000-2999, 3000-3999, 4000-4999, 5000-5999, 6000-6999, 7000-7999, 8000-9999 - Family Of Services
1 2 3 4/4A 5 7 8 9 10 12 13 14 15 16 18 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 28 31 32 33/33A 40 41 42 44 45 50/50B 51 52 54 55/55B 56 57/57A 58 77/77A 80 81 82 83/83A 84 85/85C 86 87 88 90/90B 91/91A/91B/91E 96 98/98E 99 105 107/107B 165/165F 760
TTC-operated
17A 68B 102D 129A 160
Dial-a-ride/On-Demand only
61 - Blue Willow - Holland Landing - Mapleglen - North - Sutton-Pefferlaw
School Specials
Community Bus
520/521 522 589/590
Blue/Blue A - Purple - Pink - Orange - Green - Yellow - Silver
2A 6 9 11 15 18 24D 25D 27 33 34 35D 37D 53 59 66 69 80 81 87 88E 107F 200 203 210 215 220 220/221 222 223/223A 224B 224C/224D 225 242 244 260 318/319 320 340 360 401 402 404 405 408 409 410 414 416 421 422 440 442 443 466 560 561 800 Business Shuttle Markham Fair
Greater Golden Horseshoe Agencies
Retrieved from "https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php?title=York_Region_Transit_route_18_%27Bur_Oak%27&oldid=388977" | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} |
Administration is stirring hate
Bob Franken is an Emmy award winning journalist. - photo by File photo
Bob Franken
Updated: Feb. 18, 2017, 7 p.m.
With his executive order to build that southern-border barrier, President Donald Trump simply was keeping his campaign promise, placating his millions of anti-Latino bigot followers and not really causing any sudden problems - except maybe forever antagonizing Mexico.
But his other hateful order - which kept another campaign pledge to his anti-Muslim bigot followers, many of them the same as the anti-Hispanic ones - caused total chaos. Not only was the order based on hate, it was carried out in haste. Rarely have such incompetents misused such power in such an uncoordinated way. From the moment Trump and his fellow White House Keystone Kops released their directive to stop entry to the United States for anyone but bona-fide U.S. citizens, the spit hit the fan.
The grotesque nightmare continued for Syrian refugees who had waited years to go through vetting after surviving the violence that wracks their country. Just as suddenly, those coming from or having any connection to the other six majority-Muslim nations on the list also were stopped before they could board planes or detained after they landed. Border Patrol officers, at times, seemed drunk with power. Their superiors, who had been told about this disorderly order only as it was taking effect, had an extremely harsh view of their authority and held their new arrivals prisoner or sent them packing on another plane.
Those kept captive were held incommunicado, away from the heroic lawyers who had rushed to airports to help. They persisted, even after judges ordered them to at least allow their detainees access to attorneys, raising the possibility that their defiance might result in contempt of court. Even after several days, the situation was chaotic.
But other than Trump pandering to his base, what was the purpose? Why, for instance, would the seven countries on this arbitrary list not include Pakistan, a hotbed of militancy, or Afghanistan? Why not Saudi Arabia, home to most of the 9/11 attackers? Why did he exclude so many other majority-Muslim countries? Could it be, as some suggest, because Donald Trump or his family has financial interests in those places?
Does Trump's order do anything to stop the homegrown terrorists who live here but have been radicalized or are angry outcasts? How does any nation effectively interfere with social media, which can be used for such dangerous incitement?
What about the terrorist violence inspired by other warped outlooks like the racism of Dylan Root, for instance, or even the consuming anti-Muslim obsession that drove a pathetic madman to kill during a shooting spree in a Quebec City mosque. This is chilling but true: Potential mass killers already are here waiting to be pushed over the edge.
What our dear leader Donald Trump has done with his reckless action just reinforces the argument that this great nation's welcoming reputation is really undeserved. Ask generations past about the Germans or the Italians or the Irish. Blacks were allowed in, but they were in chains. Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps.
Now it's the Muslims who have every reason to believe this is hostile territory. President Trump, as inept as his administration may be, is succeeding in recruiting new people to the side of our enemies. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} |
Joe Giorello's book Great Battles for Boys: Ancients to Middle Ages is currently available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
Joe Giorello is currently considered a "single author." If one or more works are by a distinct, homonymous authors, go ahead and split the author.
Joe Giorello is composed of 1 name. | {
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"Tom & Huck" was realesed on DVD in the US on May 6th, and is now shipping from various stores including Amazon, DVDEmpire and more.
A lot of kids get into trouble. These two invented it.
America's most famous teenager, Jonathan Taylor Thomas (Home Improvement), stars as America's greatest teenage hero-Tom Sawyer! No boy ever had so much fun, got inito so much trouble, or had so many outrageous adventures! Disney's magic touch now turns Mark Twain's masterpiece into "An outstanding classic adventure film" (Kids News Network).
Tom and his rebellious friend Huck (Brad Renfro) witness a midnight killing. They swear not to reveal what they saw-but that causesia real problem. If Tom doesn't speak up, an innocent friend may be hanged. But if he does tell the truth, the real killer, knife-throwing Injun Joe, will come after him!
Tom andiHuck has it all – a treasure hunt, a haunted house, a courtroom showdown, a scary chase in a cave, and a valuable lesson for young Tom: whenia friend's in trouble, you don't runaway!
Now one of the world's great stories becomes a great addition to your family's Disney library! | {
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The retail business exemplifies the maxim, change is fixed. The present is basically a showcase for the most recent cellular handsets, however the latest Web of Issues applied sciences additionally took the highlight. When Martha is just not inventing the longer term, she enjoys disconnecting from technology and spending time outdoors, preferably close to some physique of water.
As a result of this, new products like merchant banking, mutual funds, leasing, factoring, forfeiting, company advisory providers and enterprise capital are rising. Software program business giants have already started providing their providers on cloud. RAND performed a pivotal position in emerging applied sciences throughout the 20th century, from satellites and computers to information-sharing techniques, packet switching, and artificial intelligence.
Following Cloudreach's acquisition by Blackstone back in February, their joint ambition was to grow to be the leading international software program-enabled cloud companies supplier. In response to Cisco Techniques, largest provider of enterprise communication solutions, gear gross sales have been on the rise and extra notably teleconferencing tools and internet gadgetry.
The new age advertising and marketing goals at successful customers for ever, where companies greet the customers, create products to go well with their wants, work exhausting to develop life time prospects via the rules of customer delight, approval and enthusiasm. This is the place the importance of administration info technology training to grasp the potential impression of expertise from a enterprise perspective comes into play.
Nonetheless, the opinion on the diploma of the impact, status and economic viability of a number of emerging and converging technologies. The Rising Technology Neighborhood encourages the adoption of new and emerging technology that will enhance business outcomes for members and their clients. | {
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Kanye West Breaks Down at Paris Concert
VIDEO: The rapper is consoled onstage just a week after his mother's death
By Peter Mikelbank
Updated November 18, 2007 09:30 AM
Only a week after his mother's death, Kanye West returned to the concert stage Saturday night in Paris, only to dramatically break down in tears, audience members tell PEOPLE.
Nearing the end of the more than 60-minute performance, with the riff of "Hey Mama" beginning, West attempted to introduce the tribute to a sold-out crowd at Le Zénith in Paris, saying "this song is for my mother…." and could get no further. (See the YouTube video.)
"He just cracked," one attendee tells PEOPLE, "He was at the end of his concert and had just started to dedicate the song and then he just lost it completely."
"He said the word, 'Mother' and just couldn't go any further," Le Parisien journalist Meddy Magloire said. "A back-up singer, the DJ and a guitar player came over to console him. It looked like he might collapse. He just couldn't continue. He just stood there in a spotlight, crying while the band continued playing."
After a few moments of stunned silence, Magloire says, the audience of 5,000 reacted by offering calls of encouragement, which grew into applause.
The band restarted the song, but West left the stage, returning after 10-15 minutes to conclude the concert with a rousing performance of "Stronger."
"He was very nervous, seemed to have gathered himself up, and had a lot of energy," Magloire says. "He kept shouting out to the audience, 'I need you… I need you right now.' and the public was screaming back. It was magic."
Surprise Appearance
West had been reclusive since death of his mother. He canceled a Victoria's Secrets performance on Thursday and was not at the memorial for her in Chicago on Friday.
His arrival in Paris at the Hotel Le Meurice on Friday, accompanied by fiancée Alexis Phifer and her son, was unexpected, coming just hours after another scheduled concert set for Monday in Amsterdam was officially canceled.
West is scheduled to perform in Brussels on Sunday night. It's now expected he will return to the United States for his mother's funeral in Oklahoma City on Tuesday afternoon before returning to Europe to perform in London on Thursday. | {
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Last chance for a hike in the mountains before the snow is too deep without snowshoes. We took the Tahoe Rim Trail from Spooner Summit on Hwy 50, then cross country up to Duane Bliss Peak. This 8660-ft peak has great open 360-degree views of Lake Tahoe and the Carson Valley, and it's only about 3.5 miles one way from the TRT trailhead. The only drawback is the very steep slope through the forest up from the TRT. All it needs is a good switch-backed trail to the summit.
Duane Bliss Peak is on the Tahoe OGUL peak list. 15 down, 48 to go. | {
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const char kHelp[] = "help";
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
base::CommandLine::Init(argc, argv);
base::AtExitManager exit_manager;
base::debug::EnableInProcessStackDumping();
// Initialize logging so we can enable VLOG messages.
logging::LoggingSettings settings;
// Logs to system debug by default on POSIX.
#if BUILDFLAG(IS_WIN)
settings.log_file_path = FILE_PATH_LITERAL("ozone_demo.log");
#endif
logging::InitLogging(settings);
if (base::CommandLine::ForCurrentProcess()->HasSwitch(kHelp)) {
std::cout << "Usage:\n\n"
" --disable-gpu Force software rendering\n"
" --disable-surfaceless Don't use surfaceless EGL\n"
" --window-size=WIDTHxHEIGHT Specify window size\n"
" --partial-primary-plane "
"Use smaller than fullscreen primary plane\n"
" --enable-overlay Use an overlay plane\n"
" --disable-primary-plane Don't use the primary plane\n"
" --use-gpu-fences "
"Use GpuFences for buffer display synchronization\n";
// TODO(hoegsberg): We should add a little more help text about how these
// options interact and depend on each other.
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
// Initialize tracing.
if (base::CommandLine::ForCurrentProcess()->HasSwitch(
switches::kTraceToConsole)) {
base::trace_event::TraceConfig trace_config =
tracing::GetConfigForTraceToConsole();
base::trace_event::TraceLog::GetInstance()->SetEnabled(
trace_config, base::trace_event::TraceLog::RECORDING_MODE);
}
mojo::core::Init();
base::SingleThreadTaskExecutor main_task_executor(base::MessagePumpType::UI);
base::ThreadPoolInstance::CreateAndStartWithDefaultParams("OzoneDemo");
ui::OzonePlatform::InitParams params;
params.single_process = true;
ui::OzonePlatform::InitializeForUI(params);
ui::KeyboardLayoutEngineManager::GetKeyboardLayoutEngine()
->SetCurrentLayoutByName("us");
ui::OzonePlatform::InitializeForGPU(params);
base::RunLoop run_loop;
ui::WindowManager window_manager(
std::make_unique<ui::SimpleRendererFactory>(), run_loop.QuitClosure());
run_loop.Run();
return 0;
}
| {
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Batswana lose confidence on government accountability ÔÇô Afrobarometer
A recent Afrobarometer Policy Paper No.33 on Botswana's performance on National Vision 2016 has exposed in detail how Batswana have been losing confidence in most sectors of Government since 2008 – a year that President Ian Khama ascended to power.
The country is considered to be doing well in terms of Government performance evaluations under Personal safety and confidence in security forces – recording 67 percentage of Batswana's sense of security in their homes and neighbourhoods. Although public confidence in the security forces and courts is relatively high, the proportion of citizens who trust the police "a lot" or "somewhat" has declined by 11 percentage points since Khama came to power.
Under openness and accountability the proportion of Batswana who feel "completely" or "somewhat" free to say what they think has decreased significantly since 2008 from 93 percentage points to 83 percentage points, so too has the proportion who say people "never" or "rarely" have to be careful in expressing political opinions from 67 percentage points to 50 percentage points.
Similarly, although citizens believe that government accountability is fairly strong, the proportions of Batswana who believe that the President regularly ignores laws or that officials go unpunished have increased significantly since 2008. The proportion of Batswana who believe that Khama abides by the law has declined by 15 percentage points since 2008. Furthermore the proportion of Batswana who believe that officials who break the law seldom go unpunished also experienced a significant decline of 18 percentage points since Khama became President.
Under Education majority of citizens believe that the government is making substantial progress toward achieving a pillar of an informed and educated nation. On average since 1999, 78 percent of Batswana have said that government is doing "very well" or "fairly well" on addressing the country's educational needs. However this rating has declined by 14 percentage points since its peak in 2008.
Education ranks third among citizens' perceptions of the most important problems facing the country.
The study says despite relatively healthy macroeconomic performance, a third of Batswana describe Botswana's economic condition as "very good" or "fairly good".
A majority of Batswana have consistently reported "very bad" or "fairly bad" on personal living conditions since 2003 with only 19 percent of Batswana describing their living conditions as "very good" or "fairly good." This is considered a surprising finding given recent objective evidence that, on average, Batswana's living conditions have improved significantly since 2002/2003 and that both the incidence and severity of poverty declined in the same period.
Government performances on essential services is said to have improved since 2008 and narrowed the gap between rich and poor by 11 percentage points, food security by eight percentage points and poverty alleviation by six percentage points – however it has declined on provision of water/sanitation by 12 percentage points and improving health services also declined by six percentage points.
Under access to basic necessities the study exposed how broke Batswana are.
Citizens are said to be lacking cash income, which is at critical levels: only three in 10 (30%) survey respondents report having "never" gone without a cash income in the preceding 12 months.
Botswana is counted among countries that have invested greatly in national security. Under a safe and secure nation pillar the study notes with concern the creation of the Directorate on Intelligence and Security Services (DISS) by Khama in 2008.
Under an open, democratic, and accountable nation Afrobarometer data provide evidence of relatively strong political freedoms in the country. Strong majorities of citizens believe that their civil liberties are adequately protected. However there has been a significant decrease of 10 percentage points in perceived freedom of expression since 2008. The study further shows a decline in freedom of expression since 2008.
In 2008 two-thirds (67%) of Batswana believed that people "never" or "rarely" had to be careful about what they said in politics.
This proportion dropped to just half (50%) in 2014. The study says this reduction in perceived freedom of expression coincides with growth in the proportion of Batswana who equate "democracy" with civil liberties and declining citizen satisfaction since 2008, with the way Botswana's democracy is working.
Under the pillar of moral and tolerant nation two thirds (64%) of respondents in the 2014 Afrobarometer survey say they attended a community meeting in the previous year, down from a peak of 74 percentage points in 2008 when Khama became President. The proportion of Batswana who joined together with others to raise an issue also declined in that period, from 56 percentage points to only 27 percentage points.
Tsogwane bemoans Batswana's dependency on government safety nets
Batswana appeal to government not to introduce cost sharing on ARVs
Stay tuned for Batswana on Dstv | {
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I'm a long-time forum reader and come here to find recipes pretty often, but this is my first post.
I tried beef beef ribs for the first time recently and thought it would make for a good post. We used the beef chuck "Dino" ribs from the H-E-B, and rubbed them with salt, pepper, ancho chili and cayenne. The egg was set to 285*F with the plate legs up.
After 5.5 hours I opened up the egg to spritz the ribs with water and apple cider vinegar. They probed tender so after another 30 mins I pulled them (204*F).
The ribs were amazing. Super tender and delicious. Pictures below.
Beef ribs are on my short list to try. Looks great!! | {
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X OF SWORDS Aftermath: X-MEN #13 Explains One Mutant's Core Motivation
By Matthew Brake
X of Swords is halfway over. We've seen the Krakoan sword-wielders go to great lengths to attain their swords, with some literally going through hell itself (ahem, Wolverine)!
This issue brings readers back to the man at the heart of the story, Apocalypse, whose progeny have returned to kill their father and vanquish the mutant nation.
Ever since Apocalypse first (fully) debuted in X-Factor #6 in 1986, his modus operandi has remained the same–to weed out the weak through a twisted version of "the survival of the fittest." But why? What inspired Apocalypse to take this course of action?
According to Apocalypse co-creator Louise Simonson in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Apocalypse's twisted Darwinian vision came about because of his encounter with the god-like race known as the Celestials. The Celestials are the ones responsible for seeding the universe with many of its sentient lifeforms, including humanity, for their own mysterious purposes, with the Celestials periodically returning to evaluate the progress of their work, with a failing evaluation leading to the destruction of that species. Simonson explains, "Apocalypse encountered the Celestials and realized there was a time when humanity might be judged unworthy and destroyed." This is what has driven him "to kill off the weak and force the survivors to grow stronger, to push humanity to get better and more powerful," including those who are a part of human evolution's next step–mutants.
Getting judged poorly by the Celestials is NOT good.
Hickman performs a bit of a retcon to Apocalypse's motivations in X of Swords.
In an effort to hold back the invading demonic hordes of Amenth, Apocalypse's wife Genesis and their children stay behind on Arakko and seal the dimensional breach behind them, cutting themselves off from Earth. She tells Apocalypse that he cannot come because he is "not strong enough," and she advises him, concerning the Earth's denizens, "Stay. Use what time we buy you to make this world into something that can stand against our enemy. Judge them, my love… So that they–that you–become what we need. See that only the fittest remain."
This seems to be the inception of Apocalypse's survival of the fittest ideology, born of a desperate need to come to the aid of his wife and children against a demonic enemy, to make sure at the very least that their sacrifice is not in vain.
But now, with Apocalypse's own children leading that very horde and having betrayed him while threatening Krakoa, are we about to see a dynamic change in this former X-villain's motivations?
Apocalypse lived by the principle of the survival of the fittest because of his commitment to his old family and their struggle for survival in Arakko. With his old family turning against him and the inevitable victory of Krakoa, could we see a fundamental change in Apocalypse's character and core motivation moving forward?
As he defends and fights for his new family, will Apocalypse change and find a new purpose and principle to live by, one beyond the bleakness of "survival of the fittest"?
The ending of this series surely means a deep personal loss for Apocalypse. Perhaps his grief and vulnerability, shared with those in the new Krakoan society, will forge a new path for the world's oldest mutant.
Or perhaps, Krakoa's losses in the X of Swords tournament will harden them and push them toward Apocalypse's approach, in a world where vulnerability is dangerous for the new mutant state and where death in Otherworld may be permanent.
Matthew Brakehttps://www.popularcultureandtheology.com
Matthew Brake is the series editor for the book series Theology and Pop Culture from Lexington Books. He is also the co-editor of the forthcoming Religion and Comics series from Claremont Press. He holds degrees in Interdisciplinary Studies and Philosophy from George Mason University. He also writes for Sequart and the Blackwell Popular Culture and Philosophy blog.
Tales From the Longbox: David Lloyd's ALIENS: GLASS CORRIDOR
REVIEW: X-MEN #18 Sets Up The Team For Future Success
Project 365: One Comic Every Day, Week 3: The Outrageous 50's
Review: MONARCH #1 – The Strangers From Above
Check Out BJÖRN BARENDS' Cover For GHOST RIDER #13
James Robinson's STARMAN: Deeds of the Fathers
Project 365: One Comic Every Day, Week 2
LOVE EVERLASTING – The ANIMAL MAN of Romance Comics
The Paradoxical Charm of Zdarsky's BATMAN | {
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Edible Innovations
How Champagne Works
By: Bren Herrera
Champagne has a place at many fancy events. But why is it so popular? See more champagne pictures.
David De Lossy/Photodisc/Thinkstock
Are you a social creature? If so, you know that at just about every dinner party or major celebration, you're likely to be offered some kind of wine -- red or white (maybe both), depending on the cuisine. And then there are other soirees that take things up a notch by serving the bubbling wine known as champagne.
Those bubbles, in addition to the distinct look and taste, are what set champagne apart from other wines. For centuries, the world has been intrigued by its mystique, its cost in comparison to still wines, and a curiosity about what makes it bubble.
A sparkling wine at its finest, champagne just isn't champagne if it doesn't come from its namesake region of France. Situated just 90 minutes northeast of Paris, the region is one of France's most revered. The cool temperatures and moisture in the soil contribute to the character and caliber of the grapes chosen for winemaking. Ironically, although it's home to the expansive vineyards that arguably produce the best wine in the world, it's also one of the least-visited regions of France.
The high regard for the use of the word champagne has caused international legal battles. As a result, sparking wines produced in other parts of the world can't use the name, despite their similarities to champagne. For example, sparkling wines from the Catalonia region of Spain are labeled cava.
The traditional Champagne region includes the area around Rheims and Epernay. In the early years of champagne production, grapes were only planted in an area covering 84,000 acres around those cities. Today, cities as far north as Burgundy have been authorized to plant the fine grapes that make the famous French wine and call it champagne.
The Mighty Three Grapes
How Champagne Ferments: La Méthod Champenoise
Enter the (Champagne) Riddler
The Houses of Champagne
Champagne and the AOC
Celebrity, Wealth and the Pop
When you pop open a bottle of champagne, the first thing you look for are the bubbles. They have an interesting appeal to our senses, and without them, the experience of drinking champagne just wouldn't be the same. There's a scientifically intricate method to making the bubbles. It's known as the "la Méthode Champenoise," or the Champagne Method. This process involves fermenting, blending and refermenting, bottling, riddling and dosage.
All wines are fermented. Fermentation is the chemical breakdown of the sugars in the grape juice, creating alcohol and turning it into wine. In the case of making champagne, it all starts with picking grapes by hand from a well-manicured and maintained vineyard. After the best grapes have been individually selected, they're pressed by barefoot grape-crushers to extract all the juice. Machines can't be used to press grapes producing champagne.
Once all the juice is collected, it's placed in stainless steel vats, where it rests until it becomes a still wine. This is the first of two fermentation periods. The next step is blending, which winemakers consider to be the most integral part of the Méthode Champenoise.
Choosing red wines from champagne villages, and adding them to the fermented batch falls on the hands of cellar masters. Cellar masters are professional wine handlers who have studied and worked with grapes and wines, and understand the process of making wine and champagne. The art of blending, or selecting the cuvée -- a blend of different wines that will result in the final champagne -- requires the ability to taste and determine the appropriate color, smell and taste. Every cellar master and village produces a unique and novel wine based on specific blending practices and recipes.
The bubbles are created during the second fermentation process. Sugar and yeast are added to the wine, which is then stored in a cooler setting, about 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 15 degrees Celsius). This process -- which can take up to a few months -- can take place in stainless-steel tanks or in the bottles themselves. The wine ferments slowly, allowing it to mature through the aging of the fruity aromas of the grapes and release of yeast. This additional activity in the bottle produces alcohol and carbon dioxide.
During the fermenting process, sediment will settle out of the wine. Champagne fermented in bottles is slowly turned upside down; workers remove the cork and the carbon dioxide pressure blows out the sediment. Then the wine manufacturer may sweeten the wine by adding a little syrup that has been mixed with an older champagne.
Be a Grape Crusher
You can experience the process of wine making by taking a trip to Napa Valley and taking a grape crushing tour. Instead of machines, your feet will do all the squeezing.
Though the process of making champagne is mostly over once the cork goes into the bottle, there are a few other steps that have to happen before the bottle is ready for sale. Yeast continues to grow and split, giving the wine its flavor. However, the yeast has to be removed through a process called riddling. A person called the riddler places wine bottles upside down at a 75-degree angle, and turns them one-eighth of turn every day [source: Pandell]. A little shake and bump helps, too. This can be a mundane task, but it's necessary to allow the yeast to collect at the top for removal.
The yeast leaves the bottle through disgorging. Here's how it works: The bottle rests upside down in an ice-salt bath. A plug containing the dead yeast freezes at the neck of the bottle. The trick is removing that frozen plug without sacrificing the taste and quantity of the carefully crafted champagne.
Once the cork is removed by hand, the pressure of the carbon dioxide gas built up in the bottle forces the plug out. Doing this requires the loss of a controlled amount of champagne. To make up for it, a certain amount of white wine, brandy and sugar are added to the final product, to adjust the alcohol and sugar levels. Finally, the cork is placed back on the bottle and tightened down with wire. This last step raises the pressure again, keeping the bubbles inside until it's time to pop the cork.
This process results in four types of champagnes: A brut champagne is characterized as being very dry and not too sweet. Extra brut is the driest and least popular, according to wine specialist Stacy Slinkard. Sec champagne is dry, but not as dry as brut, and demi-sec or non-brut is the sweetest of them all.
Widow Clicquot, the Inventor
Madame Clicquot, a famous entrepreneur who was widowed at 27 and took ownership of her husband's wine business, is believed to have invented the disgorging process back in 1800s. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, one of the world's most famous champagne houses, is named after her.
We mentioned earlier the two cities that make up the Champagne region: Rheims and Epernay. The world's most famous champagne houses reside in one of these two cities.
Wine historians say champagne was invented in the 1700s as an accidental discovery by Dom Pérignon. He was a Benedictine monk who worked with wine and put great passion into chemistry and developing something other than still and red wines. His statement to other monks, "Come quickly, I am drinking stars," ultimately alluded to his misplaced discovery of what we know to be champagne [source: Marshall]. The House of Möet & Chandon, from the Epernay village, takes ownership of his discovery and has named its most popular champagne after him.
Other famous houses of champagne market their champagnes as the best in the world. But what really makes champagne better than any other sparkling wine? Climate, soil quality and the precise locations of the vineyards determine the quality of grapes used to make the still wine. Different houses plant and ferment grapes differently. Additionally, the blending or selecting of the cuvée is probably the most important element in making champagne.
The houses, depending on their specialty and distinct qualities, establish their fermentation times and exercise unique blending techniques. One thing to note is whether the champagne is vintage or non-vintage. Non-vintage champagnes are made up with several different blends from various years of grape harvesting. They only ferment 17 months. In contrast, vintage champagnes spend at least two years working their magic. Vintage champagnes are blended wines from one particular year [source: Johnson and Robinson].
Name Dropping
Want to boast knowing the best champagne houses? Start with:
Möet & Chandon (Epernay)
Perrier-Jouet (Epernay)
Louis Roedere (Rheims)
Krug (Rheims)
Cristal (Rheims)
Dom Pérignon (Epernay)
Clicquot's La Grande Dame (Rheims)
Because champagne represents and is consumed by the upper echelon, it is understandable why wine producers in other regions make similar sparkling wines. However, in order to protect the quality of wines, French wine producers must adhere to strict guidelines as outlined in the "appellation d'origine controlé," or AOC. These guidelines apply to both wines and champagnes. The Institute National de L'origine et de la Qualité has established certain guidelines as a way to limit poor-quality wines and champagnes that may come from mediocre lands and vineyards, and to establish consistent uniqueness and authentic characteristics from varying regions. If a wine producer or champagne house wants to boast being among the best, it can apply for AOC status, which will be stamped on the label of its bottles. The criteria for being a top producer aren't so easy to come by and include the following: acceptable land usage, proper region climate and soil quality, variety of grapes used, alcohol level of the wine and taste.
Bottles bearing the AOC mark have been scrutinized by a panel of tasters that sample all wines applying for this prestigious accolade. So, when you see a champagne bottle bearing the words "appellation d'origine controlé," you're drinking a bottle that has passed all criteria and quality requirements. This AOC process contributes to the high price tag on champagne, but ultimately ensures that what you're drinking is bona fide extraordinaire.
Although French law dictates that champagne must be produced in the champagne region, other notable European countries have relentlessly dipped into making sparkling wines. Spain produces a variety called cava. England also produces sparking wine. The country's proximity to the sea allows the grapes to ripen during July. This allows the wine to achieve the perfect levels of sugar and acidity, which ultimately create the bubbles. Expanding the boundaries of areas in which Champagne can be made from France to include vineyards in Great Britain is something the French government is entertaining. As of this writing, a final disposition has not been issued.
Top 3 Most Expensive Champagne Bottles Sold in Auction
Krug, Grande Cuvée, 1928 -- $21,200 (sold in Hong Kong at auction)
Methuselah Louis Roederer Cristal Brut, 1990 -- $17,525
Henri and Remi Krug, unknown date -- $2,800 (Sotheby auction)
[source: Styles]
Bottles of Beau Joie champagne sit ready for the Warner Music Group GRAMMY celebration on Feb. 12, 2012, in Los Angeles.
Todd Williamson/Getty Images
For many, uncorking a bottle of champagne is the quintessential form of saying "congratulations." All over the world, champagne is shared at major events. New Year's Eve is probably the most notable and televised, but do you wonder why the hype given to the price tag and affluent consumer? Champagne's high price comes from its region, the cost of production and the time it takes to make. As a result, it's developed a reputation as a wine enjoyed by the classy and chic.
That's no surprise if you consider that a regular bottle of Dom Pérignon can cost you $170. A vintage DP Rosé costs as much as $400, and auction houses such as Sotheby sometimes sell bottles for $21,000. Hip-hop culture has also heightened the aura of popping bottles through celebrities like Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Jay Z. Both frequently mention world-famous champagne houses in their lyrics and make it sound extremely accessible. Obviously, much of the buzz behind drinking champagne is the image it portrays and how much marketing executives feel the market can bear. Of the celebratory events where champagne is a must, NASCAR is known for its "champagne moment" at the end of the race, where bottles are poured over the winner. It's all about the victory, and what better way to enjoy the moment than by sharing champagne?
The most expensive bottle of champagne will break your bank -- but it'll also add to your art collection! According to Los Angeles Times writer Patrick Comiskey, a 1907 Heidsieck bottle sells for $275.000. The exclusive bottles were intended for the imperial family of Russia, but a shipwreck prevented them from reaching their intended owners. Found in 1997, they're now being sold at Ritz-Carlton hotels in Moscow. The mystery behind the lost ship and the length of time being lost single-handedly added to the hefty and unprecedented price tag!
In addition to the monetary cost, the mystery behind the loud pop and the bubbles' ability to remain fizzy make for good sidebar conversation at these bottle-popping events. Of course, the pressure released once the cork is removed from the bottle is the cause of the loud pop. But now that the bottle is open, how long will the wine stay bubbly? A Stanford University study shows that leaving a bottle untreated will leave you with more bubbles after 26 hours than one with alternate methods of preservation [source: Zare]. The myth that a silver spoon will preserve the fizz has been scientifically dispelled.
How Winemaking Works
How Beer Works
How Moonshine Works
How Caviar Works
How Coffee Works
How Tea Works
How Espresso Works
Champagne Pictures: From Grapes to Glass
Ultimate Guide to the Champagne Wine Region
Aspler, Tony. "All that Sparkles." The Wine Guy. Dec. 30, 2003. (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.tonyaspler.com/pub/articleview.asp?id=440&s=5
Champagne Bureau USA. "History of Champagne." (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.champagne.us/
Comiskey, Patrick. "A Champagne (or sparkling wine) for every occasion." LA Times. Dec. 24, 2008. (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/food/la-fo-champagne24-2008dec24,0,7867917.story
Encyclopedia Britannica. "Champagne." (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/105137/champagne
Johnson, Hugh. Robinson, Jancis. "The Concise World Atlas of Wine." London: Mitchell Beazley. August 2009.
Marshall, Wes. "Tasting the Stars." The Austin Chronicle. Dec. 31, 2004. (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.austinchronicle.com/food/2004-12-31/244695/
Pandell, Alexander, J. "Making Champagne." The Alchemist Wine Perspective. (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.wineperspective.com/making_champagne.htm
Passmore, Nick. "Most Expensive Champagnes 2006." Forbes Magazine. Dec. 15, 2006. (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/14/most-expensive-champagnes-forbeslife-cx_np_1215champagnes.html
Sales, Miguel. Director of Cultural Affairs, UNESCO, Paris. Personal Interview conducted Sept. 19, 2009.
Shipman, Frank M., and Thomas, Alan T. "Distilled Spirit (Alcoholic Beverage)." Encyclopedia Britannica. (March 5, 2012) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/166115/distilled-spirit
Smith, Brian. "The Sommelier's Guide to Wine." New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. 2008.
Stanford News Service. "Champagne Bubble Myth Burst: Forget the Silver Spoon." Dec. 21, 1994. (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/94/941221Arc4008.html
Styles, Oliver. "1928 Krug sets world auction record for Champagne bottle." Decanter.com. March 31, 2009. (Feb. 27, 2012) http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/484971/1928-krug-sets-world-auction-record-for-champagne-bottle
Bren Herrera "How Champagne Works" 7 March 2012.
HowStuffWorks.com. <https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/edible-innovations/champagne.htm> 30 January 2023
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Шамші́ Калдая́кова () — аул у складі Каргалинського району Актюбинської області Казахстану. Входить до складу Желтауського сільського округу.
У радянські часи аул називався Александровка.
Населення — 1934 особи(2009; 1874 в 1999).
Примітки
Джерела
Посилання
На Вікімапії
Населені пункти Каргалинського району
Аули Актюбинської області | {
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BIODYNAMIC MONITORING
High-level aminoglycoside resistance and reduced susceptibility to vancomycin in nosocomial enterococci
Luna Adhikari
Department of Microbiology, Sikkim-Manipal Institute of Medical Sciences (SMIMS) and Central Referral Hospital (CRH), 5th Mile Tadong, Gangtok, Sikkim- 737 102, India
Click here for correspondence address and email
Objectives: The objectives of the present study were to identify the species of enterococci isolated from nosocomial infections and to determine the antibiotic susceptibility pattern with reference to high-level aminoglycosides and vancomycin. Materials and Methods: Enterococci were isolated from various clinical samples collected from patients after 72 hours of hospitalization. Various species of Enterococcus were identified by standard methods. High-level aminoglycoside resistance and vancomycin susceptibility in enterococci were detected by disk-diffusion and agar-screen methods. Results: One hundred eighty enterococcal strains were isolated from various clinical samples. Various species of Enterococcus - Enterococcus fecalis 130 (72.22%), Enterococcus casseliflavus 24 (13.33%), Enterococcus fecium 17 (9.44%), Enterococcus durans 7 (3.89%) and Enterococcus dispar 2 (1.11%) - were isolated. The highest resistance to aminoglycoside was observed among E. fecium, followed by E. durans, E. fecalis and E. casseliflavus, both by disk-diffusion and agar-screen methods. The high-level aminoglycoside resistance (HLAR) was significantly (P<0.05) higher in E. fecium by agar-screen method. All enterococci showed minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of ≤8 ΅g/mL to vancomycin. Sixteen (12.31%) E. fecalis and 3 (12.5%) E. fecium strains were intermediately resistant to vancomycin (MIC= 8 ΅g/mL), whereas other strains were susceptible to vancomycin. Conclusion: The occurrence of high-level aminoglycoside resistance in enterococcal isolates in our setup was high. Even though none of the enterococcal strains showed resistance to vancomycin, yet reduced susceptibility to vancomycin was noticed in our study. This would require routine testing of enterococcal isolates for HLAR and vancomycin susceptibility. Agar-screen method was found to be superior to disk-diffusion method in detecting resistant strains to aminoglycosides and vancomycin.
Keywords: High-level aminoglycoside resistance, Nosocomial enterococci, Reduced susceptibility to vancomycin
Adhikari L. High-level aminoglycoside resistance and reduced susceptibility to vancomycin in nosocomial enterococci. J Global Infect Dis 2010;2:231-5
Adhikari L. High-level aminoglycoside resistance and reduced susceptibility to vancomycin in nosocomial enterococci. J Global Infect Dis [serial online] 2010 [cited 2019 Jul 15];2:231-5. Available from: http://www.jgid.org/text.asp?2010/2/3/231/68534
Enterococci, though commensal in adult feces, are important nosocomial pathogens. [1],[2],[3] E. fecalis is the most common cause (80%-90%) of infection, followed by E. fecium (10%-15%). [4] Their emergence in the past two decades is in many respects attributable to their resistance to many commonly used antimicrobial agents (aminoglycosides, cephalosporins, aztreonam, semisynthetic penicillin, trimethoprim-sulphamethoxazole) [5],[6] and ease with which they appear to attain and transfer resistant genes, [7] thus giving rise to enterococci with high-level aminoglycoside resistance (HLAR) and glycopeptide resistance.
A common regime for treatment of serious enterococcal infections is the combination of cell-wall inhibitors, such as penicillin, ampicillin or vancomycin; with aminoglycosides, such as streptomycin or gentamicin. [8] The addition of cell-wall inhibitor agent helps in the penetration of the aminoglycoside into the bacterial cytoplasm, making the intrinsically resistant organism aminoglycoside sensitive. Reduced susceptibility to vancomycin will interfere with the penetration of the aminoglycoside into the bacterial cytoplasm, thus making the synergism ineffective. The presence of HLAR in enterococci, defined as minimum inhibitory concentration of ≥2000 μg/mL of aminoglycoside for the isolate, makes the synergism of cell-wall inhibitor and aminoglycoside ineffective. [9] The main objectives of the present study were to identify the species of enterococci isolated from nosocomial infections and to determine the antibiotic susceptibility pattern with reference to high-level aminoglycosides and vancomycin.
The study population included patients of all age groups hospitalized at Government Wenlock Hospital, Government Lady Goschen Hospital, Kasturba Medical College Hospital, Attavar; and University Medical Centre, Mangalore, Karnataka, India. Infection was considered nosocomial if it developed more than 72 hours after admission to hospital. [10]
Isolation and identification
Enterococci were isolated from various clinical samples (pus, urine, blood and peritoneal aspirate).
Enterococci were identified using standard methods based on gram staining, catalase reaction, bile aesculin, growth in 6.5% NaCl and sugar-fermentation reactions. [4],[11]
Antibiotic susceptibility of Enterococcus species
Antibiotic sensitivity testing of enterococci was performed using Kirby-Bauer disk-diffusion method. [12] Mueller-Hinton agar supplemented with 5% sheep blood was used. The antibiotic disks were purchased from Hi Media, Mumbai. The antibiotic disks and their potency were as follows: ampicillin (10 μg), gentamicin (120 μg), penicillin (10 U), streptomycin (300 μg) and vancomycin (30 μg). The controls were S. aureus ATCC 25923 and E. fecalis ATCC 29212.
Detection of HLAR in enterococci by disk-diffusion and agar-dilution methods
HLAR in enterococci was detected by disk-diffusion method and agar-screening method. [13] In disk-diffusion method, isolated colonies of enterococci were inoculated into peptone water to get bacterial suspension that was equivalent to McFarland 0.5 standard. Lawn culture on blood agar was done by swabbing the bacterial suspension. High-level (120 μg) gentamicin and streptomycin (300 μg) disks were placed on the agar medium. Plates were incubated at 37°C for 24 hours, and diameter of zone of inhibition was measured. Resistance was indicated by no zone; and susceptibility, by a zone of diameter ≥10 mm. Strains with inhibition zones of 7 to 9 mm were re-tested by dilution method. In agar-screen method, brain-heart infusion agar (BHIA, Hi Media, Mumbai) was supplemented with 500 μg/mL gentamicin and 2000 μg/mL streptomycin separately. The plates were inoculated by spotting 10 μL of bacterial suspension that was equivalent to McFarland 0.5 standard prepared from growth on 24-hour incubated agar plate giving a final inoculum of 10 6 cfu/spot. The plates were incubated at 37°C for 24 hours. Presence of more than one colony or a haze of growth was read as resistance. Aminoglycoside plates which did not show bacterial growth after 24-hour incubation were incubated for additional 24 hours. The test was quality controlled using E. fecalis ATCC 29212 (susceptible) and E. fecalis ATCC 51299 (resistant).
Determination of minimum inhibitory concentration of vancomycin. [13]
Agar dilution was used to determine MIC of vancomycin to enterococci. Brain-heart infusion agar (Hi Media, Mumbai) was supplemented with different concentrations of vancomycin. The test organism was grown in broth and the turbidity matched with McFarland 0.5 standard (approximately 1.5 Χ 10 8 cfu/mL). Spot inoculation of the agar medium was done using 10 μL of bacterial culture. Growth control was used with each series of test. The plates were incubated at 37°C for 24 hours and examined. The minimum concentration of vancomycin which inhibited bacterial growth was considered MIC. Enterococci which had MIC ≥32 μg/mL were considered resistant; MIC of 8-16 μg/mL, as intermediately resistant; and MIC of 4 μg/mL, as susceptible to vancomycin. [14]
Statistical evaluation of the result of antibiotic sensitivity test was done using 'Z' test for proportions.
A total of 180 strains of enterococci were isolated from various clinical samples. One hundred twenty-one (67.22%) strains were isolated from urinary tract infections; 31 (17.22%) strains were from bacteremia, of which 15 (8.33%) strains were from endocarditis, 25 (13.89%) strains were from wound infection and 3 (1.67%) strains were from peritonitis [Table 1]. The male-female ratio was 1.25:1. Various species of Enterococcus were isolated - E. fecalis 130 (72.22%), E. casseliflavus 24 (13.33%), E. fecium 17 (9.44%), E. durans 7 (3.89%) and E. dispar 2 (1.11%) [Table 1]. In disk-diffusion method, of the 130 E. fecalis, 32 (24.62%); of the 17 E. fecium, 7 (41.18%); of the 24 E. casseliflavus, 4 (16.67%); and of the 7 E. durans, 3 (42.86%) showed high-level resistance to gentamicin and streptomycin [Table 2]. However, by agar-screen method, 34 (26.15%) E. fecalis, 9 (52.94%) E. fecium, 4 (16.67%) E. casseliflavus, 3 (42.86%) E. durans showed high-level resistance to gentamicin and streptomycin [Table 3]. The highest resistance was observed among E. fecium, followed by E. durans, E. fecalis and E. casseliflavus, both by disk-diffusion method and agar-screen method. E. dispar was sensitive to gentamicin and streptomycin, both by disk-diffusion and agar-screen methods. The HLAR was significantly (P<0.05) higher in E. fecium by agar-screen method [Table 3]. All the isolates were sensitive to vancomycin by disk-diffusion method [Table 2]. But by agar-dilution method, of the 130 E. fecalis isolates, 16 (12.3%); and of the 17 E. fecium isolates, 3 (12.5%) had intermediate resistance (MIC= 8 μg/mL) [Table 4]. Fifty-two (28.89%) isolates were resistant to ampicillin and penicillin; of these, 36 (27.69%) isolates were E. fecalis, 12 (70.59%) isolates were E. fecium, 2 (8.33%) isolates were E. casseliflavus and 2 (28.57%) were E. durans. Ampicillin and penicillin resistance was significantly (P<0.05) higher in E. fecium [Table 2].
Table 1: Isolation of Enterococcus spp from clinical samples
Table 2: Antibiotic resistance in enterococci
Table 3: High-level aminoglycoside resistance (HLAR) in enterococci by agar-dilution method
Table 4: Minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of vancomycin to enterococci
Enterococci show intrinsic low-level cross resistance to all aminoglycosides due to decreased uptake of antibiotics. [15] Therefore, there is no meaning in testing susceptibility of clinical isolates of enterococci to low-level aminoglycosides. Enterococci can also exhibit acquired resistance to high level of aminoglycosides. It is very important to know whether the clinical isolate of Enterococcus is susceptible to high level of aminoglycosides or not. We used disk-diffusion (using high-potency gentamicin and streptomycin) and agar-screening methods to detect HLAR. Agar-screen method was found superior in identifying HLAR. It is possible that disk-diffusion method may not detect borderline resistance. HLAR was significantly higher among E. fecium isolates, an observation which is consistent with that found in previous reports. [16],[17] The result of the present study clearly indicates that agar-screen method must be used to confirm HLAR in enterococci. Enterococci are intrinsically resistant to most commonly used antibiotics. Therefore, recommended therapy for serious infections like endocarditis, meningitis or possibly other serious infections in immunodeficient patients includes a cell-wall-active agent such as penicillin or vancomycin, combined with an aminoglycoside like gentamicin or streptomycin. This combination is synergistic in action. [18] However, when an enterococcal strain is resistant to the cell-wall-active agent or has HLAR, there is no synergism and the combination therapy is likely to be unsuccessful. Because of this, it is very important to detect resistance to both the aminoglycosides and the cell-wall-active agents in order to predict the likelihood of synergy. The incidence of infection due to strains of Enterococcus with glycopeptides resistance has increased dramatically. It is also important to know that usually these infections occur in a setting where vancomycin is being used. In the present study, all enterococci were found vancomycin susceptible by disk-diffusion method. However, 16 (12.31%) strains of E. fecalis and 3 (17.67%) strains of E. fecium showed intermediate resistance (MIC, 8 μg/mL) to vancomycin. This observation clearly indicates that disk-diffusion method is not satisfactory to detect vancomycin resistance in enterococci. Clinical laboratories that use disk-diffusion techniques may fail to recognize as resistant those enterococcal strains that have reduced susceptibility to vancomycin. This observation is consistent with that made in a previous report. [19] Early detection of vancomycin resistance in clinically significant Enterococcus is important for the management of a case. The treatment of vancomycin-resistant enterococci is a major clinical problem. Vancomycin resistance eliminates the synergistic activity usually achieved by aminoglycoside combination, thus leaving β-lactamase as the only choice to combine with aminoglycosides. However, many of the vancomycin-resistant enterococci are multi-drug resistant. The antibiotic of choice for such multi-drug-resistant enterococci is currently not known.
Drug-resistant enterococci present a challenge for the clinician and the clinical microbiologist because of their increased occurrence in nosocomial infections. The situation obligates the clinical microbiologist to try to identify the most useful active antibiotic for treatment. On the other hand, physicians should use antibiotics appropriately and comply with the infection-control policies in an effort to prevent further spread of these resistant organisms.
Strength of the study
The study identified less common species of Enterococcus - E. casseliflavus, E. durans, E. dispar.
The study also found agar-screen method to be superior in identifying HLAR in enterococci.
The HLAR was found to be significantly higher in E. fecium by agar-screen method.
The study also detected reduced susceptibility to vancomycin in enterococcal strains.
Limitations of the study
Patients with HLAR and/ or those with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin enterococcal infection could not be followed up, so the outcome of infection with these strains could not be found out.
The occurrence of high-level aminoglycoside resistance in enterococcal isolates in our setup was high. Even-though none of the enterococcal strains showed resistance to vancomycin, yet reduced susceptibility to vancomycin was noticed in our study. This would require routine testing of enterococcal isolates for HLAR and vancomycin susceptibility. Agar-screen method was found to be superior to disk-diffusion method in detecting strains resistant to aminoglycosides and vancomycin.
Recommendations on the basis of this study
The study recommends routine testing of enterococcal isolates for HLAR and vancomycin susceptibility. Agar-screen method should be preferred for detection of HLAR in enterococci. MIC for vancomycin should be performed in all laboratories to keep record of increasing resistance of enterococci to vancomycin and for early detection of vancomycin resistance by strain of enterococci.
I sincerely thank Dr. Gopalkrishna Bhat K for his guidance and encouragement.
1. Murray BE. The life and times of the Enterococcus. Clin Microbiol Rev 1990;3:46-65. [PUBMED] [FULLTEXT]
2. Clinical updates in infectious diseases. Available from: http://www.nfid.org/publications/clinicalupdates/id/enterococcal.html [cited in 1998 Apr] [updated in 2005].
3. Murray BE. Vancomycin-resistant enterococcal infections. N Engl J Med 2000;342:710-21. [PUBMED] [FULLTEXT]
4. Koneman EW, Allen SD, Janda WM, Schreckenberger PC, Winn WC. Colour Atlast and Test book of Diagnostic Microbiology. 5 th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott; 1997.
5. Murray BE. Vancomycin resistant enterococci. Am J Med 1997;101:284-93.
6. Rice LB. Emergence of vancomycin resistant enterococci. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no2/rice.htm [cited in 2001] [updated in 2005].
7. Forbes BA, Sahm DF, Weissfeld AS. Bailey and Scott′s Diagnostic Microbiology. 10 th ed. St. Louis: Mosby; 1998.
8. Herman DJ, Gerding DN. Screening and treatment of infection caused by resistant Enterococci. Antimicrob Agents Chemother 1991;35:215-9. [PUBMED] [FULLTEXT]
9. Eliopoulos GM, Moellering RC. Antimicrobial combinations. In: Lorian V, editor. Antibiotics in laboratory medicine. Maryland: William and Wilkins; 1996. p. 330-96.
10. Garner JS, Jarvis WR, Ernor TG, Horan TC, Hughes JM. CDC definitions for nosocomial infections. Ann J Infect Control 1988;123:250-9.
11. Facklam RR, Teixeira LM. Enterococcus. In: Murray PR, Baron EJ, Jorgensen JH, Pfaller MA, Yolken RH, editors. Manual of Clinical Microbiology. Washington DC: ASM Press; 2003. p. 422-33.
12. Jorgensen JH, Turnidge JD. Susceptibility test methods: Dilution and disk diffusion method. In: Murray PR, Baron EJ, Jorgensen JH, Pfaller MA, Yolken RH, editors. Manual of Clinical Microbiology. Washington DC: ASM Press; 2003. p. 1108-27.
13. Swenson JM, Hindler JF, Jorgensen JH. Special phenotypic methods for detecting antibacterial resistance. In: Murray PR, Baron EJ, Jorgensen JH, Pfaller MA, Yolken RH, editors. Manual of Clinical Microbiology. Washington DC: ASM Press; 2003. p. 1178-95.
14. National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards. Methods for dilution antimicrobial susceptibility tests for bacteria that grow aerobically. Approved standard M7-A3. National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards, Villanova Pa, 1993.
15. Rice LB, Sahm D, Bonomo RA. Mechanisms of resistance to antimicrobial agents. In: Murray PR, Baron EJ, Jorgensen JH, Pfaller MA, Yolken RH, editors. Manual of Clinical Microbiology. Washington DC: ASM Press; 2003. p. 1074-101.
16. Bhat GK, Paul C, Bhat MG. High level aminoglycoside resistance in enterococci isolated from hospitalized patients. Indian J Med Res 1997;105:198-9.
17. Bhat GK, Paul C, Ananthakrishnan NC. Drug resistant enterococci in a South Indian Hospital. Trop Doct 1997;28:106-7.
18. Standiford HD, Maine JB, Kirby WM. Antibiotic synergism of enterococci. Arch Intern Med 1970;126:255-9. [PUBMED] [FULLTEXT]
19. Swenson JM, Hill BC, Thornsberry C. Problems with the disk diffusion test for detection of vancomycin resistance in enterococci. J Clin Microbiol 1989;27:2140-2. [PUBMED] [FULLTEXT]
Department of Microbiology, Sikkim-Manipal Institute of Medical Sciences (SMIMS) and Central Referral Hospital (CRH), 5th Mile Tadong, Gangtok, Sikkim- 737 102
DOI: 10.4103/0974-777X.68534
1 Prevalence and Antimicrobial Resistance of Enterococcus Species: A Hospital-Based Study in China
Wei Jia,Gang Li,Wen Wang
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2014; 11(3): 3424
[Pubmed] | [DOI]
2 Emergence of multidrug resistant enterococci at a tertiary care centre
Puneet Bhatt,Anubha Patel,A.K. Sahni,A.K. Praharaj,Naveen Grover,C.N. Chaudhari,Nikunja Kumar Das,Mayuri Kulkarni
Medical Journal Armed Forces India. 2014;
3 High-level aminoglycoside resistance and virulence characteristics among Enterococci isolated from recreational beaches in Malaysia
Ayokunle Christopher Dada,Asmat Ahmad,Gires Usup,Lee Yook Heng,Rahimi Hamid
Environmental Monitoring and Assessment. 2013; 185(9): 7427
4 Environmental Contamination by Dog's Faeces: A Public Health Problem?
Vittoria Cinquepalmi,Rosa Monno,Luciana Fumarola,Gianpiero Ventrella,Carla Calia,Maria Greco,Danila Vito,Leonardo Soleo
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2012; 10(1): 72
5 Antimicrobial Resistance Profiles ofEnterococcus faecalisandEnterococcus faeciumIsolated from Artisanal Food of Animal Origin in Argentina
Gastón Delpech,Gisela Pourcel,Celia Schell,María De Luca,Juan Basualdo,Judith Bernstein,Silvia Grenovero,Mónica Sparo
Foodborne Pathogens and Disease. 2012; 9(10): 939
6 Pathogens Resistant to Antibacterial Agents
Luke F. Chen,Teena Chopra,Keith S. Kaye
Medical Clinics of North America. 2011; 95(4): 647
Adhikari L
High-level aminoglycoside resistance
Nosocomial enterococci
Reduced susceptibility to vancomycin | {
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Q: instance variables not accessible Serious Problem here... i'm getting ECX_BAD_ACCESS if i try to NSLog an instance variable of my custom object. Following Function is called in my ViewController, payload holds String Data which is pulled from a url.
- (void) initVcardWithData:(NSString *)payload {
NSLog(@"1. initVcardWithData");
aVCard = [[vcardItem alloc] initWithPayload:payload];
VCardViewController *aVCardViewController = [[VCardViewController alloc] initWithVCard:aVCard];
[self presentModalViewController:aVCardViewController animated:YES];
[aVCard release];
}
So far so good. The initWithWithVCard function is as follows, theVCard and theVCardN are defined in @implementation and also set as a @property (nonatomic, retain) in (.h).:
-(id)initWithVCard:(vcardItem *)aVCard {
if(self = [super init]) {
theVCard = [aVCard retain];
theVCardN = [theVCard.PersonName retain];
}
NSLog(@"---- vCardViewController :: initWithVcard :: FirstName: %@", theVCard.PersonName.FirstName);
return self;
}
If i access the theVCardN object in my ViewController aVCardViewController within ViewDidLoad everything works like a charm. I set some labels with data from that object.
If i then try to access the instance variables from theVCardN within a function which is called from an IBAction which is connected to a button in View, i get an EXC_BAD_ACCESS error at the debugger console. The Function which tries to pull data from the instance variables is as follows:
-(IBAction)addressbookButtonTapped {
NSLog(@"RETAIN COUNT FOR theVCard: %i", [theVCard retainCount]);
NSLog(@"RETAIN COUNT FOR theVCardN: %i", [theVCardN retainCount]);
NSLog(@"Save to Adressbook: %@", theVCardN.FirstName);
//[self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
}
The RetainCounter for theVCardN right before calling NSLog outputs "1". The NSLog Line then returns EXC_BAD_ACCESS in Debugger Console.
Any idea ?
A: Do not call -retainCount. Absolute retain counts are useless.
retainCount returns the absolute retain count of an object. The actual value will be an implementation detail that is very often completely out of your control as the system frameworks may do any number of things internally to cause the retain count to be modified in ways you don't expect.
It is useless for debugging and their are a wealth of tools that are specifically focused on tracking down these kinds of issues.
First, if there is a crash, there is a backtrace. Post it. Probably not that interesting in this case, but, still, always look to the backtrace to at least confirm that it is crashing where/how you think it is.
From the evidence posted, it sounds like theVCardN.FirstName is either set to garbage or the underlying string has been over-released. Turn on zombie detection mode and see if that is the case. Since it is crashing on FirstName, then show the code related to creating/storing the FirstName.
Also, instance variables and methods should always start with a lowercase letter; PersonName should be personName & FirstName should be firstName.
A: Maybe i'm reading the code wrong or misunderstanding your class structure, but it looks like you logging:
NSLog(@"Save to Adressbook: %@", theVCardN.FirstName);
Above, where you say it is still working, you are logging:
theVCard.PersonName.FirstName
Are you missing the "PersonName"? Meaning you should be logging:
NSLog(@"Save to Adressbook: %@", theVCardN.PersonName.FirstName);
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CyprusFeatured
Pancyprian exam results out, only 13 students managed perfect score (Updated)
By Annette Chrysostomou July 20, 2020 July 20, 2020 01608
Twins Irini and Marios Skitsas from Paralimni (CNA)
The average mark in core subjects in the Pancyprian exams remains below 50 per cent for 2020 with only 13 students reaching a perfect score.
The results of the Pancyprian exams became available on the website of the ministry, education minister Prodromos Prodromou announced on Monday morning.
Because of the coronavirus, the ministry and the examination board had to revise several scenarios on how to conduct the exams, the minister said, but managed to succeed.
"Despite the imposed changes in the calendar due to the emergency conditions and the pandemic, the exams were organised normally and with complete success. All the provisions of the current legislation have been followed strictly and without exception in order to ensure the integrity and objectivity that make these examinations an institution whose credibility is widely recognised."
The low scores achieved in the exams were criticised early on, however.
Monday's results show that of the more than 7,000 students who took them only 13 managed to get the perfect score of 20 out of 20. Two of them, Irini and Marios Skitsas from Paralimni lyceum, are twins.
In his statements, Marios Skitsas, who secured a place at the medical school, said "I am very happy because the efforts of so many years have been rewarded and I feel proud of my achievement and the effort I made."
While he chose medicine his sister secured a position at the law school.
Dimitrios Francescou from Aradippou, another student with top grades, now serves in the army.
"I was very happy with the results because it proves that my efforts both this year and in previous years were rewarded and I managed to achieve my goal," he commented.
Asked what he is planning to do, he replied "I have not yet decided whether I will go to Greece or stay in Cyprus for my studies. I will decide when I complete my military service."
Louisa Kampanella, a student in Paphos, is also among the 13. Like Marios Skitsas, she decided to study medicine.
Speaking to reporters, she said the year was quite difficult, especially because of the coronavirus. However, with planning and hard work it was not impossible.
As in previous years, the average mark in core subjects remains below 50 per cent. Though there were some improvements in several subjects, such as modern and ancient Greek, in maths and in history, Prodromou admitted that all other subjects registered lower average marks compared to last year.
Some 7,351 candidates initially applied to participate. Of these, 5,318 aspired to find positions in the higher education institutions of Cyprus and Greece, where currently 2,809 positions are available, 1,757 at the University of Cyprus, 870 at the Cyprus University of Technology, 94 at the Higher Hotel Institute of Cyprus and 88 in the military schools of Greece.
Of the applicants, 7,295 participated in the exams.
As the minister explained, the exams were held according to the current system and supervised by the head of the exam centre in each district.
Essays were graded in accordance with the provisions of the relevant legislation. 394 teachers worked on the grading. Each essay, which remained anonymous, was graded by two persons. In case there was a difference of more than 10 per cent, it was re-graded by a third educator.
"According to the current legislation there is no case of re-examination or other re-evaluation. The overall control of the grades and the relevant sums is done by special software of the examination service that leaves no margin for error," the minister's announcement said.
The results are available here: www.moec.gov.cy
coronaviruseducationexamsfeatured
Japanese robot to clock in at a convenience store in test of retail automation
Teenage Cypriot hacker extradited to the US due in court Monday
Annette Chrysostomou
Nikolaos Prakas January 30, 2023 | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} |
Modulation of short- and long-term plasticity in the rat auditory cortex
Rosen_Laura_G_201210_MSc.pdf (2.119Mb)
Rosen, Laura Gillian
Plasticity of synapses is not static across the lifespan. As the brain matures and ages, the ability of neurons to undergo structural and functional change becomes more limited. Further, there are a number of modulatory factors that influence the expression of synaptic plasticity. Here, three approaches were taken to examine and manipulate plasticity in the auditory thalamocortical system of rats. Using an in vivo preparation, long-term potentiation (LTP) and paired pulse (PP) responses were used as measures of long- and short-term plasticity, respectively. First, the effect of intracortical zinc application in the primary auditory cortex (A1) on LTP was examined. Following theta burst stimulation (TBS) of the medial geniculate nucleus (MGN), juvenile and middle-age rats, but not young adults, showed greater levels of LTP with zinc application relative to age-matched control animals. Next, PP responses were examined between rats reared in unaltered acoustic conditions and those reared in continuous white noise (WN) from postnatal day (PD) 5 to PD 50-60 (i.e., subjected to patterned sound deprivation). Rats reared in WN demonstrated less PP depression relative to controls, indicating that WN rearing alters short-term thalamocortical synaptic responses. Furthermore, control males showed no change in PP response following LTP induction, indicating a postsynaptic locus of LTP, whereas increased PP depression following LTP induction was seen in WN animals, suggestive of a presynaptic involvement in LTP. Finally, differences in plasticity between male and female rats were investigated, and the result of early WN exposure on both sexes was examined. Males and females did not show consistent differences in LTP expression; however WN exposure appeared to affect LTP of females less than their male counterparts. PP responses were then compared between WN-reared males and females, and no difference was found. This indicates that short-term plastic properties of auditory thalamocortical synapses between the sexes do not differ, even though plasticity on a longer time scale following sensory deprivation does indicate some difference. Together, the experiments summarized here identify some of the important factors that contribute to the regulation of short- and long-term synaptic plasticity in the central auditory system of the mammalian brain.
Centre for Neuroscience Studies Graduate Theses | {
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Home | Middle East
Saudi journalist Khashoggi victim of premeditated extrajudicial execution: UN expert
Xinhua | Updated: 2019-06-20 05:14
A 2014 file photo of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in Istanbul on Oct 2, 2018. [Photo/IC]
GENEVA -- A United Nations Special Rapporteur said in a report Wednesday that Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of a premeditated extrajudicial execution, for which the State of Saudi Arabia is responsible.
UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings, Agnes Callamard, published the report following a six-month investigation into the killing in October 2018 of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The report analyzes evidence using international human rights law and considers steps that could have prevented his murder.
"The circumstances of Mr. Khashoggi's death have led to numerous theories and allegations, but none alters the responsibility of the Saudi Arabia State," the report reads.
The report says Khashoggi's killing was the result of elaborate planning involving extensive coordination and significant human and financial resources.
The Special Rapporteur also determined that there was credible evidence, warranting further investigation of high-level Saudi officials' liability, including that of the Crown Prince.
"It (the killing) was overseen, planned, and endorsed by high-level officials. It was premeditated," says the report.
Saudi Arabian minister of state for foreign affairs on Wednesday rejected the report. | {
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The Kiwanis Club of Mt. Olive supports those children who have unfortunately experienced traumatic situations; whether it be a hospital stay, police situation, or other crisis, by providing comfort bears to those children. Our Club continues to donate the bears to the Mt. Olive Police Department and local hospitals, to give to children in these situations.
Project Chair Kelly Gregory knows first hand the feeling of being a child, nervous and alone in the hospital. At a young age, Kelly was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy, which required frequent hospital stays.
When speaking about the project, Kelly mentions that she "wishes she had a bear, stuffed animal, or another source of comfort for when my parents could not be in the hospital with her". It is this first hand experience which prompted Kelly to start this project, which has provided over 200 comfort bears to children in and around the Mt. Olive area.
For just $12.00, you can help support Kiwanis' 'Caring with Bears' project allowing us to donate a bear and brighten a child's life.
For further information, please contact Kelly Gregory, Project Chair, at [email protected] or at 973-775-2967. | {
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Satisfy your need for speed and famous sights on the thrilling RIB speedboat from Beastie Boats, our partner tour operators. Your adrenaline-fuelled voyage will include a one-hour, high-speed cruise to take in the breathtaking views of Loch Ness – including the spectacular sight of historic Urquhart Castle.
Your skipper will tell you all the chat there is to know about the incredible sights and landmarks. Not forgetting some stories about that elusive monster. They might just play you some of Scotland's best music too, as you breathe in the fresh highland air and skim over these world-famous waters. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
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Bone resorption is resorption of bone tissue, that is, the process by which osteoclasts break down the tissue in bones[1] and release the minerals, resulting in a transfer of calcium from bone tissue to the blood.[2]
Bone Reabsorption
Light micrograph of an osteoclast displaying typical distinguishing characteristics: a large cell with multiple nuclei and a "foamy" cytosol.
The osteoclasts are multi-nucleated cells that contain numerous mitochondria and lysosomes. These are the cells responsible for the resorption of bone. Osteoclasts are generally present on the outer layer of bone, just beneath the periosteum. Attachment of the osteoclast to the osteon begins the process. The osteoclast then induces an infolding of its cell membrane and secretes collagenase and other enzymes important in the resorption process. High levels of calcium, magnesium, phosphate and products of collagen will be released into the extracellular fluid as the osteoclasts tunnel into the mineralized bone. Osteoclasts are prominent in the tissue destruction found in psoriatic arthritis and rheumatological disorders.[3]
The human body is in a constant state of bone remodeling.[4] Bone remodelling is a process which maintains bone strength and ion homeostasis by replacing discrete parts of old bone with newly synthesized packets of proteinaceous matrix.[5] Bone is resorbed by osteoclasts, and is deposited by osteoblasts in a process called ossification.[6] Osteocyte activity plays a key role in this process. Conditions that result in a decrease in bone mass can either be caused by an increase in resorption or by a decrease in ossification. During childhood, bone formation exceeds resorption. As the aging process occurs, resorption exceeds formation.[5]
Bone resorption rates are much higher in post-menopausal older women due to estrogen deficiency related with menopause.[7] Common treatments include drugs that increase bone mineral density. Bisphosphonates, RANKL inhibitors, SERMs—selective oestrogen receptor modulators, hormone replacement therapy and calcitonin are some of the common treatments.[8] Light weight bearing exercise tends to eliminate the negative effects of bone resorption.[9]
1 Regulation
2 Alcoholism
RegulationEdit
Bone resorption is highly stimulated or inhibited by signals from other parts of the body, depending on the demand for calcium.
Calcium-sensing membrane receptors in the parathyroid gland monitor calcium levels in the extracellular fluid. Low levels of calcium stimulates the release of parathyroid hormone (PTH) from chief cells of the parathyroid gland.[4] In addition to its effects on kidney and intestine, PTH increases the number and activity of osteoclasts. The increase in activity of already existing osteoclasts is the initial effect of PTH, and begins in minutes and increases over a few hours.[4] Continued elevation of PTH levels increases the abundance of osteoclasts. This leads to a greater resorption of calcium and phosphate ions.[4]
High levels of calcium in the blood, on the other hand, leads to decreased PTH release from the parathyroid gland, decreasing the number and activity of osteoclasts, resulting in less bone resorption. Vitamin D increases absorption of calcium and phosphate in the intestinal tract, leading to elevated levels of plasma calcium,[4] and thus lower bone resorption.
Calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol) is the active form of vitamin D3.[10] It has numerous functions involved in blood calcium levels. Recent research indicates that calcitriol leads to a reduction in osteoclast formation, and bone resorption.[11][12] It follows that an increase in vitamin D3 intake should lead to a decrease in bone resorption — it has been shown that oral administration of vitamin D does not linearly correlate to increased serum levels of calcifediol,[13] the precursor to calcitriol.
Calcitonin is a hormone secreted by the thyroid in humans. Calcitonin decreases osteoclast activity, and decreases the formation of new osteoclasts, resulting in decreased resorption.[4] Calcitonin has a greater effect in young children than in adults, and plays a smaller role in bone remodeling than PTH.[4]
In some cases where bone resorption outpaces ossification, the bone is broken down much faster than it can be renewed. The bone becomes more porous and fragile, exposing people to the risk of fractures. Depending on where in the body bone resorption occurs, additional problems like tooth loss can arise. This can be caused by conditions such as hyperparathyroidism and hypovitaminosis D or even decreased hormonal production in the elderly. Some diseases with symptoms of decreased bone density are osteoporosis, and rickets.
Some people who experience increased bone resorption and decreased bone formation are astronauts. Due to the condition of being in a zero-gravity environment, astronauts do not need to work their musculoskeletal system as hard as when on earth. Ossification decreases due to a lack of stress, while resorption increases, leading to a net decrease in bone density.[14]
AlcoholismEdit
The effects of alcohol on bone mineral density (BMD) are well-known and well-studied in animal and human populations. Through direct and indirect pathways, prolonged ethanol exposure increases fracture risk by decreasing bone mineral density and promoting osteoporosis. Indirect effects of alcohol abuse occur via growth hormone, sex steroids, and oxidative stress.
Growth hormone is an important regulator of bone growth and remodeling in adults, and it acts via insulin-like growth factor I (IGF1) to stimulate osteoblastic differentiation.[15] Chronic alcoholism decreases the levels of IGF1, which suppresses the ability of GH to increase bone mineral density.[15]
Increasing alcohol consumption is linked with decreasing testosterone and serum estradiol levels, which in turn lead to the activation of RANK (a TNF receptor) protein that promote osteoclast formation.[16] Oxidative stress results when ethanol induces NOX expression, resulting in ROS production in osteoblasts which can ultimately result in cell senescence.[17] Direct effects of chronic alcoholism are apparent in osteoblasts, osteoclasts and osteocytes. Ethanol suppresses the activity and differentiation of osteoblasts.
At the same time, it has a direct effect on osteoclast activity. This results in an increased bone resorption rate and a decreased bone mineral density due to increased pit numbers and pit areas in the bone.[18][19] Research has shown that viable osteocytes (another type of bone cell) may prevent osteoclastogenesis, whereas apoptotic osteocytes tend to induce osteoclast stimulation. Stimulation of osteocyte apoptosis by alcohol exposure may explain decreased bone mineral density in chronic drinkers.[19][20]
Bone remodeling
Nuclear factor-kappa B
^ Bone+Resorption at the US National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
^ Teitelbaum SL. (2000). "Bone resorption by osteoclasts". Science. 289 (5484): 1504–8. Bibcode:2000Sci...289.1504T. doi:10.1126/science.289.5484.1504. PMID 10968780.
^ Mensah, Kofi A.; Schwarz, Edward M.; Ritchlin, Christopher T. (2008-08-01). "Altered Bone Remodeling in Psoriatic Arthritis". Current Rheumatology Reports. 10 (4): 311–317. doi:10.1007/s11926-008-0050-5. ISSN 1523-3774. PMC 2656567. PMID 18662512.
^ a b c d e f g Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology, 12th Edition. ISBN 1416045740
^ a b Clarke, Bart (2008-11-01). "Normal Bone Anatomy and Physiology". Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. 3 (Suppl 3): S131–S139. doi:10.2215/CJN.04151206. ISSN 1555-9041. PMC 3152283. PMID 18988698.
^ Maurel, D. B.; Jaffre, C.; Rochefort, G. Y.; Aveline, P. C.; Boisseau, N.; Uzbekov, R.; Gosset, D.; Pichon, C.; Fazzalari, N. L. (2011-09-01). "Low bone accrual is associated with osteocyte apoptosis in alcohol-induced osteopenia". Bone. 49 (3): 543–552. doi:10.1016/j.bone.2011.06.001. ISSN 1873-2763. PMID 21689804.
^ Feng, Xu; McDonald, Jay M. (2011-01-01). "Disorders of Bone Remodeling". Annual Review of Pathology. 6: 121–145. doi:10.1146/annurev-pathol-011110-130203. ISSN 1553-4006. PMC 3571087. PMID 20936937.
^ Russell, G.; Mueller, G.; Shipman, C.; Croucher, P. (2001-01-01). "Clinical disorders of bone resorption". Novartis Foundation Symposium. Novartis Foundation Symposia. 232: 251–267, discussion 267–271. doi:10.1002/0470846658.ch17. ISBN 9780471494331. ISSN 1528-2511. PMID 11277085.
^ Shanb, Alsayed A.; Youssef, Enas F. (2014-01-01). "The impact of adding weight-bearing exercise versus nonweight bearing programs to the medical treatment of elderly patients with osteoporosis". Journal of Family and Community Medicine. 21 (3): 176–181. doi:10.4103/2230-8229.142972. ISSN 1319-1683. PMC 4214007. PMID 25374469.
^ Institute of Medicine (US) Committee to Review Dietary Reference Intakes for Vitamin D and Calcium; Ross AC, Taylor CL, Yaktine AL, et al., editors. Dietary Reference Intakes for Calcium and Vitamin D. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2011. 3, Overview of Vitamin D. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK56061/
^ Kikuta J, Kawamura S, Okiji F, Shirazaki M, Sakai S, Saito H, Ishii M (Apr 2013). "Sphingosine-1-phosphate-mediated osteoclast precursor monocyte migration is a critical point of control in antibone-resorptive action of active vitamin D." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 110 (17): 7009–13. Bibcode:2013PNAS..110.7009K. doi:10.1073/pnas.1218799110. PMC 3637769. PMID 23569273.
^ Yamamoto Y, Yoshizawa T, Fukuda T, Shirode-Fukuda Y, Yu T, Sekine K, Sato T, Kawano H, Aihara K, Nakamichi Y, Watanabe T, Shindo M, Inoue K, Inoue E, Tsuji N, Hoshino M, Karsenty G, Metzger D, Chambon P, Kato S, Imai Y (Mar 2013). "Vitamin D receptor in osteoblasts is a negative regulator of bone mass control". Endocrinology. 154 (3): 1008–20. doi:10.1210/en.2012-1542. PMID 23389957.
^ Stamp TC, Haddad JG, Twigg CA (Jun 1977). "Comparison of oral 25-hydroxycholecalciferol, vitamin D, and ultraviolet light as determinants of circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D.". The Lancet. 1 (8026): 1341–3. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(77)92553-3. PMID 69059. S2CID 9326591.
^ Iwamoto J, Takeda T, Sato Y (Jun 2005). "Interventions to prevent bone loss in astronauts during space flight". The Keio Journal of Medicine. 54 (2): 55–9. doi:10.2302/kjm.54.55. PMID 16077253.
^ a b Maddalozzo, G. F.; Turner, R. T.; Edwards, C. H. T.; Howe, K. S.; Widrick, J. J.; Rosen, C. J.; Iwaniec, U. T. (2009-09-01). "Alcohol alters whole body composition, inhibits bone formation, and increases bone marrow adiposity in rats". Osteoporosis International. 20 (9): 1529–1538. doi:10.1007/s00198-009-0836-y. ISSN 1433-2965. PMID 19238309. S2CID 11502836.
^ Ronis, Martin J. J.; Wands, Jack R.; Badger, Thomas M.; de la Monte, Suzanne M.; Lang, Charles H.; Calissendorff, Jan (2007-08-01). "Alcohol-induced disruption of endocrine signaling". Alcoholism, Clinical and Experimental Research. 31 (8): 1269–1285. doi:10.1111/j.1530-0277.2007.00436.x. ISSN 0145-6008. PMID 17559547.
^ Chen, Jin-Ran; Shankar, Kartik; Nagarajan, Shanmugam; Badger, Thomas M.; Ronis, Martin J. J. (2008-01-01). "Protective effects of estradiol on ethanol-induced bone loss involve inhibition of reactive oxygen species generation in osteoblasts and downstream activation of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase/signal transducer and activator of transcription 3/receptor activator of nuclear factor-kappaB ligand signaling cascade". The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. 324 (1): 50–59. doi:10.1124/jpet.107.130351. ISSN 1521-0103. PMID 17916759. S2CID 27152788.
^ Bonewald, Lynda F. (2011-02-01). "The amazing osteocyte". Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. 26 (2): 229–238. doi:10.1002/jbmr.320. ISSN 1523-4681. PMC 3179345. PMID 21254230.
^ a b Verborgt, Olivier; Tatton, Nadine A.; Majeska, Robert J.; Schaffler, Mitchell B. (2002-05-01). "Spatial distribution of Bax and Bcl-2 in osteocytes after bone fatigue: complementary roles in bone remodeling regulation?". Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. 17 (5): 907–914. doi:10.1359/jbmr.2002.17.5.907. hdl:10067/1033580151162165141. ISSN 0884-0431. PMID 12009022. S2CID 22428635.
^ Maurel DB, Jaffre C, Rochefort GY, Aveline PC, Boisseau N, Uzbekov R, Gosset D, Pichon C, Fazzalari NL, Pallu S, Benhamou CL (September 2011). "Low bone accrual is associated with osteocyte apoptosis in alcohol-induced osteopenia". Bone. 49 (3): 543–52. doi:10.1016/j.bone.2011.06.001. PMID 21689804.
ICD-10: M80
ICD-9-CM: 733.99
SNOMED CT: 22200009
eMedicine: ent/646
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Exhibit (a) (18)
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS
POTASH CORPORATION OF
SASKATCHEWAN INC.,
Plaintiff,
Civil Action No. 1:10-cv-06024
BHP BILLITON LTD., BHP BILLITON
PLC, and BHP BILLITON
DEVELOPMENT 2 (CANADA) LTD.,
Defendants.
COMPLAINT FOR INJUNCTIVE AND OTHER RELIEF
Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Inc. ("PCS") seeks to preliminarily and permanently enjoin BHP Billiton Ltd., BHP Billiton Plc, and BHP Billiton Development 2 (Canada) Ltd. (together, "BHP") from proceeding on its attempt to wrest majority control from PCS shareholders in a coercive $40 billion hostile tender offer (the "Tender Offer") – an offer built upon false and misleading statements and omissions relating to (i) the background of the offer, (ii) the conditions and uncertainties inherent in that offer, and (iii) BHP's plans for PCS's business if it acquires control, and built upon BHP's manipulation of the perceived value of PCS.
1. On August 12, 2010, BHP's CEO Marius Kloppers met with PCS's CEO Bill Doyle to convey BHP's offer to purchase PCS for $130 a share. Kloppers stated "there is only a short window" to get a deal done. Kloppers also stated that BHP had been "studying PCS since 2001 and more intensively since 2005"; that Doyle had created "unbelievable shareholder value"; and that it was time for Doyle and PCS shareholders "to reap the harvest." But, it is Kloppers and BHP who seek to "reap the harvest." As Kloppers admitted to Doyle, he had
"choked on the [PCS] share price more than a couple of times." BHP found a way to try to get past that choke-point – by driving down the price of PCS stock – as one analyst observed after BHP commenced its hostile tender offer:
So what are BHP up to? I think they were trying to scare off investors from the potash industry by painting a very apocalyptic view of the future industry, with a view of picking the stock up on the cheap, perhaps at $80 or $90 per share. However, the recent run-up in crop prices will spur demand for fertiliser and give the potash industry a better chance of recovering pricing power. This has driven the [PCS] share price higher and forced BHP's hand.
(CF Eclectica Agriculture Fund, 30 July 2010 Monthly Fact Sheet, Eclectica Asset Management LLP, Aug. 2010, available at http://www.eclectica-am.com/pdf/EAGF/reports/ EAGF1007.pdf.)
2. BHP has also sought to increase its chances of acquiring PCS on the cheap by making its offer in an unusually coercive form. Unlike a typical tender offer, BHP has not conditioned its offer on obtaining sufficient shares to enable it to effect a merger of PCS and BHP (662/3% required under Canadian law). Instead, BHP's Tender Offer will be consummated if BHP is able to acquire a bare majority (i.e., just over 50%) of the outstanding PCS shares. PCS shareholders therefore face the real possibility that if they do not tender, they could be left owning shares in an enterprise controlled by BHP and without a clear exit strategy. The result is strong coercion to tender into BHP's inadequate offer.
3. Section 14(e) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 ("Exchange Act"), designed to "insure that public shareholders who are confronted with a tender offer will not be required to respond without adequate information," Schreiber v. Burlington Northern, Inc., 472 U.S. 1, 2 (1985), requires that BHP be enjoined because:
• Contrary to its representations in the Tender Offer that it began to consider an acquisition of PCS in May 2010, BHP embarked much earlier on a strategy designed to drive down the price of PCS stock and thereby make an acquisition
possible – among other things, impairing the perceived future value of PCS by pledging to enter the potash industry as a new competitor, to develop its own greenfield sites into the first new potash mine in Saskatchewan in the last 40 years, and to run its new mine flat out, flooding the market with potash;
• Fearing a backlash from its own shareholders because of a failed 2008 bid for mining giant Rio Tinto, BHP sought to avoid a vote of its shareholders on the Tender Offer for PCS shares, and thus (1) made strategically-timed announcements about its plans to become a potash competitor to drive down PCS's perceived value to a low enough level to avoid triggering a BHP shareholder vote, and (2) moved on its intent to acquire PCS in the "small window" before PCS stock price recovered from a 52-week low, and before an expected spike in worldwide potash demand that would surely lead to increases in PCS's stock price and require a BHP shareholder vote;
• But, BHP failed to disclose to PCS shareholders that on the day it launched its hostile bid, and thereafter in light of the market reaction to the offer price, it was reasonably likely that a vote of BHP shareholders – required under U.K. law for any acquisition where the consideration equals 25% or more of the acquirer's market capitalization – would be required. Indeed, even BHP's lowball bid was equal to approximately 23% of BHP's market capitalization at the time the tender offer was commenced. BHP's misleading omission deprived PCS shareholders of critical information in at least two respects: that approval of the transaction was uncertain, and that the need for shareholder approval could constrain BHP's ability to increase its bid to a level closer to fair value; and
• BHP has also made false and misleading statements regarding its plans for how it will run PCS if it acquires control, whether it will develop its Jansen greenfield project, whether it will participate in the Canpotex joint export venture, and whether it will sell PCS's nitrogen and phosphates businesses. Each of these is a critical consideration for PCS shareholders threatened with the prospect of becoming minority shareholders in a BHP-controlled entity because BHP can complete the tender offer by acquiring just over 50% of the shares.
4. As a result of BHP's misleading statements, PCS shareholders have received false and conflicting information about BHP's offer and PCS's prospects and true value. Since BHP's offer became public, PCS's shares have traded in a range of $145-$150 per share, well above BHP's tender offer price of $130 per share. Indeed, PCS's share price rose to 13% over the BHP offer price after one day and by almost 15% one week later. The market's reaction to the BHP $130 per share offer was unique and reflects a clear signal that the offer is inadequate.
Traditionally, in tender offers for large companies, the trading price for the target's shares tends to settle within a week to a price below the tender offer price. Here, PCS shares continue to trade over a month later significantly above the BHP offer price. Based on the information available to the market, the market has determined that $130 per share is not the right price for PCS, but it remains confused about the true value of PCS.
5. In the midst of this confusion, PCS shareholders now face a rapidly approaching deadline of November 18, 2010 to determine whether to tender their shares.1 Because of BHP's false statements, half-truths, and contradictions – all of which were designed to confuse and coerce PCS shareholders into tendering their shares to BHP in a Tender Offer that can be completed with just a bare majority of the shares – shareholders lack clear and accurate information about BHP's intentions and the true value of PCS shares. BHP's statements concerning its plans for PCS and the potash industry are particularly coercive to PCS shareholders because those who do not tender their shares, or all their shares, may well be left in an enterprise controlled by BHP with great uncertainty as to the value of their shares and no clear exit strategy.
6. BHP has violated the federal securities laws and it should be enjoined from proceeding with its Tender Offer. Otherwise, PCS's shareholders will be irreparably harmed as a result of BHP's coercively-structured tender offer because they face the dilemma of whether to (i) tender their shares to BHP on an inadequate record tainted by BHP's misleading statements and omissions and a manipulated and confused market price that does not reflect the true value
1 The original expiration date was October 19, 2010, but BHP extended that date recently in response to actions undertaken by the Canadian Competition Bureau in connection with that group's review of the Tender Offer.
of PCS; or (ii) risk being left as a minority shareholder in an enterprise controlled by BHP with an uncertain future business plan.
THE PARTIES
A. Plaintiff
7. PCS is a Canadian corporation with its principal place of business in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Through its subsidiaries, PCS maintains its U.S. commercial center in this District, located at 1101 Skokie Boulevard, Northbrook, Illinois 60062. PCS's shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") and the Toronto Stock Exchange. Approximately 111 million shares, or more than 37% of PCS's outstanding shares, are currently held beneficially by U.S. residents. Of the total PCS shares traded during the past five years, approximately 84% of the daily trading volume was on the NYSE. PCS files periodic reports with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), and its phosphate and most of its nitrogen operations are based in the U.S.
B. Defendants
8. BHP Billiton Plc is incorporated in England and Wales and has a registered office at Neathouse Place, Victoria, London SWIV 1BH.
9. BHP Billiton Ltd. is incorporated in Victoria, Australia. It has a registered office at BHP Billiton Centre, 180 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000.
10. BHP Billiton Plc maintains a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and a secondary listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. BHP Billiton Ltd. maintains a primary listing on the Australian Stock Exchange.
11. Both BHP Billiton Plc and BHP Billiton Ltd. maintain American Depositary Shares on the NYSE under the symbols BHP (since 1987) and BBL (since 2003), with each
American Depositary Share representing two ordinary shares evidenced by American Depositary Receipts ("ADRs").
12. On June 29, 2001, BHP Billiton Plc and BHP Billiton Ltd. combined to create the BHP Billiton Group. BHP was created through the Dual Listed Companies (DLC) merger of BHP Ltd. (now BHP Billiton Ltd.) and Billiton Plc (now BHP Billiton Plc), which was consummated on June 29, 2001. The headquarters of BHP Billiton Ltd., and the global headquarters of the combined BHP Billiton Group, are located in Melbourne, Australia. BHP Billiton Plc is located in London, United Kingdom. Shareholders in each entity have equivalent economic and voting rights in the BHP Billiton Group as a whole.
13. BHP Billiton Development 2 (Canada) Ltd. is a wholly-owned, indirect subsidiary of BHP Billiton Plc. BHP Billiton Development 2 (Canada) Ltd. was formed for the purpose of acquiring PCS.
14. BHP and its affiliates, collectively, are the eighth largest company in the world, with a combined market capitalization of approximately $189 billion, eclipsing such corporate giants as IBM, Shell, and AT&T. According to BHP's latest annual filing with the SEC, as of June 30, 2009, U.S. share ownership of ADRs translated into 299,898,954 shares of BHP Billiton Ltd. and 70,388,132 shares of BHP Billiton Plc, or more than 12% of the combined companies. Combined average daily trading volume for ADRs of BHP Billiton Plc and BHP Billiton Ltd. on the NYSE has been in excess of six million ADRs daily for the past year.
JURISDICTION & VENUE
15. This Court has jurisdiction over the subject matter of this action under 28 U.S.C. § 1331 and 15 U.S.C. § 78aa and 28 U.S.C. § 2201.
16. This Court has personal jurisdiction over defendants under Section 27 of the Exchange Act, 15 U.S.C. § 78aa, because acts by all three defendants constituting securities law
violations have occurred here. BHP's Tender Offer violates the federal securities laws, and thus, the Court can exercise nationwide jurisdiction over defendants. (15 U.S.C. § 78aa.) In addition, this Court has both general and specific personal jurisdiction over defendants because all three defendants are parties to BHP's Tender Offer, which is the gravamen of this action, and which they purposefully caused to be disseminated through the U.S. mails to United States citizens, including citizens of Illinois, in an effort to secure the tender of their shares in PCS. Moreover, on August 12, 2010, the CEO of BHP Billiton Group, Marius Kloppers, acting as an agent for the defendants, came to this District personally to communicate the offer to purchase PCS's shares to its CEO, Bill Doyle. In addition, BHP Billiton Plc and BHP Billiton Ltd. are subject to personal jurisdiction in the United States because each has purposely availed itself of the benefits and protections of the United States by listing American Depositary Shares on the NYSE. Each of these companies has had continuous and systematic contacts with the United States, both directly and through their subsidiaries, at least one of which is registered to do business in Illinois. Finally, in addition to its own actions with respect to the Tender Offer, this Court has personal jurisdiction over BHP Billiton Development 2 (Canada) Ltd. because it is the alter ego of and is controlled in all respects by BHP Billiton Plc and BHP Billiton Ltd., both of which are subject to personal jurisdiction in this Court.
17. Venue is proper in this judicial district under 28 U.S.C. § 1391 and 15 U.S.C. § 78aa. This action arises out of BHP's transaction of business within the State of Illinois. BHP has caused the dissemination of fraudulent and misleading materials to residents of Illinois in connection with its Tender Offer. Moreover, as discussed above, BHP communicated its Tender Offer to PCS in this District, where PCS maintains its U.S. commercial center.
18. Declaratory relief is appropriate under 28 U.S.C. § 2201 because an actual controversy exists regarding the propriety of BHP's statements and disclosures.
A. The Potash Industry
19. "Potash" is the common name of a family of potassium-containing salts that are essential nutrients for plant growth. In most cases, potash is mined from naturally occurring, underground ore deposits. Potash is principally used as an agricultural fertilizer because it is a source of soluble potassium. Farmers throughout the world use large amounts of potash to help crops fight disease and to enhance crop yields. Somewhere between 93-95% of world potash production goes into fertilizer. As a key farm input, potash accounts for roughly 22% of fertilizer in developed economies. That fertilizer is used to grow feed corn that supports cattle and other meat-producing livestock.
20. Potash reserves are confined to relatively few areas of the world. Canada, Russia, and Belarus account for approximately two-thirds of the annual world production and approximately 80% of global reserves. Canada, and in particular the Province of Saskatchewan, is home to the world's largest mineable deposits of potash.
21. One of the unique characteristics of potash that differentiates it from other mined resources is that it is degradable. As a result, potash producers cannot mine in significant excess to demand and hold the extra potash in inventory indefinitely. The Canadian potash industry
2 PCS makes the allegations contained in this complaint upon knowledge as to its own acts and certain actions taken by BHP and upon information and belief as to all other matters. PCS's allegations are based in part on the investigation of its attorneys, which included, among other things, a review and analysis of: (a) SEC filings; (b) press releases, news articles, and other public statements issued by or concerning BHP; (c) statements and information provided to PCS by BHP; and (d) research and analyst reports concerning BHP and its business strategies.
experienced this problem in the 1980s when potash mining exceeded demand and significant amounts of the salt were wasted.
22. Entry into the potash industry as a new competitor is challenging due to the time and expense involved in preparing a new mine for operation. The process starts by identifying a "greenfield" – a source of undeveloped potash. After a miner has identified and acquired a greenfield site, it must invest substantial time and money to ready the greenfield location for potash production. This development includes: extensive and expensive exploratory drilling and environmental assessment; developing and constructing the appropriate infrastructure (power, gas, water supply, roads and railways, port facilities and potential domestic distribution facilities, storage, and rail yards); and, in Saskatchewan, freezing the mining shaft area. Only after thorough freezing can shaft drilling, and then mining, begin.
23. The entire process of developing and preparing a single potash mine for operation, from exploratory drilling to a steady state of mining operations, typically costs several billion dollars and takes many years to complete. Mining a newly developed greenfield site for the first time brings many additional challenges, costs, and delays, depending on such factors as ore quality and mine management issues.
24. Given these extraordinary obstacles, new potash mines are rarely developed. In fact, a new potash mine has not been brought into operation in the Province of Saskatchewan in the past 40 years.
B. PCS's Business
25. PCS was created in 1975 as a Crown corporation owned by the Saskatchewan government. By the 1980s, the potash industry was faced with a major oversupply problem, due in part to the then-government-owned PCS and its ill-advised strategy to run its mines at full production without regard to demand. The oversupply led to a price war among competitors, an
industry crisis, dumping allegations in the U.S., and record losses across the industry. By 1987, the price for potash was at historically depressed levels, such that potash producers were losing millions of dollars.
26. The Saskatchewan government privatized PCS in 1989 in an effort to return the company to profit, and PCS became a publicly-traded company that same year. A turning point for PCS has occurred during the last decade, when meat and poultry became greater staples of the diets of the expanding middle income populations of China and India. Feeding livestock requires more grain, which requires more potash fertilizer. By 2008, demand for potash was at an all-time high, and prices for potash soared, from less than $200 per metric ton one year earlier, to more than $800 per metric ton.
27. As stated in PCS's 2009 Annual Report on Form 10-K, PCS is the world's largest integrated fertilizer and related industrial and feed products company. It is the largest producer of potash worldwide, by both capacity and production, representing 11% of global potash production and 20% of global potash capacity.
28. PCS is also one of the world's largest producers of phosphates and nitrogen. In 2009, its phosphate operations represented 5% of world phosphoric acid production and its nitrogen operations produced 2% of global ammonia production.
29. As stated in its 2009 Form 10-K, PCS owns and operates five potash mines in the Province of Saskatchewan and one mine in the Province of New Brunswick, Canada. It also holds mineral rights at a mine near Esterhazy, Saskatchewan. PCS's mines had an estimated annual maximum operational capability in 2009 of approximately 10.775 million metric tons of potash.
30. The Saskatchewan basin is considered the premier source of world-class potash. The basin currently provides roughly 25% of the world's potash; its untapped potash could supply the world's potash demand, at its current levels, for several hundred years.
31. PCS sells, trades, and markets its Saskatchewan potash outside the United States and Canada through Canpotex Limited ("Canpotex"), an entity that is also owned by Canada's two other primary potash producers – Mosaic Co. and Agrium, Inc.3 Canpotex is the world's largest exporter of potash, and its members, including PCS, benefit from the economies of scale provided by Canpotex's extensive distribution system and lower transportation costs, which can be considerable when shipping from Canada's interior.
C. BHP's Interest in Entering the Potash Market.
32. BHP Billiton Group holds itself out as the "world's largest diversified natural resources company," with interests in over 100 operations across more than 25 countries world-wide. BHP's global operations and interests make it the world's largest supplier of seaborne traded hard coking coal and manganese ore; the third largest producer of nickel and copper; the sixth largest producer of primary aluminum; and a leading producer of lead, zinc, iron ore, and export thermal coal.
33. Despite BHP's extensive holdings in a broad range of natural resource mining operations, it does not own or operate a single potash-producing mine. To further diversify its business operations, BHP has sought to enter the lucrative potash market for many years. In particular, BHP has long been interested in acquiring PCS, because of PCS's premier position in the industry and because of the substantial expense, long lead time, and other drawbacks of entering the market by developing new sources of potash production.
3 PCS's subsidiaries sell the company's potash directly to customers in the United States, Canada, and certain other countries.
34. In November 2007, just one month after Kloppers became CEO, BHP launched a hostile bid to acquire mining rival Rio Tinto in what would have been the second largest corporate takeover in history. As part of its offer, BHP notified its shareholders that it would be seeking their approval for the transaction and offered to buy back up to $30 billion in BHP shares within one year of acquiring complete ownership of Rio Tinto. However, by November 2008, commodity prices had dropped and market conditions had deteriorated, and BHP announced that the takeover was no longer in the best interests of its shareholders.
35. In search of his first major acquisition as BHP's newest CEO, Kloppers set his sights on PCS. At the time BHP launched its bid for Rio Tinto, PCS shares were at the beginning of a meteoric rise, increasing from nearly $45 a share in January 2007 to more than $120 per share in November 2007 and as high as $240 per share before BHP decided to abandon its bid to acquire Rio Tinto.
36. Until its August 2010 offer to acquire PCS, BHP concealed its longstanding interest in such an acquisition. Instead, Kloppers and BHP implemented a strategy designed in substantial part to depress the perceived long-term value of PCS, so that BHP could secure control of PCS at a low-ball price. Thus, over the course of several years, BHP fed into the market a supposed "build, not buy" plan – pledging to enter the potash industry as a new competitor; to develop its own greenfield sites into the first new potash mine in Saskatchewan in the last 40 years; and to run its new mine flat out, flooding the market with potash and driving down prices.
37. BHP's announcements were strategically timed, intended to color investors' views of the future for PCS, and designed to raise the specter that BHP was the 800-pound gorilla about to become a major competitor of PCS, including:
• As early as June 23, 2008, when PCS's share price was at an all-time high, Kloppers forecasted that BHP "could invest billions – perhaps $10 billion over the next decades – and take [its Canadian potash reserves] into a very, very significant producer of potash;"
• On January 28, 2010, the same day that PCS released its fourth quarter results for 2009, BHP announced its acquisition of Athabasca Potash, Inc., which gave BHP access to an additional 14,000 square kilometers of prospective exploration ground near PCS's operations in Saskatchewan; and
• On the very day that PCS's Doyle was on his way to Chicago last month to meet with Kloppers (at the latter's request) about BHP's proposal to acquire PCS, Doyle heard of an announcement that BHP planned to open a substantial potash export facility at the Port of Vancouver, Washington. The announcement, however, did not mention that the port contract was not scheduled to be signed until 2012, the proposed facility was not needed in light of existing export facility capacities, or that BHP would not be in a position to ship potash from its promised new mine for at least five more years.
38. At the August 12, 2010 meeting with Doyle, Kloppers lamented that he would have preferred to build a relationship with Doyle before trying to acquire PCS, but stated "there is only a short window" to get a deal done. As discussed below, the only window that was closing was BHP's ability to acquire PCS at a price well below PCS's intrinsic value and without triggering a BHP shareholder vote.
39. BHP's clear aim throughout this process has been to undermine investor confidence in the potash industry – and in PCS's long term prospects in particular – by depressing the market's perception of the long-term intrinsic value of PCS's shares and priming the company for a takeover at an artificially low price.
D. BHP Makes a Low-Ball Bid for PCS.
40. At the end of the August 12 meeting, Kloppers presented Doyle with a proposal to combine BHP and PCS pursuant to a plan of arrangement in which PCS shareholders would receive $130 per share.
41. Directly contrary to the "build, not buy" strategy BHP had publicly touted for years, Kloppers told Doyle that BHP had been interested in PCS for 10 years and had seriously considered making an offer to acquire PCS for five years. He commended Doyle for creating "unbelievable shareholder value," and noted that he had "choked on the [PCS] share price more than a couple of times." Kloppers made clear that BHP felt there was only a short window to get the deal done and allow BHP to take advantage of the anticipated ramp-up in worldwide potash demand. This sense of urgency was no doubt intensified by the fact that PCS's share price was on the rise – rebounding from a closing price of $84.60 on July 5, 2010 to $112.04 on the day of Kloppers's visit. BHP was motivated to complete the acquisition before PCS recovered fully.
42. The next day, BHP's chairman Jacques Nasser sent a letter communicating the same proposal to PCS's chairman, Dallas Howe.
43. Doyle immediately took the proposal outlined by Kloppers and in Nasser's letter to the PCS Board of Directors, and in the days that followed, the Board met and consulted with financial and legal advisors in order to weigh the BHP proposal.
44. On August 17, 2010, after fully considering BHP's $130 per share proposal, PCS's Board of Directors unanimously rejected it. The PCS Board concluded that the proposal was not in the best interests of PCS's shareholders and was wholly inadequate in light of PCS's fundamentals, market position, and strong prospects for future growth.
45. That same day, PCS communicated its decision to BHP in a letter from Howe to Nasser. In the letter, Howe explained that PCS believed "the timing of [BHP's] proposal is highly opportunistic given that, among other things, the industry is still in the early stages of a recovery." Howe continued: "PCS is significantly and disproportionately undervalued as a result of our strategic decisions to match production with demand while continuing to invest in
our infrastructure. The Board determined that your proposal fails to adequately recognize the value of PCS's premier position in the industry, the value of our planned capacity expansions and the value of our equity investments." (Letter from Dallas Howe, Chairman, PotashCorp, to Jacques Nasser, Chairman, BHP Billiton (Aug. 17, 2010) (Ex. A).)
46. Also on August 17, 2010, PCS publicly disclosed the decision of its Board of Directors to its shareholders. PCS reiterated its reasons for rejecting BHP's proposal: "[The] BHP proposal grossly undervalues PotashCorp and fails to reflect both the value of our premier position in a strategically vital industry and our unparalleled future growth prospects." The Board concluded that, "[i]n the interest of transparency, we believe it is critical for our shareholders to be aware of this aggressive attempt to acquire PotashCorp for significantly less than its intrinsic value." (Presentation, PCS, Investor Presentation (Aug. 17, 2010), available at http://www.potashcorp.com/media/POT_2010_Investor_Presentation.pdf.)
47. Within days, the market demonstrated its agreement that BHP's proposal (and subsequent Tender Offer) undervalued PCS's shares, as the share price leapt from approximately $110 per share before news of the proposal went public to more than $150 per share in the days following the announcement, eventually settling into a trading range of $145-149 per share.
48. On Friday, August 20, 2010, BHP formally launched its hostile Tender Offer, communicating the offer of $130 per share directly to PCS shareholders. (See BHP, Tender Offer Statement Under Section 14(d)(1) or 13(e)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (Aug. 20, 2010) (attaching the Offer and the Circular) (collectively, "Schedule TO") (Ex. B).) Under BHP's Tender Offer, as amended, PCS shareholders have until November 18, 2010 to tender their shares. Unlike a typical tender offer, BHP has not conditioned its offer on obtaining sufficient shares to enable it to effect a merger of PCS and BHP (662/3% required under Canadian
law). Instead, BHP has agreed to consummate the Tender Offer if it is able to acquire a controlling interest of just over 50% of the shares. This creates the real possibility that PCS shareholders who do not tender, or do not tender all their shares, could be left owning a minority position in an enterprise controlled by BHP and without a clear exit strategy.
49. On Monday, August 23, 2010, PCS filed its response to the BHP offer on Schedule 14D-9, discussing the unanimous recommendation of its Board of Directors against the Tender Offer based on the conclusion that it was wholly inadequate and not in the best interests of PCS's shareholders. (See PCS, Solicitation/Recommendation Statement under Section 14(d)(4) of Exchange Act (Aug. 23, 2010) ("Schedule 14D-9") (Ex. C).)
50. Though BHP has publicly characterized its $130 per share offer as a "fair price" for PCS, it knows that this is untrue. Indeed, BHP's offer represents a premium of only 20% over the closing price for PCS's shares on the day before Kloppers met with Doyle to first convey the offer. By comparison, when BHP acquired Anglo Potash Ltd. in 2006, it paid a premium of 34% over the pre-offer closing price. It then bought Athabasca Potash Inc. earlier this year for a premium of 105% over the closing price before the acquisition plans were announced. Neither Anglo Potash nor Athabasca had a single operating mine; BHP was simply buying exploratory greenfield sites that were many years away from actual production. For BHP to offer a lower premium to acquire PCS – the industry's premier potash producer that has historically boasted the highest multiples of any firm in the industry – and then call that offer "fair" defies credulity.
E. BHP's Disclosures Relating to the Tender Offer Are False and Misleading.
51. In connection with its Tender Offer, BHP is prohibited by law from making false statements or omissions of material fact and from engaging in any fraudulent, deceptive, or manipulative act or practice. (15 U.S.C. § 78n(e).) BHP is also required by law to provide PCS
shareholders with certain information pertaining to the Tender Offer on its Schedule TO, including the material terms of the transaction and its plans, proposals or negotiations that would result in any material change in PCS's business. As detailed below, BHP knowingly and recklessly violated these requirements in multiple ways.
1. BHP Omitted Material Information About a BHP Shareholder Vote and Misrepresented Whether Such a Vote Would Be Required.
52. BHP failed to inform PCS shareholders that the vote of a majority of its own shareholders was reasonably likely to be required to complete the Tender Offer and that the approval of its shareholders was far from assured. BHP knowingly and recklessly omitted this information in the disclosures it was required to make under U.S. law.
53. Rule 14d-3 of the Exchange Act requires a person making a tender offer to file certain disclosures in its Schedule TO. (17 C.F.R. § 240.14d-3.) The instructions to Schedule TO and Items 1001 and 1004(a) of Regulation M-A under the Exchange Act require all material terms of a tender offer to be disclosed. (17 C.F.R. §§ 240.14d-100; 229.1000; 220.1004(a).) The material terms of a tender offer include prospective conditions and events if they are reasonably likely to occur.
54. BHP's Offer and Circular, filed on August 20, 2010, contains a section entitled "Conditions of the Offer." In this section, BHP identifies a laundry list of conditions that must be satisfied before it will be obligated to take up, purchase, or pay for tendered shares of PCS. Although the list includes items such as clearing U.S. and Canadian regulatory and antitrust hurdles, at no point does the 66-page document mention or refer to BHP shareholder approval as a condition for consummation of the Tender Offer. (See Schedule TO, Ex. B.)
55. At the time it filed Schedule TO, BHP knew or recklessly ignored that the approval of the transaction by BHP's shareholders was reasonably likely to be a condition for consummation of the Tender Offer and that such approval was far from assured.
56. The Listing Rules of the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority, to which BHP is subject, clearly require listed companies and their subsidiaries to obtain shareholder approval for any transaction where the consideration paid to acquire the target company equals or exceeds 25% of the acquiring corporation's market capitalization.
57. With the recent economic downturn, shareholders increasingly insist that excess corporate cash be returned to them in the form of dividends or share repurchases, and not utilized on large corporate acquisitions.
58. A recent survey of BHP shareholders demonstrates that there is a substantial risk that a majority of BHP shareholders (64% of those surveyed) would not approve BHP's acquisition of PCS. (See, e.g., Rebecca Keenan, BHP Shareholders Favor Buybacks to Potash Bid, Bloomberg Survey Indicates, Bloomberg, Sep. 7, 2010, available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-07/bhp-shareholders-favor-buybacks-to-potash-bid-bloomberg-survey-indicates.html (citing Bloomberg News survey of BHP investors).) One fund manager at Perpetual Investments, a fund that manages the equivalent of $25 billion, including an investment in BHP shares, said on September 8, 2010: "'M&A should always be measured versus the value accretion of buying back' your stock. Versus PotashCorp, I'd prefer them to buy back BHP shares." (Christopher Donville and Rebecca Keenan, Potash's CEO Says BHP Unlikely to Be the Only Bidder, Bloomberg, Sep. 8, 2010, available at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-09-08/potash-s-ceo-says-bhp-unlikely-to-be-the-only-bidder.html.)
59. BHP knows full well that any need to obtain its shareholder approval would put its proposed PCS acquisition at risk, so it has knowingly omitted any mention of such a condition from its Schedule TO. As one analyst stated: "[W]e would not rule out that BHP's initial offer is likely to have been engineered to avoid [the need for] BHP shareholder approval for the deal, rather than BHP's final valuation of [PCS] as a takeover target." (Americas Merger Report, Independent Global Research Ltd., Aug. 23, 2010.)
60. BHP has also knowingly and recklessly misrepresented the legal standards for whether and when a shareholder vote would be required to approve the Tender Offer, stating to the press that BHP shareholder approval might never be required because the 25% calculation is "performed only once on the date of the launch of the offer." (Americas Merger Report, Independent Global Research Ltd., Aug. 23, 2010 (noting a BHP representative "confirmed to us that the test for a Class 1 Transaction is performed only once on the date of the launch of the offer, and therefore BHP shareholder approval will not be required even if BHP raises its offer substantially.").) The United Kingdom rules dictate otherwise and require the calculation to be made whenever there is a significant change in an offer, including a price increase.
61. It is reasonably likely that the U.K. Listing Rules and the shareholder vote requirement will apply to this transaction. Based on the closing price of BHP shares on August 19, 2010, the day before the tender offer was commenced – and even at the lowball $130 price stated in that offer – the offer amounted to nearly 23% of the market capitalization of BHP. Indeed, if BHP made its Tender Offer based on a mere 4.6% premium over the trading price of PCS shares on the last business day before this Complaint was filed – the approval of BHP shareholders would be required for the transaction to be completed. Given the likelihood that the market price of PCS's stock will remain well above BHP's Tender Offer price, BHP will have to
increase its bid if it has any hope of successfully completing the Tender Offer. As a result, the risk that BHP shareholders will be entitled to vote on, and reject, the transaction is material information that should be disclosed to PCS's shareholders before they decide whether to tender their shares. Likewise, PCS shareholders must be informed of the likelihood that an increased bid will trigger the shareholder approval requirement so they can evaluate the extent to which – in light of the unwillingness of BHP management to face such a shareholder vote – this factor will constrain BHP's ability to increase its bid to a level approaching fair value.
62. BHP's failure to disclose the risk that shareholder approval is a reasonably likely condition to its ability to consummate a transaction, its failure to disclose that its shareholders might not approve the acquisition of PCS shares, and its false statement that such a vote would not be required even with an increase in the offer price are material to PCS shareholders.
2. BHP's False and Manipulative Statements About Its Plans for PCS and the Potash Industry Were Designed to Confuse Shareholders and Raise Doubts About the Long-Term Profitability of PCS.
63. Before and after the Tender Offer was commenced, BHP has knowingly and recklessly misled the market and PCS shareholders about its plans for PCS and the potash industry. BHP has told at least three mutually-inconsistent stories, all designed to undermine investor and analyst confidence in the long-term value of PCS and to prime the company for a takeover at an unfair price. In an effort to conceal its longstanding scheme, BHP states in its Schedule TO filing that it did not "commence[] a process to consider a possible combination" with PCS until May 2010. (Schedule TO, Ex. B, at 33.) In fact, as Kloppers told Doyle when they met in Chicago on August 12, 2010, BHP has been studying PCS since at least 2001 and intensively studying PCS since 2005.
64. Item 6 of Schedule TO and Item 1006(c)(5) of Regulation M-A require a person making a tender offer to disclose any plans, proposals, or negotiations that would result in "any
other material change in the subject company's . . . business." (17 C.F.R. §§ 240.14d-100; 229.1000; 229.1006(c)(5).)
65. BHP's Schedule TO contains a section entitled "Plans for PotashCorp" that identifies: (a) BHP's plans to acquire control and ownership of PCS depending on how many shares are tendered; (b) its intention to review "various business strategies" if it acquires 100% ownership of PCS; (c) its intention to increase exploration spending at PCS if it acquires control; and (d) its plans and intentions with respect to Canpotex. This section of Schedule TO also contains a representation by BHP that it has "no current plans or proposals or negotiations that relate to or would result in . . . any other material change in [PCS's] corporate structure or business." (Schedule TO, Ex. B, at 36.)
66. As described below, BHP's statement that it had no other plans or proposals that would materially change PCS's business was false and misleading. In fact, by the time BHP made this statement, it had already injected into the market at least three different stories about its plans for PCS and the potash industry, knowingly and recklessly misleading and confusing PCS investors.
a. Story A – Build, Not Buy
67. For several years leading up to its hostile bid for PCS, BHP trumpeted its intention to enter the potash industry by acquiring and developing greenfield sites, with the stated goal of opening the first new potash mine in Saskatchewan in 40 years.
68. In June 2006, BHP acquired its first substantial greenfield interest – a 75% stake in Anglo Potash Ltd. In July 2008, BHP acquired the remaining 25%, giving it control over 7,338 square kilometers of highly prospective exploration permits in the Saskatchewan basin and Manitoba. (BHP Billiton Ltd. & BHP Billiton Plc, Report of Foreign Private Issuer (Form 6-K),
at 3 (Aug. 18, 2008), available at http://shareholder.api.edgar-online.com/efx_dll/edgarpro.dll? FetchFilingRTF1?sessionid=3K4sH3_y1h6fTFQ&ID=6110856&PageBreakStyleID=2#D6K_HTM_TOC.)
69. In an August 2007 presentation to investors, BHP declared that potash was a future option for the company and, at over $2 billion, potash exploration was among the largest capital expenditures proposed by BHP. (Transcript, BHP, Preliminary Results — 30 June 2007 Debt Investor Call, at 12 (Aug. 22, 2007), available at http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bbContentRepository/fy07debtinvestorpresentation.pdf.)
70. With the Anglo Potash acquisition, BHP secured land for what became known as the "Jansen Project." The head of BHP's Canadian Operations, Graham Kerr, confirmed that the company would actively enter the potash market as a new competitor: "We see potash as a highly attractive industry." Kerr continued, "across Manitoba and Saskatchewan, we will pursue multiple projects over the course of the next few years." (Liezel Hill, Potash an 'Excellent Fit' for BHP — Kerr, Mining Weekly, June 10, 2008, available at http://www.miningweekly.com/ article/potash-an-039excellent-fit039-for-bhp-kerr-2008-06-10.)
71. The Jansen Project is a greenfield potash development in central Saskatchewan. BHP has announced that the Jansen Project potash capacity is larger than it first expected — the land likely could produce approximately 3.37 billion metric tons of potash. If fully operational, the Jansen Project's production capacity would make it the largest potash mine in the world.
72. Beginning in 2008, BHP began very preliminary steps toward converting its Jansen Project greenfield site into an operating mine. On June 23 of that year, Marius Kloppers boasted that BHP's Canadian potash resources were "absolutely world-class," and forecasted "the real opportunity that, perhaps with upside, [BHP] could invest billions — perhaps $10 billion
over the next decades — and take that into a very, very significant producer of potash." (Transcript, BHP, Presentation to the Melbourne Mining Club, at 11 (June 23, 2008), available at http://google.brand.edgar-online.com/EFX_dll/EDGARpro.dll?FetchFilingHtmlSection1? SectionID=6014832-1703-42037&SessionID=4_mFWS0AHfLgf57.)
73. Just before Kloppers made his comments about the threat of BHP entering the potash market, PCS's share price was at an all time high, and it has not traded at that level since then. Analysts have recognized that uncertainty about BHP's entry into the potash industry has unsettled the market. (See, e.g., Mark Connelley, Fertilizer Market Conditions, CLSA — US Agriculture, Jul. 19, 2010 ("We believe worries about BHP have held back PotashCorp shares, to a degree that is not supported by the risk, while expectations that potash prices cannot rise are very likely to be proven incorrect in the coming months"); Jacob Bout, POT: Analyst Day — Banking on Record Potash Demand 2011 Onward, CIBC, May 19, 2010 ("We continue to view the biggest risk, and a potential game changer, to the potash industry is the entrance of BHP and its 10Mt/yr potash greenfield project.").)
74. In January 2010, BHP approved a $240-million investment for further development of the Jansen Project — just a tiny fraction of the cost needed to convert the greenfield site into an operating mine. The money was earmarked for engineering, equipment, and materials commitments, as well as preparing the site for production and service shafts. (See Press Release, BHP, Update on Jansen Project (Jan. 20, 2010), available at http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/investorsMedia/news/2010/updateOnJansenPotashProject.jsp.)
75. In addition, earlier this year, BHP acquired Athabasca Potash Inc., a small potash company that owned various potash exploration properties in Saskatchewan and held one of the largest exploration permit areas in the Saskatchewan basin. The Athabasca acquisition gave
BHP access to an additional 14,000 square kilometers of prospective exploration ground in the Saskatchewan basin, but Athabasca had no operating potash mines. (Press Release, BHP, Plan of Arrangement to Acquire Athabasca Potash Inc. (Jan. 28, 2010), available at http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bb/investorsMedia/news/2010/planOfArrangementToAcquireAthabascaPotashInc. jsp.)
76. Perhaps not coincidentally, given its long-time, secret interest in acquiring PCS, the mineral rights that BHP snapped up in its purchases of Anglo Potash and Athabasca are in the lands that literally surround PCS's existing mines.
77. Still maintaining its public "build, not buy" story, however, BHP timed the announcement of its Athabasca acquisition to occur on the same day that PCS announced its fourth quarter results for 2009, knowing that it would temper the market's perception of PCS's future prospects in light of BHP's threat to become a well-funded and experienced competitor.
78. BHP's threat to enter the potash market in Canada was repeated the day before BHP first offered to purchase PCS. While PCS's CEO Doyle was driving to meet with BHP's Kloppers in Chicago (at the latter's request), he heard of an announcement that BHP planned to open a substantial potash export facility at the Port of Vancouver, Washington. Although this announcement emphasized that BHP was acquiring space to transport significant quantities of potash from the Pacific northwest region, it notably failed to mention that BHP had not yet signed any agreement for the port facilities (an agreement is not expected until at least 2012); a new port facility was wholly unnecessary given existing export capacity in the region; and BHP would not have a scoopful of potash to ship from its supposed new mines for at least five more years. Instead, in yet another strategically-timed message, BHP was able to feed the market yet
another half truth, strengthening its own image as a strong new competitor and thus weakening the view of PCS's long-term value.
79. Throughout this pre-offer period, a key facet of BHP's message about the Jansen Project and related acquisitions was its repeated assertion that it would not operate its future potash mines like existing producers — that is, tailoring supply to meet but not exceed anticipated demand. Instead, BHP publicly stated on numerous occasions that it would run its potash mines just as it claims to run its mines for other minerals — 100% of the time and at full capacity without regard to fluctuating cycles of demand.
80. Indeed, BHP's CEO Kloppers rarely spoke of the company's mining activities without emphasizing its purported "full" market strategy: "We do have a completely different understanding of our revenue line from our competitors. Our full capacity, market price focus is a big difference to our competitors." (Matt Stevens, Disappointment Despite a Fine Set of Figures, The Australian, Feb. 11, 2010, available at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ business/opinion/disappointment-despite-a-fine-set-of-figures/story-e6frg9if-1225828938420.)
81. BHP's announced "flat out" plan is diametrically opposed to the strategy employed by PCS currently, whereby the company closely matches its production to demand for the product. PCS adopted this strategy after the industry's record losses in the 1980s when companies mined potash without regard to demand and prices fell. Thus, BHP knew that its announced plan to mine without regard to demand would lead PCS shareholders to conclude that BHP's promised actions as a competitor might cause a worldwide drop in potash prices as supply increased, reducing profits for those in the industry.
82. The potential risks of BHP's "flat out" strategy on the Jansen Project were not lost on some analysts who cautioned: "The entrance of a large global mining company, such as BHP,
into the potash market would arguably weaken the position of the incumbent producers [like PCS], as BHP has a history of running its mines flat out." (Euan Rocha, BHP Plan Signals Major Shift in Potash Industry, Reuters, Jan. 21, 2010, available at http://uk.reuters.com/ article/idUKTRE60K2VJ20100121 (quoting CIBC World Markets analyst Jacob Bout).)
83. By conditioning the market for years to believe that BHP was primed to bring the full force of its worldwide financial and mining power to compete in the potash industry, BHP knew and intended to undermine investor confidence in the potash sector generally — and PCS in particular — creating an opportunity for BHP to acquire PCS shares for less than their intrinsic value.
84. As one analyst observed after news of BHP's proposal to acquire PCS became public: "Over the past six months, BHP has spent a good deal of time talking about its interest in the potash business, but most of the talk was couched in negative terms . . . . The net effect . . . has encouraged investors to be skeptical of the vision of the business espoused by the market leader, [PCS]." (Mark Connolly & Ashish Gupta, What Is POT Worth, CLSA, Aug. 18, 2010, at 2.) According to the same analysts:
As we see it, BHP was successful in holding back the price of POT shares. In our marketing, we have met with a number of large investors whose caution toward [PCS] was largely a function of their confidence in what BHP was saying about the way it would behave if it entered the potash business.
(Id. (emphasis added).) The same analysts, in another report that day, said:
In general, BHP's comments and answers to questions were vague and lacking in specifics, as has been the pattern. As we see it, BHP's comments over the past several months have served to undercut investor confidence in the investment case for POT shares. So the $130 bid represents a far lower premium than it might appear at first glance. We believe that the stock might have traded relatively close to $130 on its own, had BHP not been so vocal about its expansion plans, and how differently it might operate PotashCorp.
(Mark Connolly & Ashish Gupta, BHP to Canada: Watch Out!, CLSA, Aug. 18, 2010, at 2.)
85. Yet another analyst noted that "BHP's organic strategy to date has hurt [PCS]'s stock perception to date for perhaps more than its $1B spent" developing BHP's own greenfield operations, including Jansen. (Sam Kanes, David Forster, & Lisa Wilkinson, BHP's $130 Hostile Bid for POT Rejected, Scotia Capital, Aug. 18, 2010, at 2.)
b. Story B — Build And Buy
86. On August 20, 2010, BHP attempted to capitalize on these efforts, launching a hostile Tender Offer for PCS at a price ($130 per share) that grossly underestimates the present and future value of the company.
87. Shifting gears from its long-avowed "build, not buy" strategy, BHP now signaled to the market that it would do both — acquire the market leader and still move forward to develop its greenfield sites into operating mines that would be run flat out.
88. BHP's move came as a shock to many analysts, some of whom "complain the bid was an 'about-face' by the BHP top team on 'look into my eyes' denials that it planned a big acquisition." (Emilya Mychasuk, Kloppers' Foil, Financial Times, Aug 26, 2010, available at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6a7ceec4-b0a1-11df-8c04-00144feabdc0.html.) Another analyst reported:
This is quite a backflip. . . . The finance director was crystal clear that they had a better greenfield option in Athabasca and Jansen, that they did not want to do a big acquisition that would get contaminated with Canadian labour laws.
(William MacNamara, Potash Bid By BHP Puts M&A Back On Mining Agenda, Financial Times, Aug. 17, 2010, available at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3be9f56a-a9ef-11df-8eb1-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss.)
89. Perhaps attempting to disguise just how long it had been secretly targeting PCS, while at the same time espousing its "build, not buy" strategy to the marketplace, BHP stated in
its Tender Offer that, "[i]n May, 2010, BHP Billiton commenced a process to consider a possible combination of BHP Billiton and PotashCorp and began conducting a financial, legal and business due diligence review of PotashCorp based on publicly available information." (Schedule TO, Ex. B, at 33.) But when Kloppers met with Doyle little more than a week before the Tender Offer was commenced, he admitted that BHP had been "studying PCS since 2001 and more intensively since 2005." BHP's carefully worded statement about "commencing a process to consider a possible combination" with PCS is, therefore, a misstatement as Kloppers admitted to Doyle that BHP began looking intensively at PCS years earlier. BHP knowingly and recklessly made this misstatement to conceal its long-term intention to acquire PCS and its efforts to do so at an unfairly low price.
90. Just five days after the Tender Offer was commenced, Kloppers told analysts that BHP was "going as hard . . . on [the Jansen Project] as we can," and that regardless of whether or not the planned acquisition of PCS was consummated, BHP would move forward with the Jansen Project: "Graham [Kerr, the head of BHP's Canadian Operations,] and the team there are going to . . . when we get to the approval point, try and ramp that up as quickly as possible. No changes." (See BHP, Amendment No. 1 to Tender Offer Statement on Schedule TO (Aug. 25, 2010), at Exhibit (a)(5)(iv) to Item 12 ("Amendment 1") (Ex. D).)
91. Kerr reaffirmed BHP's public stance on Jansen again two days later: "The plan remains unchanged whether we are successful [in acquiring PCS] or not." (Cassandra Kyle, Sask. Potash Has New Dig, Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Aug. 27, 2010, available at http://www.thestarphoenix.com/Sask+potash/3448844/story.html.)
92. Kerr also reconfirmed BHP's commitment to the risky "flat out" concept, telling the Wall Street Journal that BHP believes in "running our assets 100% of the time and selling
our products at market price." (Phred Dvorak & Scott Killman, BHP Roils Potash Cartel, Wall St. J., Aug. 24, 2010, available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487041256045 75449640415573142.html.)
93. BHP executive Andrew Mackenzie echoed this sentiment: "We as a company have a strong bias toward running our facilities at maximum capacity through thick and thin . . . . In most cases we would keep things going through the cycle and not really attempt to manage supply by pulling back production in days of slightly weaker demand." (Cassandra Kyle, Canpotex Future Uncertain, Regina Leader-Post, Aug. 20, 2010, available at http://www.leaderpost.com/business/Canpotex+future+uncertain/3421323/story.html.)
94. At the time it made these statements about its future plans, BHP knew and intended that the statements would have the effect of undermining investor confidence in PCS and making it more difficult for PCS shareholders faced with the coercive Tender Offer to determine the true value of their shares.
95. BHP's bold announcements led one analyst to observe that: "We find it difficult to reconcile BHP's comments on its interests, and its expected operating approach, with the realities of the potash market. That gap has in the past served to reduce investor interest in PotashCorp, in our view, and helped to depress the trading value of the shares." (Mark Connolly & Ashish Gupta, BHP to Canada: Watch Out!, CLSA, Aug. 18, 2010, at 2.)
c. Story C — Buy, Not Build
96. While BHP was pledging in its public statements to move forward with the Jansen Project, no matter what, the company was apparently telling a different story behind closed doors, indicating to some analysts that it had no intention of ever developing the Jansen Project.
97. Specifically, after an August 26, 2010 breakfast with Kloppers, Bernstein Research senior analyst Paul Galloway reported: "breakfast confirmed much of what we originally suspected . . . the Jansen growth option is not viable (too costly and risky)." (Paul Galloway & James Luke, Quick Takes — BHP Billiton: Breakfast with Marius, Bernstein Research, Aug. 26, 2010.)
98. In the last few days, other analysts have shared this skepticism of BHP's claim that it would continue forward with its Jansen plans if its PCS acquisition is successful. Barrie Bain, director of Tunbridge Wells, England-based Fertecon, opined that BHP may push back building the Jansen Project beyond 2020 as it would be cheaper to expand the adjacent PCS assets already in operation: "They've said they will continue to develop that," Bain said. "My view is that they will put it on the back-boiler and look to develop that beyond 2020. Potash Corp. has got the potential for substantial expansions at much lower cost." (Jesse Riseborough & Maria Kolesnikova, BHP May Delay Jansen Project In Canada If It Buys Potash, Fertecon Says, Bloomberg, Sept. 14, 2010, available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-14/bhp-may-delay-jansen-project-in-canada-if-it-buys-potash-fertecon-says.html.)
99. Given its global size and strength, BHP's words and deeds have an impact that few other firms can match. By flooding the market with inconsistent and misleading statements about its intentions for entering and doing business within the potash industry, BHP has deprived PCS shareholders of their right to make a decision about the Tender Offer based on complete and truthful information. BHP made its statements knowingly and recklessly without regard to the impact they would have on PCS shareholders who were deciding whether to tender their shares.
100. PCS shareholders cannot at this point reasonably know BHP's actual intentions with respect to running PCS or becoming a competitor of PCS, and these issues are highly
material to the shareholders' decision on BHP's Tender Offer. For example, a shareholder might decide it is better to tender if he or she believes that BHP would otherwise enter the market independently, drive down the worldwide price of potash, devalue all potash producers (including PCS), and leave his or her shares worth potentially less in the future than the $130 per share offer currently on the table. But if BHP's threat to become a competitor is revealed as a smokescreen, the shareholder might behave very differently.
101. In any event, PCS shareholders are entitled to know the truth and which of the multiple stories BHP has told, if any, reflects BHP's true plans for the potash industry. Accordingly, BHP should be required to amend its Tender Offer materials to state affirmatively its true plans and intentions.
3. BHP Has Taken Inconsistent Positions About Its Plans for Canpotex, Confusing the Market and PCS Shareholders.
102. BHP has also knowingly and recklessly sown confusion in the market regarding how it intends to transport and to market its potash, whether it enters the industry independently or by acquiring PCS. Specifically, BHP has taken inconsistent positions about its plans for Canpotex, both in its Tender Offer disclosures and in its public statements relating to the Tender Offer.
103. As set forth above, BHP was required by law to disclose any plans that would result in a material change in PCS's business. In the section of BHP's Schedule TO entitled "Plans for PotashCorp," BHP makes the following statements about Canpotex:
BHP Billiton will work with the Canpotex shareholders in order to further understand existing agreements and establish the basis for a relationship that provides for continuous and undisrupted supply to export markets and ultimately permits BHP Billiton to market its potash independently. BHP Billiton intends that PCS will continue to honour existing commitments and contractual arrangements PCS has entered into in relation to Canpotex.
(Schedule TO, Ex. B, at 36.) These statements fail to reveal BHP's true plans for Canpotex, and they (as well as BHP's public statements) are designed to create the impression that BHP will operate independently of Canpotex and as a competitor of PCS if the Tender Offer does not succeed. BHP knowingly and recklessly made these statements to maintain the threat that it would enter the market and damage Canpotex and potash producers in the Saskatchewan region.
104. The provincial government of Saskatchewan is a strong supporter of Canpotex. For example, the government subjects potash to a special taxation scheme designed to encourage participation in Canpotex. (See The Potash Production Tax Regulations (The Mineral Taxation Act of 1983), ch. M-17.1 Reg. 6 (1990) (Sask.) (providing tax incentives for potash producers in Saskatchewan to participate in the "industry sales organization," called "Canpotex Ltd." to coordinate "offshore sales").)
105. Prior to its Tender Offer for PCS, BHP made clear that it planned to bypass Canpotex and sell its Jansen-produced potash independently. At the time that news of the Athabasca acquisition became public in January 2010, BHP's Kerr told Canada's National Post that, while selling through Canpotex was an option, BHP was likely to use its internal marketing team instead: "We run a centralized marketing model in the group, and those guys do a fantastic job." (Peter Koven, BHP May Snub Potash Cartel, National Post, Jan. 25, 2010, available at http://www.financialpost.com/news-sectors/story.html?id=2487720 (quoting Graham Kerr).)
106. On August 11, 2010, about one week before its offer to acquire PCS was made public, BHP made its supposed intent to abandon Canpotex even more clear for the potash investment community. On that day, BHP's preliminary agreement with the Port of Vancouver, Washington that ultimately would result in a nearly 60 acre lease of land and the eventual construction of an off-site export facility for its potash supplies was announced. Such a facility
would only be necessary in the event BHP planned not to utilize Canpotex's export facility located just 20 miles away at the Port of Portland, Oregon.
107. In its Tender Offer materials, on the other hand, BHP stated both that it "will work with the Canpotex shareholders in order to . . . establish the basis for a relationship that provides for continuous and undisrupted supply to export markets and ultimately permits BHP Billiton to market its potash independently" and that it "will continue to honour existing commitments and contractual arrangements [PCS] has entered into in relation to Canpotex." (Schedule TO, Ex. B, at 36.)
108. The same day the Tender Offer was commenced, BHP executive Andrew Mackenzie once again shunned Canpotex, telling Canadian newspapers that BHP "would normally market our own production" and does not "do anything else with any other product where we sell through a club, if you like." He further stated that BHP's approach was "slightly different to what Canpotex would be prepared to do in the past." (Cassandra Kyle, Canpotex Future Uncertain, The Regina Leader Post, Aug. 20, 2010, available at http://www.leaderpost.com/business/Canpotex+future+uncertain/3421323/story.html.)
109. After sticking to its "no Canpotex" pledge in the days leading up to and immediately after its Tender Offer, however, BHP later altered its stance in the face of increasing concern from Saskatchewan government officials, who indicated that Canpotex is important to Saskatchewan and expressed concern about the possibility of BHP withdrawing from Canpotex.
110. On August 25, 2010, Kloppers told Canada's largest national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, that "[w]ithout all the [Canpotex] shareholders coming to a mutual understanding . . . [BHP leaving Canpotex is] not going to happen. . . . Partners are partners. They're different from competitors. . . . Getting into a bad blood situation with other [Canpotex]
shareholders . . . would be reasonably silly on my behalf." (Brenda Bouw, BHP Backtracks On Canpotex Stance, The Globe and Mail, Aug. 27, 2010, available at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/potash/bhp-backtracks-on-canpotex-stance/article1684308/.)
111. BHP and Kloppers knew that their conflicting statements on Canpotex would keep alive the fear that BHP might enter the potash market independently while appearing to satisfy local concerns that BHP's acquisition of PCS would not hurt Canpotex and the Saskatchewan region. Based on the confusing statements made by BHP, PCS shareholders have no firm sense of BHP's intentions regarding Canpotex. For example, in an interview published September 9, 2010, BHP changed its tune yet again, with its spokesperson stating that "BHP was committed to going its own way if it acquired [PCS]." (Ian Austen, Takeover Bid Shines Spotlight On Crucial Player In Potash, New York Times, Sep. 9, 2010, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/business/global/10potash.html.)
112. During the two days before the filing of this Complaint, Kloppers continued to obfuscate BHP's true plans with respect to Canpotex. On September 20, the Regina Leader Post reported that Kloppers "did not see participation in Canpotex as a major problem" (John Burton, Viewpoints: Privatizing Potash A Devine Error, The Leader-Post, Sept. 21, 2010, available at http://www.leaderpost.com/news/ Privatizing+potash+Devine+error/3553894/story.html), and the Toronto Star reported that Kloppers described Canpotex's infrastructure as "unrivalled" and that BHP has "no intention to duplicate that" (BHP Billiton Fails to Win Over Saskatchewan Premier, The Toronto Star, Sept. 20, 2010, available at http://www.thestar.com/business/ article/863901--bhp-billiton-fails-to-win-over-saskatchewan-premier). Yet, one day later, after a meeting between Kloppers and the editorial board of The Globe and Mail, the newspaper
reported that BHP "is sticking to its strategy to some day breaking up the powerful Canpotex potash marketing arm if it buys [PCS] despite an outcry from the province and its peers." (Brenda Bouw & Tim Kiladze, Canpotex Breakup Will Happen Eventually: BHP CEO Kloppers, Globe and Mail, Sept. 21, 2010, available at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ report-on-business/canpotex-breakup-will-happen-eventually-bhp-ceo-kloppers/article1716883/.)
113. BHP's threat to abandon Canpotex and build its own export facility in Vancouver, Washington is designed to influence PCS shareholders because it appears to contradict rational economic behavior. Canpotex has spent years building, refining, and perfecting an extensive infrastructure to efficiently and profitably market, sell, and transport potash to customers in various countries. BHP has none of that costly infrastructure in place and does not need to develop new export facilities with additional capacity. Confirming these principles, Agrium's CEO, Mike Wilson, commented that "BHP would be crazy to leave" Canpotex. (Javier Blas & Bernard Simon, BHP Faces Potash Cartel Backlash, Financial Times, Aug. 26, 2010, available at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/13f300cc-b13a-11df-b899-00144feabdc0.html.)
114. PCS shareholders considering whether to tender their shares have a right to know BHP's true intentions with regard to Canpotex because BHP's intentions will bear on PCS shareholders' decision of whether to tender their shares.
4. BHP Has Made Misleading Statements to the Market and Even to PCS Customers Regarding Its Plans to Divest Substantial Portions of PCS's Business.
115. In another effort to disrupt PCS's current business operations and the perception of PCS's intrinsic value, BHP has told analysts and others of its plan to divest large portions of PCS's secondary assets if the Tender Offer succeeds. These statements were made knowingly and recklessly with the intent to damage PCS's business and depress views of its value in hopes of improving BHP's chances to acquire the company.
116. Schedule TO and Item 6 of Regulation M-A of the Exchange Act specifically require a tender offeror to disclose any plans, proposals, or negotiations that would result in "any purchase, sale, or transfer of a material amount of assets of the subject company or any of its subsidiaries." (See 17 C.F.R. § 240.14d-100; 17 C.F.R. § 229.1006(c)(2); and 17 C.F.R. § 240.14d-6(d)(1).)
117. BHP's Schedule TO makes no mention of any plan to sell off PCS's business lines and instead expressly states that BHP has "no current plans or proposals or negotiations that relate to or would result in . . . any purchase, sale or transfer of a material amount of assets of [PCS] or any of its subsidiaries." (Schedule TO, Ex. B, at 36.) In light of BHP's subsequent public statements, however, this assurance appears to be false and misleading.
118. After a conference call with BHP's chief commercial officer, Alberto Calderon, on August 26, 2010, one analyst reported that "BHP said that 70 percent of the value [of PCS] is in the potash assets and that it would probably look to possibly divest the nitrogen and perhaps the phosphates business." (Mark Gulley, Potash Corp. POT ($144.82) Hold BHP Conference Call. Massively Deploying Capital To Go For Market Share in KCl, Soleil Securities, Aug. 26, 2010, at 1.)
119. In addition, BHP has contacted PCS's current customers directly and raised doubts about whether it will continue to supply them with nitrogen and phosphate products if it acquires PCS. BHP knows full well that such actions will drive away customers who "one-stop shop" with PCS for various mineral needs, thereby decreasing PCS's profitability in the short term and making BHP's offering price look more attractive before the Tender Offer expires on November 18, 2010. Given that BHP is, by its own admission, five years away from operating its own potash mines, the only plausible reason for BHP to contact PCS's customers is to
interfere with PCS's business, depress current operating results, and negatively influence perceptions of PCS's true value.
120. Once again, however, BHP has made false and confusing statements to the market about its plans for PCS's phosphate and nitrogen business. Even as it was telling PCS customers and analysts that it intended to sell off the nitrogen and phosphate business, BHP demurred when pressed on this issue by the media, claiming that "[a]t this stage BHP Billiton has no plans to sell any Potash Corp assets. Our offer is for the whole company, including the phosphate and nitrogen businesses." (Euan Rocha & Michael Erman, BHP Denies Plans to Divest Potash Assets, Reuters, Aug. 31, 2010, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/ idUSTRE67G1R620100830.)
121. PCS shareholders have a right to know the full extent of BHP's plans in order to make a fair evaluation of the Tender Offer.
5. BHP Has Attempted to Mislead PCS Shareholders Into Accepting Its Low-Ball Offer by Falsely Asserting that Arbitrageurs Will Control the Outcome of the Tender Offer.
122. BHP's campaign to negatively impact PCS's perceived long-term value has not been limited to false statements and omissions concerning the conditions of the Tender Offer and its plans for PCS and potash operations.
123. One of BHP's additional strategies is intended to move PCS shares out of the hands of long-term investors and into the hands of arbitrageurs, short term or "fast money" investors, who aim to profit from the difference between a target's share price after a takeover announcement and the closing price at completion, and who create movements in the market unrelated to the shares' intrinsic value.
124. In an August 25, 2010 interview with CNBC discussing BHP's recent earnings report, Kloppers stated "[a] huge chunk of this register has changed hands in the last week — I
think over 40 percent of the register. . . . Clearly there are a lot of arbitrageurs in there. There are a lot of hedge funds and so on." (Michael Erman, Fast Money Pours Into Potash But Influence Limited, Reuters, Aug. 26, 2010, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/ idUSTRE67P1PZ20100829.) Kloppers went on to say that the "fast money" shareholders make the decisions at the end of the day, implying that it was this mass of arbitrageurs, and not PCS's long-term shareholders, who will control the fate of BHP's Tender Offer. (Id.) Kloppers made these statements knowingly or with reckless disregard for their impact on PCS shareholders. The clear aim of the statements was to convince PCS shareholders that BHP would receive sufficient tenders to close the offer and that non-tendering shareholders would be left out in the cold after so-called "fast money" forced the deal through.
125. Kloppers's statements are false and misleading. According to a Financial Times article on August 29, 2010, "only about a fifth of the traded stock represents a real change of ownership," while the remaining volume of trades "is simply churn between investing shareholders." (Helen Thomas, Potash Arbitrage Deals Under Scrutiny, Financial Times, Aug. 29, 2010, available at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b2710930-b395-11df-81aa-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss.) More importantly, according to the Financial Times, "[a]rbitrage ownership of [PCS] remains in the mid single-digits," limiting the influence that the so-called "fast money" shareholders can exert. (Id.) Indeed, according to one of the arbitrage investors who owns PCS shares, the success of BHP's Tender Offer will be decided "by the large institutions. . . . They are the ones that will drive the price and make the money." (Id.)
126. Section 14(e) of the Exchange Act prohibits materially false and misleading statements relating to a tender offer. BHP's statements are plainly material to PCS shareholders, and the knowingly false information BHP has disseminated should be corrected by BHP.
COUNT I
Violations of Section 14(e), 15 U.S.C. § 78n(e)
127. PCS repeats and re-alleges paragraphs 1 through 126 hereof as if fully set forth herein.
128. BHP has made a Tender Offer to acquire at least a majority of the outstanding shares of PCS, which are traded on the NYSE. In connection with the Tender Offer, BHP has filed with the SEC a Schedule TO and various amendments thereto containing BHP statements about the Tender Offer. BHP, through its officers, has also made public statements to the press and analysts about the Tender Offer.
129. In its Schedule TO, amendments to the Schedule TO, and other public statements, BHP has made untrue statements of material fact or omitted to state material facts necessary to make the statements made, in light of the circumstances, not misleading, and engaged in fraudulent, deceptive, or manipulative practices. Specifically, as detailed above, BHP has engaged in fraudulent, deceptive, or manipulative practices and misrepresented or omitted material facts concerning: (a) the BHP shareholder vote requirement; (b) the perceived value of PCS shares; (c) BHP's plans to develop the Jansen Project and run its mines at 100% regardless of demand; (d) BHP's intentions regarding Canpotex; (e) BHP's plans to divest nearly 30% of PCS's assets relating to production of nitrogen and phosphates; and (f) BHP's misstatements concerning the percentage of PCS shares that are in the hands of arbitrageurs.
130. BHP's misrepresentations and omissions are material because a reasonable investor, in deciding how to invest, would have considered it important to know about additional conditions for the Tender Offer, BHP's plans for PCS and the potash industry, and the likelihood that certain PCS shareholders might tender their shares. BHP's misrepresentations and
omissions altered the total mix of information that should have been available to PCS shareholders who are deciding whether to tender their shares.
131. BHP knew or should have known that its failure to disclose the true facts was, and continues to be, of material importance to all investors who are deciding whether to tender their shares.
132. BHP's material misrepresentations and omissions were made knowingly or recklessly in an effort to influence and deceive PCS investors into tendering their shares based on an incomplete and incorrect set of facts.
133. As a direct and proximate result of BHP's misleading statements and omissions relating to the Tender Offer, PCS shareholders lack the material facts they need to make — and thus cannot make — an informed decision on whether to tender and receive $130 per share, retain their investment in hopes that the share price will go higher, or wait for a new or higher bid to be presented.
134. PCS shareholders have relied upon the Tender Offer, the amendments to the Tender Offer, and BHP's public statements about the Tender Offer and have a right to rely upon this information as being truthful and complete. In fact, BHP contemplates that nearly 50% of PCS's outstanding shares could remain outstanding even after the Tender Offer is complete. (Schedule TO, Ex. B, at 21.) Therefore, non-tendering and partially-tendering shareholders have a vital interest in full disclosure of BHP's future plans or proposals for PCS. Although BHP has revealed its plans to extinguish the ownership of non-tendering shareholders, there is no guarantee that these efforts will succeed. This is precisely why the SEC's rules require disclosure of future plans and proposals, regardless of how the company plans to complete its acquisition. (See 17 C.F.R. §§ 240.14d-100; 229.1006(c); 240.14d-6(d)(1).) PCS shareholders
simply cannot decide whether tendering, in whole or in part, is in their best interest without a complete and accurate understanding of BHP's plans or proposals for PCS.
135. Given the high stakes involved, the law recognizes that irreparable harm is inherent whenever investors are asked to tender their shares without the full and complete information to which they are entitled. This is especially true where the material false statements or omissions are targeted to impact how the investors perceive the value of those shares.
136. As discussed above, BHP's various actions, statements, and omissions over the course of several years have been designed to manipulate and confuse the market as to the true value of PCS shares, painting a picture of the future of the potash industry in which it is better to cash out for a low price than to stay put and watch BHP make good on its stated plans to enter the market and crater the worldwide price for potash. This disinformation campaign has left PCS investors without the truthful information they need to accurately value their shares and thus to evaluate the fairness of BHP's $130 per share offer.
137. If the Tender Offer is allowed to proceed, uncorrected, these misrepresentations and omissions will deprive PCS shareholders of the opportunity to make fully informed decisions about the future of PCS, and both PCS and its shareholders will be irreparably harmed. PCS shareholders will be forced to make a decision without the information to which they are legally entitled. And once the deal is done, there will be no way to unwind it and provide these shareholders with any adequate relief.
138. PCS has no adequate remedy at law that can erase or even mitigate the effect of BHP's concerted efforts to mislead and confuse the marketplace. PCS shareholders need the truth, and they need it sufficiently in advance of any deadline to decide whether to tender their shares.
139. By intentionally or recklessly misrepresenting and omitting material information in connection with its Tender Offer, BHP has violated Section 14(e) of the Exchange Act, 15 U.S.C. § 78n(e). The true and material information omitted from the Tender Offer is largely in the sole possession of BHP. Particularly in light of BHP's widespread dissemination of misinformation to the public to date, its failure to provide a complete and accurate picture for shareholders in the Tender Offer is a violation of federal securities laws.
140. BHP must make full and accurate disclosures so that PCS investors can at last have the information that they need, and to which they are legally entitled, in order to evaluate whether to tender their shares. These corrective disclosures must be transmitted to the public with a degree of intensity and credibility sufficient to effectively counterbalance any misleading impression created by previous disclosures. Furthermore, discovery in advance of BHP's corrective disclosures is required in order to evaluate whether those future disclosures are in fact complete, accurate, and credible.
141. PCS investors also must be afforded sufficient time to consider BHP's new disclosures before being asked to make their tender decision. BHP spent literally years sowing disinformation in the marketplace, attempting to undermine investor confidence in the value of PCS. The results of such a lengthy and multi-faceted campaign cannot be unwound immediately when BHP is at last forced to tell the truth. It will take time for the market to settle, and for investors to see accurately the value of PCS, free of the cloud of BHP's improper actions, and to be able gauge for themselves whether $130 per share is a fair price.
COUNT II
Declaratory Relief Under 28 U.S.C. § 2201
143. For the reasons set forth above, BHP has made false and misleading statements and material omissions in connection with the Tender Offer and in materials disseminated to the investing public and filed with the SEC, including its Schedule TO and amendments thereto. Defendants have accordingly violated the rights of PCS's shareholders to receive full and accurate information concerning: (a) the BHP shareholder vote requirement; (b) the true value of PCS stock; (c) BHP's plans to develop the Jansen Project and run its mines at 100% regardless of demand; (d) BHP's intentions regarding Canpotex; (e) BHP's plans to divest nearly 30% of PCS's assets relating to production of nitrogen and phosphates; and (f) BHP's misstatements concerning the percentage of PCS shares that are in the hands of arbitrageurs.
144. Defendants made these materially false and misleading statements and omissions recklessly, knowingly, or intentionally.
145. If left uncorrected, the false and misleading statements and omissions of material fact contained in the Schedule TO, including amendments, will deprive PCS shareholders of the full and accurate information to which they are entitled and PCS and its shareholders will be irreparably harmed.
146. Declaratory relief is appropriate pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 2201 because an actual controversy exists regarding the propriety of Defendants' statements and disclosures under Section 14(e) of the Exchange Act.
147. Plaintiffs have no adequate remedy at law.
PRAYER FOR RELIEF
WHEREFORE, PCS respectfully requests that this Court issue an order:
A. Declaring that BHP's Tender Offer to acquire shares of PCS violates Section 14(e) of the Exchange Act, 15 U.S.C. § 78n(e), by misrepresenting or failing to inform investors of material facts, and engaging in fraudulent, deceptive or manipulative acts concerning: (a) the
BHP shareholder vote requirement; (b) the perceived value of PCS shares; (c) BHP's plans to develop the Jansen Project and run its mines at 100% regardless of demand; (d) BHP's intentions regarding Canpotex; (e) BHP's plans to divest nearly 30% of PCS's assets relating to production of nitrogen and phosphates; and (f) BHP's misstatements concerning the percentage of PCS shares that are controlled by arbitrageurs;
B. 1. Preliminarily and permanently enjoining the Defendants from taking further steps to consummate the Tender Offer or acquiring PCS shares because of their fraudulent, deceptive, or manipulative acts; or, in the alternative,
2. (a) Directing the Defendants to make full and complete corrective disclosures to PCS shareholders regarding their materially misleading statements and omissions; and
(b) Preliminarily enjoining the Defendants and other persons or entities acting in concert with them from taking further steps to consummate the Tender Offer or acquiring shares in PCS until the above-referenced corrective disclosures have been made and the effects of BHP's misleading statements to the market have dissipated and shareholders have had the opportunity to review and consider the corrective disclosures for no fewer than 60 days;
C. Preliminarily and permanently enjoining the Defendants and other persons or entities acting in concert with them from further violations of the federal securities laws;
D. Awarding PCS its costs and reasonable attorneys fees; and
E. Providing such other relief as the Court may deem just and proper.
Dated: September 22, 2010 /s/ Lee Ann Russo
Daniel E. Reidy (IL Bar No. 2306948)
Email: [email protected]
Lee Ann Russo (IL Bar No. 06181656)
Email: [email protected]
Jason G. Winchester (IL Bar No. 6238377)
Email: [email protected]
77 West Wacker
OF COUNSEL:
Patricia J. Villareal
Email: [email protected]
Thomas R. Jackson
Email: [email protected]
Michael L. Davitt
Email: [email protected]
2727 North Harwood Street
Meir Feder
Email: [email protected]
222 East 41st Street
N. Scott Fletcher
Email: [email protected]
717 Texas, Suite 3300
ATTORNEYS FOR PLAINTIFF POTASH
CORPORATION OF SASKATCHEWAN INC. | {
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The task is to make a design for some paper money bills. I work on the cryptocurrency BitCash. This is our website: https...for these BitCash Dollar bills. We need a design for the 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 Dollar bill. Which only needs to be slightly different, so that the user can distinguish between the different bills. I attach our logo. | {
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Children are rewarded for outstanding work or behaviour with house points. The house with the most points at the end of each term recieves a special treat for all their hard work and effort that they have put in during the term.
Each house has four house captains, a boy and a girl from Year 2 for KS1 and a boy and a girl from Year 6 for KS2. | {
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Find cleaning services in Angier, NC. Listings include Red's Power Washing & Lawn Care, Office Works, Hope's Home Cleaning With Norwex, Bubbles Cleaning Service, Shyne-Bright Green Cleaning and On Site General Cleaning Services. Click on each in the list below the map for more information.
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Don't Forget to ask about Grill Cleaning. Have a Fun and Safe Labor Day Weekend!
We will notify you when anything happens in Angier. | {
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After eight starts and few glimpses of the repertoire that made him one of the dominant pitchers of his generation, John Smoltz's Red Sox career has come to a crossroads, and possibly an end.
The Red Sox have designated the 42-year-old righthander for assignment this afternoon, meaning that if he is not claimed on waivers, the club has 10 days to release him or send him to the minors. Smoltz, who went 2-5 with an 8.32 earned-run average this season, could also retire.
Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein flew to New York this morning to deliver the news to Smoltz in person.
Smoltz, who allowed nine hits and eight earned runs in 3.1 innings of the Sox' gruesome 13-6 loss to the Yankees last night, has left the club and returned to his home in Atlanta to consider his options. During his pregame press briefing, Francona did not seem to rule out any option with regard to Smoltz should he clear waivers. Rosters expand Sept. 1.
"It's tough," Jason Bay said. "I faced him a few years ago, back when he was dominant. It's tough to say that it's over him. He had a little rough patch. The guy I'll always remember is the dominant guy that pitched for 15, 20 years and did it all for Atlanta. It was pleasure to play with him.
The surefire future Hall of Famer is replaced on the roster by rookie Junichi Tazawa, who was pitching in the Japanese Industrial League last season and has skyrocketed through the Red Sox system.
Tazawa will be in the bullpen tonight. The club has not yet named a starter to replace Smoltz on Tuesday, but the 23-year-old righthander appears to be the leading candidate if he is not used in relief this weekend.
Two of the three pitchers the Red Sox used in their loss to the Yankees last night were designated for assignment today — lefthander Billy Traber, who relieved Smoltz and was no more effective, was let go to make room for veteran infielder Chris Woodward, who was claimed on waivers from Seattle.
If this is the end of Smoltz's decorated career, during which he won 212 games — the first 210 during his 20 seasons with the Atlanta Braves — and saved 154, it was certainly an inauspicious final few weeks.
The Red Sox signed Smoltz, who was coming off major shoulder surgery that cost him most of the 2008 season with the Braves, to one-year contract for $5 million plus incentives in early January, hoping one of the great postseason pitchers of all-time — he is 15-4 with a 2.65 ERA in 40 postseason games and 27 starts — would offer a boost to the staff in October.
But he couldn't make it through the summer. After several rehab starts in the minors, Smoltz made his Red Sox debut June 25, allowing five runs in five innings while suffering the loss in a 9-3 decision to the Washington Nationals. It didn't get much better after that, as Smoltz struggled terribly during his eight starts with the Sox, allowing 59 hits and 37 earned runs in 40 innings, including eight home runs.
His two victories came against the Royals July 11 — allowing just one run in five innings while striking out seven — and the Orioles July 31, two of the weakest teams in the league. His losses came against the Orioles, Nationals, Rangers, A's and Yankees.
Smoltz, who threw in the upper-90s with perhaps the best slider in baseball during his heyday, struggled with his command during his time with the Sox, and his pitches lacked their familiar bite. He especially struggled against lefthanded hitters, who batted .440 against him with six home runs and a 1.248 OPS in 91 at-bats. | {
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Victoria Beckham must be jumping for joy! Not only has the world's fashion press lapped up her collection of high-end dresses, but she's gained some seriously stylish A-list fans as well.
The latest glamazon to pour themselves into a VB, figure-hugging frock is Heidi Klum, who wore this chic LBD to launch Victoria's Secrets' latest lingerie range.
Letting her fabulous figure do the talking, the supermodel kept accessories to a bare minimum, merely adding the obligatory skyscraper heels and that mega-watt smile to complete her look.
As with the majority of her collection, one-woman publicity machine Mrs Beckham has also been spotted in the style.
But while Klum went for minimalism, Posh went maxi, wearing hers not only with YSL platforms, but with a fur shrug, leather gloves, A-list essential black shades and a Hermes bag.
And so we have today's fashion conundrum: who wore it best? Let us know your answers in the comments box below. | {
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Benjamin Förster (born 14 November 1989) is a German professional footballer who plays as a striker for ZFC Meuselwitz.
Career
Förster came through Chemnitzer FC's youth system, and made his debut in a 2–1 home defeat to SV Babelsberg 03 in October 2008, as a substitute for Jörg Emmerich. Two seasons later helped the club win the Regionalliga Nord title, and promotion to the 3. Liga, finishing as the division's top scorer with 25 goals.
After three years at this level, Förster joined Regionalliga Südwest club SV Elversberg for the 2014–15 season, along with team-mate Thomas Birk.
In summer 2015, Förster signed for Wacker Nordhausen.
After one season with Wacker Nordhausen, Förster moved to Energie Cottbus.
Career statistics
References
External links
1989 births
Living people
Sportspeople from Chemnitz
German footballers
Association football forwards
Chemnitzer FC players
SV Elversberg players
FC Energie Cottbus players
VSG Altglienicke players
Berliner FC Dynamo players
ZFC Meuselwitz players
3. Liga players
Regionalliga players
Footballers from Saxony | {
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When we first reported on the launch of the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, it was described by the Japanese company as being the first production plug-in hybrid electric SUV in the world.But we don't believe in such statements and let spell everything out.
The Outlander plug-in hybrid looks nearly identical to the gas-fired version. We dig, if only because the three-row crossover's sharp, techy exterior styling is reasonably modern-looking, if a bit anonymous. Mitsubishi designed the crossover's platform to accommodate plug-in-hybrid gear from the git-go, so none of the hybrid gear intrudes into the interior.
Thus plug-in buyers will enjoy the same space as they would in the conventional Outlander.
Outside, the only giveaways that the plug-in is special are a unique grille, a monochrome paint job, LED taillights, and 18-inch wheels. The regular rig features 2.0-liter gas and 2.2-liter diesel engines (in Europe, at least); the plug-in mates a 2.0-liter, gas-slurping four with two 81-hp electric motors and a 70-kW generator.
One electric motor lives up front with the gas engine and generator, and the other takes up residence at the rear axle and powers the rear wheels. Interestingly, the rear electric motor produces 43 additional lb-ft of torque than does the front unit, for a total of 144.
The Outlander plug-in can operate in three drive modes that are engaged automatically: pure EV, series hybrid, and parallel hybrid. In pure EV mode, the front and rear electric motors are fed directly by a 12-kWh lithium-ion battery pack. Electric-only operation is said to be feasible for up to 34 miles at a maximum speed of 75 mph, and topping off the battery takes just four hours using a 240-volt outlet. Series hybrid operation is possible, in which the gas engine powers only the generator to feed the battery. Otherwise, the Outlander's gas engine and electric motors work in tandem in parallel hybrid mode; in this case, the gas engine powers only the front wheels via a gear-reduction setup.
Mitsubishi claims its hybrid system is good for 143 mpg (measured on Japan's JC08 test) and a 547-mile driving range. To further help energy regeneration, Mitsubishi allows Outlander plug-in drivers to manually select a battery charge mode that fires the engine to feed the cells electricity. Speaking of the batteries, they're located entirely between the front and rear wheels. The location of the juice box results in a relatively neutral 55/45-percent front-to-rear weight distribution and a lower center of gravity.
Also, we would like to reveal one really useful advice for you. Sometimes the battery indicator can show about half full or less, but you can manually told the vehicle to start the four-cylinder petrol to not only provide drive, but also charge the battery. It will give you a chance to have enough charge in the battery, so you could do all our off-road sections on electric power alone.
This Outlander is a soft and cuddly plug-in hybrid, with a claimed fuel economy figure of 148mpg and CO2 emissions of just 44g/km.
Engineers could achieve such awesome result, thanks to the combination of electric motors and 2.0-litre petrol engine. And your average will be even higher if you're mainly making short, all-electric trips.
The Outlander PHEV is a plug-in series parallel hybrid, a phrase that might require breaking down.
The Mitsu can be hooked up into the mains electricity supply, charging it for a 'electric-only' range of 32.5 miles.
The petrol engine and electric motors work together, with either source providing motive power directly to the wheels, or be de-clutched and used to charge the batteries back up. The car decides which task has priority at any given point depending on how it's been driven. Think Toyota Prius, but with more emphasis on running on electric, and you'll be about there.
Does diesel get better mileage?
To a certain extent, yes. For short journeys, starting with a full charge, you can achieve some extraordinary 'economy' figures. Despite driving normally, with air con on, we never dipped below 60mpg.
And because it has two electric motors, one on either axle, it's still a four-wheel drive SUV easily capable of towing little Ginny and the nag to the local gymkhana.
But as a car to know and love, the Outlander isn't so great. The batteries have added 200kg to the kerbweight, so it doesn't ride as well as the diesel version.
And the 2.0-litre petrol is disappointing. It doesn't add the expected boost in power when it kicks in, and it's a wheezy lump that rasps asthmatically as soon as you push it. Compared to the smooth electric mode, the Outlander's combustion engine feels very old-school.
It depends. If you don't do huge miles, and like doing your bit for the planet but don't want to compromise on range or practicality, the hybrid Outlander makes sense.
Especially when you factor in the cost. Including government subsidy in some states and countries, the hybrid will cost you exactly the same as the diesel Outlander. In other words, there's no price penalty for being green.
And company car drivers should definitely take a look. Because of the low tax bands, company car users will save a fortune over three years . | {
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Should You Start Matthew Stafford Vs. Buffalo For Fantasy Football?
While the draft and waiver impact a fantasy football team, nothing else matters if you make the wrong lineup decisions. As managers make the final tweaks to their lineups for Week 1, should you start Los Angeles Rams QB Matthew Stafford against the Buffalo Bills in your fantasy football lineup?
Fresh off a Super Bowl season, Stafford is looking to prove it was no fluke in 2022. After getting out of Detroit, where the only time anyone saw him was through a half-closed eye during a tryptophan-induced coma on Thanksgiving Day, Stafford shined as bright as the lights of LA on premiere night.
Stafford's first year wearing the Rams colors saw him hit career-highs in completion percentage (67.2%) and touchdowns (41). He ended the year as the QB5 overall and QB11 in points per game, averaging 20.4 PPR/game. Stafford pushed the ball down the field as he always has, ranking inside the top 10 in deep-ball attempts and competition percentage.
Unfortunately, he also had a knack for turnovers. Stafford led the NFL with 17 interceptions last year. This hurt his per-game totals, with Stafford topping 25 fantasy points only three times. If your league penalizes interceptions even more severely, it would have been worse.
It truly hit him between Weeks 15 through 18, right in the fantasy playoffs. In his four games, Stafford had three multi-pick games, throwing eight interceptions in total to just eight touchdowns. Over this stretch, he averaged fewer fantasy points per game (17.1) than Davis Mills (17.8) and Tyler Huntley (18.1).
While he walked away with a ring, Stafford limped his way home right when fantasy managers needed him the most.
Could Matthew Stafford get off to a slow fantasy start in Week 1?
The Rams are again a Super Bowl favorite, and much of that is to do with Stafford. He was a fringe QB1 during the draft cycle and in PFN's fantasy football draft rankings, came in as the QB13.
Part of it is due to the lack of rushing upside, but there is concern surrounding Stafford's throwing elbow. One of the stories of the summer has been Stafford's elbow and whether or not that will impact him in 2022.
ESPN NFL insider Dan Graziano recently reported he believes the lingering elbow injury could impact Stafford all season long.
"My impression of this situation is that it affects Stafford's practice schedule all year and could also, obviously, affect his performance on Sundays," wrote Graziano. "He's tough enough that it's fair to believe it won't affect his availability for Sundays, but this is a guy who already led the league in interceptions last year. We sure an elbow problem isn't going to mess with him at all?"
However, whether it's damage control or the truth, head coach Sean McVay sees it differently. Per Ian Rapoport of NFL Network, McVay has "no limitations" for Stafford. Omar Ruiz, also of NFL Network, reported something very similar, when he asked McVay if there'd be any hesitation before asking Stafford to throw 50-55 times to win a game, he simply replied, "no hesitation."
The Bills are one of the NFL's toughest matchups to start a QB against, even for Stafford
If not the elbow, Stafford also has another obstacle standing in his way, the Buffalo freaking Bills. From top to bottom, this is the best roster in football. Their defense ranked No. 1 in EPA last season, allowing the fewest yards (272) and points (16.4) per game last year. They were also No. 1 in fantasy points allowed as a team, ranking first against QBs in the process (11.29 PPR/game).
While this doesn't correlate perfectly year to year, the Bills are the exception since they're so good. They also got better with the addition of Von Miller. With that said, the most lopsided matchup of this game is the Rams' wide receivers against the Bills' cornerbacks.
Tre'Davious White is starting the season on the PUP list and will be out for at least the first four games as he recovers from a torn ACL suffered last year. That means Buffalo will be rolling out a combination of Dane Jackson, Kaiir Elam, and Christian Benford. Both Elam and Benford are rookies and will be facing both Cooper Kupp and Allen Robinson, two of the best at what they do.
In a game with a 52.5 total, we expect fireworks offensively as both sides throw haymakers at the other. Stafford should put to rest the elbow concerns, at least for Week 1, as this is the healthiest he will be all year. If things are bad, then we have a serious question next week.
If you drafted Stafford as your starter, feel free to use him. While an interception could be in the cards, enough yardage and touchdowns should offset it, making him a solid play in Week 1 despite the matchup.
With less than a week until the 2022 NFL season kicks off, we've published updated fantasy football outlooks for 200 players. Search the table below or filter by position and team for detailed fantasy insight so you can win your fantasy football draft! Additionally, don't forget about our Fantasy Football Draft Kit, which is packed with more information and proprietary research. | {
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In my previous post, I discussed the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi (The Agreement for Mutual Respect), which is being promoted by several organizations to help solve the problem of recalcitrant spouses in divorce proceedings. This time, I'll write about two other agreements that are similar in concept, but different enough that I ought to point out the differences, and then I'll give you my two cents.
The agreement begins with some paragraphs on financial matters and equal distribution of property, in accordance with the Israeli civil law. In the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi, these matters are addressed in the addendum.
Similar to the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi, the recalcitrant spouse must pay a monthly payment until the get is given/accepted (man agrees to give, woman agrees to accept). The amounts defined are slightly different, but not significantly. For these payments to be obligatory, one of the three following conditions must be in place: Either the couple must be living apart for at least twelve months; the beit din has determined that there is no chance for reconciliation or has ordered one of the parties to give/accept a get; or the breakdown in the marriage is irreparable.
The primary difference between this agreement and the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi is the manner in which it is decided that reconciliation is not possible. The second condition is what bothers me most in this agreement. The beit din is the last place I'd look for someone to say that a marriage is over. A recalcitrant husband just has to say the words "shalom bayit" and he has to be practically a serial murderer before the beit din would obligate a divorce, in spite of the husband's request to reconcile. I only need to remind you of the case of the husband who was guilty of sexually molesting his 15 year old daughter. So that condition is worthless. The third condition, the intent of which is the same, is not elaborated on. Who decides that the marriage is irreparable, and on what basis? The agreement does not specify. Therefore, the only condition that is clearly defined and feasible to happen is the twelve month separation. Therefore, for anyone who thinks it is important to try to reconcile before proceeding with divorce, the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi is the better formulated agreement.
I wrote above that the amounts of the monthly payments to be made by the recalcitrant spouse according to Yad L'Isha's prenup are not significantly different from the amounts in the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi. However, there is one point that bothers me. These amounts are not equal for the man and the woman. While the man would have to pay 40% of his monthly salary, with a minimum of 3000 NIS, the woman would have to pay 40% of her monthly salary, with a minimum of 2000 NIS. No doubt, the authors of this agreement took into consideration that more often that not the woman's salary is a lower salary. I'm in favor of equality. It is possible that the minimum of 3000 NIS might pressure the women more, because relative to her income it is more. But remember, the real point in this payment is not to pay maintenance. The real point is to "encourage" someone to agree to divorce. There is no problem of a coerced divorce if the woman is the recalcitrant spouse. If there were no concern of a coerced divorce (see my quote from Maimonides about that in my previous post), I'd say the higher the payment the better! We are out to accomplish something here - ending a marriage that is no longer good. I'm in favor of equal rights and equal responsibilities. Every situation is different. If a couple wants to take into consideration their different circumstances, including differences in earning potential, in this agreement, they can consult with a lawyer and a halakhic authority and tailor their prenup to their requirements. I don't see the necessity of doing that when the goal is not to actually pay. In any event, it is essential that a couple consult with such experts before signing this agreement.
Unlike the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi, Yad L'Isha's agreement does not address child custody and support issues. In my opinion, this is a significant omission that needs to be addressed, and a couple who would use this agreement should amend it to include this matter.
To sum up, in my opinion, this agreement is not as well-formulated as the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi (for which I have criticism, also - not to worry - as I do for all of the prenups that are based on the same concept), and therefore I'd like to suggest that Yad L'Isha remove it from their website and replace it with the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi, unless they can offer some explanation of what advantages their own prenup has. The Heskem L'khavod Hadadi has achieved greater momentum as far as its publicity and support from various organizations are concerned, so why confuse the public? Let's avoid decision fatigue.
Here we find a breath of fresh air! In the second "whereas" (in the manner that legal contracts are written) it states that the Conservative approach to marriage, which the couple has chosen, is based on their belief in equality of the genders and the right of each one to be married to whom they wish. Breakdown of a marriage should not result in a woman remaining an aguna, because of the refusal of her spouse to give her a get.
The agreement itself is also based on the principle of monthly payments by the recalcitrant spouse, as seen in the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi. The amount is not specified, and, as always, the couple should consult with legal and halakhic authorities. There is also a paragraph requiring an attempt at marriage therapy, but there is no paragraph addressing custody and support of children. This should be added.
Two possibilities are presented with this agreement. One possibility is that the couple has a civil marriage (in addition to the Conservative ceremony), in which case, presumably, they register in Misrad HaP'nim (see my previous post for my thoughts on that, and you can read earlier posts, as well - by now you must know what I think about doing that). If that is the case, then any divorce proceedings would have to be in a beit din (of the Israeli rabbinate). Therefore, the halakhic and legal advice that the couple obtains must be with people who are familiar with those batei din.
The second possibility is that the couple do not register in the Misrad HaP'nim. Such a couple is referred to as yedu'im batzibbur (literally, known in public, what is termed "common law marriage"). I urge such couples who plan on having this status - or even just think about it - to check with the New Family organization to find out all of the latest and greatest rights of such a relationship. The information provided on the form for the prenup is not up-to-date in this matter. These rights are improving all the time in Israel and I think this is the best way to go! If a couple chooses this route, they should consult with a Conservative halakhic authority, who should explain the implications of marriage (and divorce) in the manner of the Conservative movement. I am under the impression that if the prenup agreement does not lead to the desired result, if one party wishes to divorce, then the Conservative beit din will annul the marriage (hafka'at qiddushin).
Therefore, it would be wise for any couple who chooses to marry in a Conservative ceremony not to register in Misrad HaP'nim. They will have a traditional and halakhic (yes, I maintain that their ceremony is halakhic) marriage (and therefore, with all of the reservations that I have about qiddushin), but at least better protection against get refusal than is found in the (Orthodox) Israeli rabbinate.
In summary, if I had to choose one of the three prenups based on substantial monthly payments by the recalcitrant spouse that are offered, I would opt for the Conservative one, marry in a Conservative ceremony, and not register in Misrad HaP'nim.
But if a couple insists on marrying using the services of the Israeli rabbinate (you do know already what I think about this, don't you?), then use the Heskem L'khavod Hadadi. Yad L'Isha should remove their agreement, so that there is a standard prenup of this type. There are enough concerns about the effectiveness and acceptance of this type of agreement, without confusing the matter by having multiple versions. This does not mean that couples should not tailor it to their needs, but it should be based on a standard format.
If I am already raising the matter of "concerns", I ought to tell you that one reader raised the question of the attitude of the Israeli batei din to such agreements. Based on her personal experience, there are dayyanim who see any such prenup as a cause to make any future divorce a coerced divorce, and thus invalid. I plan on raising this issue with the various organizations that are promoting the agreement. It is fine that a civil court will order the recalcitrant spouse to pay, because this agreement is seen by the civil court as a valid monetary contract, but what happens when the couple appears in the beit din to arrange the divorce?
In my next post I'll discuss the prenup offered by the Center for Women's Justice. I'll also say a few words about a prenup that is on Mavoi Satum's site, not because I think it is of much importance, but because it is kind of nice.
Thank you for calling this agreement to my attention. I will be happy to look at it and comment in a future post. Do you know who are the "gedolei haposkim" who support this agreement? Why doesn't it get more attention? Why doesn't it appear on Tzohar's website? How many couples have used it? Is it presented to students in yeshivot and midrashot? You might not know the answers to these questions - maybe after I examine it more closely, I'll be able to suggest possible explanations. | {
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Our law firm can assist you with all matters related to family law from divorces, to pre/post nuptial agreements, domestic violence injunctions/restraining orders, child custody, child support, spousal support / alimony, paternity actions, post judgment modifications, collaborative divorces (where the parties are divorcing amicably and not contesting any matters), visitation rights and much more. We understand that family issues are sensitive and require a special type of attention—allow our office to help you aggressively and competently in your time of need during any family-related legal proceeding. Don't give away your rights and make sure you are fully protected and knowledgeable as to your rights under Florida law. | {
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280-acre, suburban campus in Lawrenceville (population: over 4,000), two miles from Trenton and 60 miles from New York City; branch campus in Princeton. Major airport serves Philadelphia (50 miles); smaller airport and train serve Trenton; bus serves Princeton (three miles). Public transportation serves campus. | {
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AFC team-by-team preview
By Sam Farmer
Sep 03, 2014 | 11:13 PM
Patriots QB Tom Brady runs onto the field before the preseason game against the Giants. (Jeff Zelevansky / Getty Images)
2013: 12-4, first.
Last in playoffs: 2013.
They're going all the way: TE Rob Gronkowski is (almost) back — he's still favoring his recovering right knee and is said to be 50-50 for the opener against the Dolphins. Regardless, Tom Brady finds a way to win no matter who's in his supporting cast. The Patriots addressed their defensive shortcomings with some impressive additions, among them CBs Darrelle Revis and Brandon Browner.
They're doomed: The Patriots have an aging defensive front, notably with Vince Wilfork coming off surgery for a torn Achilles tendon. Their first-round pick, DT Dominique Easley, suffered ACL tears to both knees at Florida.
Now hear this: "Nah, I ain't changing that one bit. I'm going to go full speed when I'm out there and I'm going to keep smashing and dashing in everything I do." — Gronkowski, on whether he'll change his style after a slew of injuries and surgeries, via WEEI.
2013: 8-8, third.
They're going all the way: Even though the Dolphins are a so-so 15-17 with him at the helm, QB Ryan Tannehill has shown flickers of promise despite playing behind a terrible line and without a big, go-to receiver who can bail him out of trouble. Maybe Knowshon Moreno will resuscitate the running game.
They're doomed: With Mike Pouncey still recovering from hip surgery, the Dolphins will open with five new offensive linemen. While that's a necessity for a team that gave up a league-high 58 sacks last season, it's tough to see that group meshing right away. The Dolphins are on their fourth offensive coordinator in five years.
Now hear this: "I heard a rumor that some people have reported we've made it hard for him on the field. That's on purpose. That's how you build a quarterback. He's coming." — offensive coordinator Bill Lazor on Tannehill.
2013: 8-8, second.
They're going all the way: The strength of the Jets is their young, athletic defensive line, and the front seven — led by Sheldon Richardson, Muhammad Wilkerson and Damon Harrison — will smother the run and generate a solid pass rush. QB Geno Smith appears to be a better decision-maker than last season and has the pressure of Michael Vick waiting in the wings.
They're doomed: The Jets are scrambling for answers in the secondary, with No. 1 CB Dee Milliner injured, Dimitri Patterson released and rookie Dex McDougle lost for the season with a torn ACL.
Now hear this: "I never said I had to have the best corner in football. That's not it. My defenses work, period. I don't care what it is. We take what we have, and then we work around it. ... That's why, to me, it's not a panic situation, it's an opportunity." — coach Rex Ryan.
2013: 6-10, fourth.
They're going all the way: The defensive line features three players who made the Pro Bowl last season — Mario Williams, Kyle Williams and Marcell Dareus — and the one who didn't, Jerry Hughes, had 10 sacks. The Bills might also have the league's deepest cast of running backs: C.J. Spiller, Fred Jackson, Anthony Dixon and Bryce Brown.
They're doomed: It has been a steady stream of bad news this offseason: from the death of owner Ralph Wilson to the cancer battle of Jim Kelly to the issues that could directly affect the 2014 team — among them the arrests of Dareus for illegal car racing and drug possession and a season-ending ACL injury to second-year star LB Kiko Alonso.
Now hear this: "We've got a lot to prove. ... We haven't been in the playoffs in a long time. ... we're planning to be a playoff team." — GM Doug Whaley, to the Buffalo News.
They're going all the way: With Hue Jackson as offensive coordinator, the Bengals won't be paying lip service to the running game as much as they did under Jay Gruden. That means an enhanced role for RBs Giovani Bernard and Jeremy Hill, and less pressure on QB Andy Dalton and WR A.J. Green. DT Geno Atkins anchors a terrific front.
They're doomed: Everybody's looking to see how the Bengals will do in January, as they are 0-5 in playoff games under Marvin Lewis. But with Dalton playing all four quarters, the Bengals are 1-7 as visitors in the AFC North. In prime-time games, they're 2-4.
Now hear this: "The people who are the critics, they look at all of the negatives. They don't look at all of the stuff that I've accomplished. … All that matters is what everyone believes in this organization and what I believe in myself. — Dalton, via the Cincinnati Enquirer.
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They're going all the way: Ben Roethlisberger has shown increasing efficiency in Todd Haley's offense and was sacked just seven times in the final seven games last season. The running game should be improved with bruisers Le'Veon Bell and LeGarrette Blount bashing inside. C Maurkice Pouncey is back at full speed after missing all but eight plays last season because of a knee injury.
They're doomed: Despite being younger and quicker on defense, the Steelers haven't proved they can stop the run. They are ultrathin at corner. Four of Roethlisberger's top five receivers are essentially new faces, with the only familiar one being Antonio Brown.
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Now hear this: "Hopefully (when the season ends) I'm not one of them." — coach Mike Tomlin, to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in reference to having three fired head coaches on his staff: Haley, Mike Munchak and Dick LeBeau.
They're going all the way: The running game will be a staple with Gary Kubiak as offensive coordinator. The Ravens ranked 29th in offense last season and are bound to be better. Steve Smith is another capable target for Joe Flacco, and Smith finally has a quarterback with pinpoint accuracy getting him the ball. The offensive line is improved.
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They're doomed: A defense that once had the quintessential center fielder in Ed Reed no longer has a menacing safety patrolling the back end. Pass rushers Terrell Suggs and Elvis Dumervil are on the wrong side of 30. RB Ray Rice is suspended for the first two games — against the Bengals and Steelers.
Now hear this: "This offense is going to be pretty tough to handle. We've got a lot of weapons and we've got a lot of tough guys. I expect us to be up there at the top of the league." — Flacco, to Baltimore Ravens.com.
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They're going all the way: Defensively, the Browns are in good shape. They ranked ninth in yards allowed last season, and they believe they can get a lot more pass-rushing productivity out of LBs Paul Kruger and Barkevious Mingo. They have two talented press corners in Joe Haden and rookie Justin Gilbert.
They're doomed: The jury is still out on Johnny Manziel, but his decision-making hasn't been stellar. He has attracted the wrong kind of attention for his off-field antics. Brian Hoyer will start the season as the No. 1 quarterback, but he's coming off an ACL injury and has little experience. And WR Josh Gordon is suspended for the season for violating the league's substance-abuse policy.
Now hear this: "We have his back. ... It's not going to be a quick hook." — coach Mike Pettine on Hoyer, saying he told the quarterback, "This is your team, this is your offense."
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They're going all the way: QB Andrew Luck is elite, and now his corps of pass catchers is bolstered by a healthy Reggie Wayne and Dwayne Allen and free-agent addition Hakeem Nicks. The Colts picked up some difference-makers in
DE Art Jones and LB D'Qwell Jackson.
They're doomed: Some of the major questions heading into training camp — Will the young interior of the offensive line be an issue? Who will replace safety Antoine Bethea? — still linger. The Colts have a rookie starting at left guard and a first-year starter at center, and the safety job opposite LaRon Landry remains up for grabs. Trent Richardson is coming off a season in which he averaged 3.0 yards per carry, and sacks leader Robert Mathis is suspended for the first four games.
Now hear this: "Trent needs to answer the bell and do his job to the best of his ability. We're all accountable here." — GM Ryan Grigson, on Richardson.
They're going all the way: Maybe Ken Whisenhunt can resurrect a franchise that hasn't won a postseason game since 2003. The Titans have a good foundation with a solid offensive line and defenders who can pressure the passer in Akeem Ayers, Shaun Phillips, Derrick Morgan and Kamerion Wimbley.
They're doomed: This is a prove-it year for QB Jake Locker, who has missed 14 of 32 games since being named the starter. The Titans cut the inconsistent but occasionally spectacular Chris Johnson in April, and parting ways with Pro Bowl CB Alterraun Verner could be costly.
Now hear this: "It's a different mood. ... You're just excited and ready to play. (Before) you just had a lot of guys that had other things on their minds. Other things were more important. They were just happy to be here rather than more happy to win games." — S Michael Griffin, to TitansInsider.com.
They're going all the way: The Texans don't have all the pieces to win consistently now, but they have enough to start building. WR Andre Johnson finally has a capable sidekick in DeAndre Hopkins, and there's ample depth behind RB Arian Foster. On defense, everyone's looking at what kind of damage the dynamic duo of J.J. Watt and Jadeveon Clowney can do. They figure to give fits to opposing offenses.
They're doomed: Quarterback is a big question mark as Ryan Fitzpatrick doesn't look like a long-term answer. The Texans are shaky at safety and aren't great in coverage in general. The offensive line is solid at left tackle, center and right guard, but left guard and right tackle appear to be problematic.
Now hear this: "He better have his head on a swivel because I'm coming and I know J.J.'s coming." — Clowney, on Colts QB Andrew Luck.
2013: 4-12, third.
They're going all the way: Yes, he's facing vanilla defenses in exhibition games, but rookie QB Blake Bortles has looked excellent. He's accurate on short and deep passes and has a hint of Ben Roethlisberger in him. Bortles isn't expected to play for the first month, but he could be a franchise quarterback.
They're doomed: This team will be better than the one that started 0-8 last season. The top four receivers are promising but young — basically three rookies and Cecil Shorts, entering his fourth season. Gus Bradley imported some defensive help from Seattle in ends Chris Clemons and Red Bryant, so the Jaguars are bigger and deeper up front.
Now hear this: "We do feel good about where Blake's at, but we feel like this time that he has under Chad — a year to develop — will be really good in the end." Bradley, to NFL Network, on the decision to start Chad Henne at quarterback.
They're going all the way: The offense-minded Broncos beefed up on defense, adding DE DeMarcus Ware, CB Aqib Talib and S T.J. Ward. Peyton Manning looks as sharp as ever. Deep threat Emmanuel Sanders more than makes up for the loss of WR Eric Decker.
They're doomed: Manning has had two great seasons in Denver, but does he have another at 38? The defensive additions might look better on paper than in reality. Several key players are coming off injuries, including LB Von Miller and LT Ryan Clady. Plus WR Wes Welker is suspended for the first four games. And the schedule is tough, with games against the NFC West.
Now hear this: "(Manning) has got more weapons around him than he's ever had. There's more depth behind him. The offensive line is probably the best he's ever played behind." — GM John Elway.
They're going all the way: Philip Rivers was back to form last season, leading the league in completion percentage and finally getting some help from a running game and better blocking. Pass defense was a major concern last season, but it improved late. It should be better still with the addition of two good cornerbacks in first-round pick Jason Verrett and free agent Brandon Flowers.
They're doomed: The Chargers need to generate a pass rush, and their two biggest threats are coming off serious injuries: Melvin Ingram a torn ACL and Dwight Freeney a torn quadriceps. D-line depth is a problem, as is tackling.
Now hear this: "I've watched that playoff game so many times. Some of it is watching it for fun — not that all of that game was fun — and some of it's for, man, how close were we? We were right there. Let's get back right there." — Rivers on the 24-17 loss to the Broncos.
2013: 11-5, second.
They're going all the way: Andy Reid executed a brilliant makeover in his first season — they went from 2-14 to 11-5 — and he guided an NFL franchise to the playoffs for the 10th time in 15 seasons. The defensive front seven is loaded, and Eric Berry is among the best safeties in the game. On offense, there's the steady hand of QB Alex Smith and the playmaking speed of RB Jamaal Charles.
They're doomed: The Chiefs won just two of their last seven games last season. They lost a lot in free agency, especially on the O-line and in the secondary.
Now hear this: "I'm still not over it. Of all the games I've played ... I don't know if I've ever hurt more than after that game. Then to have to sit on that for 31/2 months, it's not fun." — DE Mike DeVito, to ESPN.com, on the Chiefs blowing a 28-point lead in the third quarter to lose to the Colts in the playoffs.
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They're going all the way: The Raiders don't lack for experience. They loaded up in the offseason with former NFL stars who have lost their luster: QB Matt Schaub, RB Maurice Jones-Drew and defenders Justin Tuck, LaMarr Woodley, Antonio Smith and Carlos Rogers. If those players — or even most of them — can make the impact the Raiders are expecting, the club can avoid a third consecutive four-win season.
They're doomed: Seldom does an influx of expensive, 30-something free agents produce the desired results. The Raiders are turning could to rookie QB Derek Carr sooner than they hoped. A strong secondary is essential in this division, and the Raiders have work to do there.
Now hear this: "He's really calm, really cool in the pocket. ... I've been calling him mini A-Rod since he got here." — former Packers WR James Jones, comparing Carr to Aaron Rodgers. | {
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Company Register in Georgia
Types of Companies in Georgia
Company Act in Georgia
Public Registry in Georgia
Virtual Office in Georgia
Open a Limited Liability Company in Georgia
Establish a Branch in Georgia
Set up a Subsidiary in Georgia
Liaison Office in Georgia
Holding Company in Georgia
Open a Travel Agency in Georgia
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Open a Pharmaceutical Company in Georgia
Open a Foundation in Georgia
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Creating a Publishing Business in Georgia
Set Up Poti Free Zone Company in Georgia
Open a Company in Kutaisi Free Zone in Georgia
Tbilisi Green Free Industrial Zone – Airport City
The Minimum Share Capital for Opening a Company in Georgia
Opening a Bank Account in Georgia
Obtaining Construction Permits in Georgia
Types of Investment Funds in Georgia
Purchase a Company in Georgia
Open a Company in Agriculture in Georgia
Open a Company in Construction Sector in Georgia
Set up an IT Company in Georgia
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Open a Shop in Georgia
Set up a Cryptocurrency Company in Georgia
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Special Permits and Licenses in Georgia
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Company Formation Services in Tbilisi
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Business Start-up Costs in Georgia
VAT in Georgia
Tax Minimization in Georgia
Taxation in Georgia
Accounting in Georgia
Why is Georgia an Attractive Destination for Investors?
Legislation Related to Foreign Investments
Imports and Exports in Georgia
Credit Rating of Georgia
Workforce in Georgia
Selling Tobacco in Georgia
Obtaining a Work Permit in Georgia
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Obtaining a Visa for Georgia
Invest in Georgia
Trading in Georgia
Relocate to Georgia
Foreign Investments in Georgia
Law Firm in Georgia
Litigation Attorneys in Georgia
Legal Services in Georgia
Close a Company in Georgia
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Legislation Related to Commercial Activities in Georgia
Real Estate Due Diligence in Georgia
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Land Registry in Georgia
Intellectual Property in Georgia
Civil Law in Georgia
Power of Attorney in Georgia
Arbitration Court in Georgia
Updated on Friday 23rd October 2020
Foreign businessmen who want to open a company in Georgia can select one of the company types that are prescribed under the country's national legislation. The investors may choose between companies with limited liability, joint stock companies or partnerships. The partnerships that can be set up in Georgia are available as limited partnerships or general partnerships. Also, foreign companies may enter the local market by opening a subsidiary or a branch office and our team of specialists in company registration in Georgia can provide in-depth assistance on these business structures.
How can an investor register a Georgian company?
All the Georgian legal entities must be registered with the National Agency of the Public Registry (Georgia company register) subordinated to the Ministry of Justice in Georgia. The National Agency of the Public Registry falls under the supervision on the Ministry of Justice. Georgia company register was set up under the Law of Georgia on State Registry, which was adopted in this country on 1st of June 2004.
The Public Registry is responsible for the registration functions and tax services (front office), official property registrations, taxes on property, movable and immovable property, entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs (non-commercial) legal persons, geodesy and cartography. The main ideas sit on the foundation of a centralized registration system; Georgia company register performs a coordinated activity with customers and partners.
Investors can request more information on the procedures that have to be followed when registering with the National Agency of the Public Registry (NAPR) from our team of specialists in Georgian company formation; our consultants can provide step-to-step advice in matters concerning the registration of a local business, but they can also assist on the formalities of registering a property with the institution.
The registration of the companies is based on a signed and notarized application. The application must include a set of information, such as the name of the company, the type of company, its address, the purposes for which it was set up as well as the following:
• date of starting the business and a notarized copy of the company's statutory documents;
• providing information on the founder of the company (name, address, place of birth and the profession),
• the amount of share capital and details regarding the contribution of each partner;
• documents regarding each member of the supervisory board and management board.
The application must be accompanied by the charter of company, the documents showing the value of the contributions made in kind, a proof from the Information Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that the persons appointed to represent the company are not subject to penalty for proprietary offences, the documents of appointment of the directors and members of the councils.
If necessary, all the documents must be accompanied by the notarized and legalized translation into Georgian. A registration fee must be paid before the company is registered in the Entrepreneurial Register. After submitting all the above mentioned documents along with the proof of registration fee payment, the company will receive an identification number and a certificate of state and a tax registration; our team of specialists in company formation in Georgia can provide more details related to this matter.
The fee ranges from GEL 100 in the situation of the standard registration, but the investors may opt for a faster registration, in which case they will have to pay a fee of GEL 200. The last step before starting the actual economical activity is opening a bank account. The registration with the Georgia company register lasts 1-2 days.
Documents to be submitted with the Georgia company register when starting a business
In the above section, we have added a short presentation on the basic documents an investor should submit with the Georgia company register when opening a company in Georgia. However, the list of documents and procedures that have to be followed is more complex, depending on the type of company selected for registration. Below, we present some of the basic steps that have to be concluded when opening a Georgian limited liability company, which is a common way to start a business here:
• investors must pay a fee of GEL 100 or GEL 200 (for the standard or expedited registration procedures) with the NAPR;
• the company has to be registered with the Entrepreneurial Register, a procedure which is done through the NAPR;
• the company must obtain an identification number and a certificate of state and tax registration;
• the company must also register for value added tax and for these procedures, specific documents have to be submitted;
• investors must prepare a certified application for registration and a certified memorandum of association;
• it is also necessary to add to the file the certified consent of the owner of the premises where the business carries its operations, which states that the premises can be used as the company's official business address.
Besides these, Georgia company register expects investors to offer additional information; the full list of the information that must be disclosed with the institution can be presented by our team of consultants in company registration in Georgia. However, it is necessary to find out that businessmen have to provide additional contact information (e-mail address and a separate address, different from the one where the company develops its activities).
One of the aspects that have to be completed during the procedure of company formation in Georgia is to set up a corporate bank account. According to the Georgian legislation, investors can deal with this procedure during the registration of the company with the Georgia company register.
What is the basic data one should know on the Georgia company register?
The National Agency of the Public Registry (NAPR) represents a government agency, which, in Georgian, is named Sajaro Reestris Erovnuli Saagento. The agency is located in Tbilisi, the capital city of Georgia, and, besides the above mentioned responsibilities, the institution in is charge with matters such as: satellite imagery, aerial photography or thematic mapping. Other basic data regarding this institution is presented below:
• the National Agency of the Public Registry in Georgia was set up in 2004;
• the Georgia company register has a staff that is formed of 1,370 persons;
• the annual budget the institution receives is EUR 10.2 million;
• in 2017, it implemented a reform on land registrations, which had a positive effect on the number of properties registered with the institution;
• up until 2017, the institution had more than 400,000 land plots registered in its database;
• at the level of 2017, the institution had 783 dispute cases regarding local properties that were resolved through mediation.
Why register a Georgian limited liability company?
A limited liability company (LLC) is formed by maximum 50 shareholders and the capital is divided into shares. The advantage of a Georgian LLC is given by the fact that the investors will be liable for the company's debts only to the amount of the shares they own in the company. The shares are freely transferable and the members of the company are not allowed to withdraw. Other characteristics of the LLC are the following:
• it is the most common type of business registered in Georgia, preferred by both foreign and local businessmen;
• the LLC can be set up by natural persons, but legal entities are also allowed to register this business form;
• the share capital of the LLC is divided into shares and the investors can't issue additional shares;
• the registration of this business form can last approximately two weeks.
Can foreigners access the data stored by the Georgia company register?
One of the legal matters that are handled through the Georgia company register is the registration of a property. Most of the data stored by the institution is available for the general public, but such information is limited only to specific aspects. Starting with 2015, the institution allows foreigners to verify various information on the Georgian properties; our team of specialists in company registration in Georgia can assist with more information on the procedures for purchasing or renting real estate properties in this country.
This was a direct consequence of the fact that the Georgia company register became part of the European Land Information Services Association (EULIS). The latter represents an organization that offers reliable information on the European properties, but only to its subscribed customers, which are represented by entities such as banks, lawyers, real estate agents and others.
How to check information from the Georgia company register?
The information registered in the National Agency of the Public Registry of Georgia may be checked online, through the Public Service Hall. The information may be requested on the basis of a standard application (filled in front of the officer) and an ID copy. Also a fee payment is requested. This fee depends on the number of days allowed to release the information. Usually the longest term is four days.
The information regarding the registration of the companies is public, but in certain cases, specific information is considered confidential, such as the state secrets or personal information considered confidential by the Georgian legislation. Foreign investors who want more information about the Public Registry may contact our company formation agents in Georgia.
What are other popular business forms in Georgia?
The joint stock companies are business forms with the capital divided into shares with equal nominal value and this type of legal entity can be registered with more than 50 members. The members of the joint stock companies have the responsibilities limited to the nominal value of their shares and it is important to know that the investors of this type of company may issue additional shares.
A general partnership in Georgia can be incorporated by minimum two partners, who have equal liability for the company's profits and losses. They both have decisional powers. In the case of a limited liability partnership in Georgia it is also necessary to associate at least two partners, with the difference that one will have the quality of a general partner, while the other will be a limited partner. The general partner carries the full responsibility for the company's debts and incomes, unlike the limited partner who has limited responsibilities in extend of his/her contribution to the company's capital.
Furthermore, foreign investors can operate on the local market through a branch office, which is a type of company that is managed and controlled by the foreign company abroad. In this case, the parent company is held responsible for any debts and financial difficulties related to the branch office registered in Georgia.
The branch office does not represent a legal entity in itself, as it is just a sub-division of the parent company. One of the advantages of opening a branch office in this country refers to the fact that the investors will have lower initial costs related to the registration of this type of entity. When opening a company in Georgia as a branch office, the following steps will have to be concluded:
• provide a decision of the parent company related to the registration of a branch office in Georgia;
• provide the parent company's statutory documents and a proof regarding that the parent company is a registered entity in its country of origin;
• a decision which states the name of the appointed director of the branch office or of any other legal representative which has the right to represent the office in Georgia;
• an evidence regarding the company's registered address in Georgia;
• the identification documents of the branch's appointed director and an evidence regarding the payment of the registration fee.
How can an investor open a bank account in Georgia?
As mentioned earlier, it is necessary to open a corporate bank account for a newly formed business, this being one of the compulsory steps of the procedure of company formation in Georgia. This procedure can be completed in only one day, in the situation in which the investors have prepared the necessary documents. Some of the important aspects related to the registration of a corporate bank account are presented below:
• the procedure will incur the payment of a small fee, which ranges from GEL 10 to GEL 100, depending on the fees established by each commercial bank;
• the investors will need to provide the company's tax registration certificate;
• it is also necessary to provide copies of the identification documents of all the persons that can represent the company;
• it is also compulsory to offer a signature sample of the company's director.
What are the main VAT obligations in Georgia?
Any company that develops commercial activities in Georgia is required to pay the value added tax (VAT), unless the service or the product provided by the company is exempted from this type of tax. The tax regulations in Georgia stipulate that a local business has to register for VAT purposes once the company's annual revenues are of minimum GEL 100,000.
Are there any tax incentives for Georgian based companies?
Yes, companies in Georgia can obtain a set of tax incentives, including for trading matters. It is necessary to know that Georgia benefits from several regions which provide a special tax treatment, known as free zones, more exactly, free industrial zones. Our team of specialists in company registration in Georgia can assist with in-depth advice on how to start a business in the country's free zones and can provide advice on the types of business activities that are accepted in such special regions.
Thus, persons who are interested in starting the procedure of company formation in Georgia can obtain relevant tax deductions if they set up their businesses in the regions of Tbilisi, the capital city, and the cities of Kutaisi and Poti (the latter being a seaport).
One of the main advantages of opening a company in Georgia in its free zones refers to the tax exemptions that can be obtained by local and international businesses. For example, in the country's free zones several taxes do not apply, as it is the case for the corporate income tax or on the taxes on trading; also, companies can benefit from lower value added tax rates.
Amongst the types of activities that can be developed in such regions we mention the following: consulting activities, financial activities, manufacturing or construction; our representatives can offer more information on other tax incentives and benefits that can be obtained when conducting a business in these free zones.
Who can start a sole trader in Georgia?
Another way to start a business in Georgia is by opening a sole trader (known as individual entrepreneur). The sole trader represents the simplest way to open a company in Georgia and it is recommended for small businesses. The main characteristic of the sole trader is that the company is represented by a single founder, who develops a business activity in his or her name.
The downsize of the type of business form is given by the fact that the owner of the company is personally responsible with his or her own assets in the situation in which the company has any financial difficulties, as there is no distinction between the owner and the company; the sole trader can also be registered by foreigners.
Information regarding the Georgian economy
Georgia is situated in a strategic area, connecting Asia to Europe, and this offers the country a competitive advantage - it is seen as a desirable location for foreign investors. The well developed infrastructure helps the import and export of goods all over the world.
Georgia is also known for its various reforms made in all the sectors, in its attempt to attract foreign investments. The financial system is encouraging - even though in 2004 there were 21 taxes, the number of them has decreased to only six. The VAT is imposed at a rate of 18%, the corporate tax rate is established at a rate of 15% and dividends distributed by a company are subject to a 5% dividend tax rate.
Another reason why the investors are interested in opening companies in Georgia is the simplified registration procedure of a business. The process of registration of a new company doesn't take longer than two days, as mentioned above, but the entire registration process can take longer, if we consider the registration with the local institutions, obtaining specific business permits and other necessary steps.
The Georgian workforce is well trained and the country is situated on the 1st place in the world in the Adult Literacy Rate indicator (with a rate of 100%). The country also benefits from a young workforce and this can provide numerous advantages to foreign businessmen who are seeking to expand on this market.
For more details regarding the registration of a company in Georgia, we invite you to contact our specialists in company formation, who can offer further information on any aspect concerning the registration procedure. Investors may also request assistance on the tax regulations applicable to a specific business structure.
Meet us in Tbilisi
Call us now at +995 595 11 88 22 to set up an appointment with Valeri Bendianishvili, one of our specialists in company formation in Tbilisi, Georgia. Alternatively you can incorporate your company without traveling to Georgia.
As a Business Setup Georgia LLC client, you will benefit from the joint expertize of local lawyers and international consultants. Together we will be able to offer you the specialized help you require for your business start-up in Georgia.
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VAT Registration in Georgia | {
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Here are some interesting facts about the Irish last name O'Sullivan, including its history, family crest, coat of arms, and famous clan members.
Name meaning: "Descendant of the hawk/dark eyed one."
Counties associated with the name: Cork, Clare, Galway, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford.
Coat of arms motto: The steady hand to victory.
- The term "Manifest Destiny" was coined by a journalist named O'Sullivan, who supported the expansion of the United States into the western territories.
- The father of the skyscraper was a Sullivan who also originated the famous architectural axiom "form follows function."
- The great Chicago Fire of 1871 was started by a Sullivan.
- The first tank ever acquired by the state of Israel was a gift from an O'Sullivan.
- The first heavyweight boxing champion of the world was a Sullivan.
- The man hit by the most lightning strikes was a Sullivan.
- First American woman ever to walk in space was a Sullivan.
Do you know any O'Sullivans? Let us know in the comments! | {
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Asw. Sandra Galef (D – Ossining) spoke with Susan Arbetter about ending pay-to-play politics in Albany.
We heard from Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb (R – Canandaigua) about why he is still calling for a pause of state payments connected to the Buffalo Billion project as investigations continue.
Asm. Phil Goldfeder (D – Far Rockaway) and Barry Trachtenberg, University at Albany Director of the Judaic Studies Program, debate Governor Cuomo's anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) executive order.
Asw. Pat Fahy (D – Albany) and Senate Deputy Majority Leader John DeFrancisco (R – Syracuse) discuss where indigent legal defense reforms stand in the Legislature. | {
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If you want to control your money and know your exact financial position at any time, planning is vital.
Listing down your monthly expenditure can help you see where your money is going.
Once you have this broader picture, you can redirect or reduce your expenses.
Budgeting can give you a clearer focus on what you want to do with your money.
Budgeting can help you isolate unwanted or 'hidden' expenses.
During these financially uncertain times, make it a priority to establish a 3 - 6 month cash cushion of savings.
Choose the right accounts for your way of banking.
In day-to-day banking transactions, a mix of flexibility and convenience is important to most people. To get the best from your banking, identify your specific needs and think about how you are likely to use each account.
You may want easy access to your funds or a better interest rate. You may want to write checks, or use ATMs and EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer Point of Sale) facilities. How often you make transactions is another important consideration when choosing an account, because some accounts incur lower or less frequent transaction fees than others.
Now it's time to see what kind of account suits you best. Banks offer a full range of products and services, giving you the opportunity to use what is right for you now, with the flexibility to cope with changes in your circumstances.
Remember, choosing the right account now could save you time and money tomorrow.
Investigate special options or packages.
It's always in your best interests to ask about options or packages for which you might be eligible. For example, some banks offer students, graduates, senior citizens, or customers who keep higher minimum balances certain special benefits.
What extras would help your banking?
Think about products or services that might complement and improve your banking. An overdraft policy is one example. Like many people, there may be times when you accidentally spend more money than you've got in available funds. A simple overdraft product allows you to apply for a credit limit of either $500 or $1,000 on your account in case it should ever become overdrawn.
Identify what you need and how you will use an account.
Think about how often you will use an account.
Check to see if you're eligible for any special packages.
Ask about other products or services that might improve your banking.
Many people now want the convenience of access to funds at a time and place that suits them. If that sounds like your way of "going to the bank", simply choose the kind of access that suits you – whether it be banking by Internet, phone, ATMs or EFTPOS. You may want to use them all!
Phone Direct is a telephone banking service and provides a wide range of value-added services. With Phone Direct you can check your account balances, obtain information on previous transactions, transfer money between your linked accounts and pay bills. There is usually no charge to use your bank's Phone Direct service, and you can often make as many transactions as you like every time you access the service using your Customer Registration Number and PIN.
Internet Banking allows you to access all the features of Phone Direct plus a few more. Whether you want to get an account balance, transfer funds, or pay a bill you can do so from the comfort of your own PC.
ATMs are located worldwide and availalbe for use 24 hours a day.
In addition, EFTPOS allow you to make purchases at thousands of retail outlets, with funds debited directly from your account.
Using ATMs and EFTPOS can also help you reduce over-the-counter branch withdrawal fees.
Keeping all your accounts in the one bank not only streamlines your banking, it could save you money.
For example, customers who have a home loan or investments with one bank are sometimes eligible (upon application) for a reduction in their account fees. If you are in a position to offer one financial services provider the majority of your banking business, it's certainly something worth asking about.
You could save on interest if you consolidate several debts into one loan that is financed at a lower interest rate.
paying off one loan is easier to manage.
Decide which accounts you don't need and don't use – and close them. Unused accounts often still incur fees, so it's in your best interests to make a decision to use them or lose them.
Banks are here to help you use products and services that offer you some financial or service benefit.
We encourage you to take advantage of the expertise and information banks offer at their branches, on the phon, or via the Internet to help you make informed decisions about the management of your finances. | {
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Tag: henshinGARB
New henshinGARB mini catalogue: Go over time and space!
Hey, I just wanted to mention a few things that I recently added to henshinGARB, the Greatest Toku Shop EVER, and official henshinhead merchandise shop. This time we have some new products inspired by Mirai Sentai Timeranger, or Power Rangers Time Force if you'd prefer Take a look:
Timeranger Airbrush Tee
Here we have the whole Timeranger/Time Force team, including TimeFire/Quantum Ranger. Their personal insignias have been "airburshed" onto these tees, giving it that personalized, homemade feel. And you gotta admit, it looks cool, right? They're available in the colors shown above, and in mulitple sizes. The men's standard weight tees (red, blue, green, fire/quantum) are available for only $12.00, the men's heavyweight tee (yellow) is $16.00, and the two women's slimfit AA tees (yellow and pink) are only $19.00.
AkaRed's Head Tee
Now you can have AkaRed's head printed on your chest where ever you go! These sleak red tees bear the resemblence of the cult favorite warrior, and are available for only $12.oo (multiple sizes, same price for men's and women's).
Oretachi Mega Tee
Here we have the Oretachi Mega tees, inspired by Megaranger/PRiS, with the five-colored band running across the chest. They are available in the colors seen here, and on the bands. Available in multiple sizes. Men's tees only $12.00, women's slimfit AA tees only $19.00
SunVulcan Tee
And finally, we have the SunVulcan Tees, guess where these designs come from. Available in the colors seen here, and in multiple sizes, the men's tees are $16.00, and the women's slimfit AA tees are only $19.00. Currently, we also have the SunVulcan logo available in button form for only $5 for a pack of five.
And you can only find these amazing products at henshinGARB!
If you like any of this, or would like to see what else we have available, you can either click the link in the post, or click the link in the blogroll, under the category "Stuff I actually have anything to do with".
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on July 4, 2011 Categories MC's postsTags AkaRed, catalogue, henshinGARB, Megaranger, new products, Power Rangers in Space, Power Rangers Time Force, SunVulcan, TimerangerLeave a comment on New henshinGARB mini catalogue: Go over time and space!
Go-Kaiger Ep.17 Pics: Ooh, shiny!
Here are some screen shots from this week's episode. Sorry I never do actual reviews:
In the Go-Kaiger Goseiger Super Sentai 199 Hero Battle movie the premiered on Saturday, they apparently do get the Goseiger's grand power, along with a few others (check next post).
Here's Gai, watching this big opening fight scene, grinning ear-to-ear. He does introduce himself, and follows them around trying to get them to let him join, but they ignore him for the most part.
This is when they run into this week's Action Commander and fight him the first time, using the Sixth RangerKeys they got from Basco the week before. Gai does try to jumo in during this fight, but the Action Commander runs off before he has a chance to.
This is from a scene where Gai really tries to get the other to let him join, even revealing his day-dream to them. Needless to say, they tell him off and leave him where he was, thinking that he was just some obsessed idiot.
And this is where he later reveals himself as Go-KaiSilver. This image is from a very long and drawn out self-introduction that pulls a lot from past introductions. Hopefully, they'll shave it down to size in the next one. Really shows how much of a fanboy he is. And I couldn't find any pics from the henshin sequence itself, but let's just say it was like the others, only with the anchors, and they came down from a point above him, similar to the Titanium Ranger or Quantum Ranger morph sequences. Makes you wonder just how much Koichi Sakamoto is trying to get Saban to make this series.
Don't let this pic fool you, he actually faired very well against the Gormin, he just had a harder time against the Action Commander.
This is what his Final Wave looks like. Mothaf*cka got impaled!
And these are some shots from the next episode:
We finally get to see Go-JyuJin in action! But we'll have to wait two weeks to see it! 😦
Next week there won't be any new episodes of Go-Kaiger or Kamen Rider OOO, both shows will be on break. However, new episodes will premiere the week after on June 26th, so try to hang in their until then. You can always wait for the subs to come out, or go through and catch up on previous episodes you weren't able to watch before, or you can always stock up on Go-Kaiger stuff. I know where you can find cheap Go-Kaiger themed t-shirts! 😉
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on June 12, 2011 June 12, 2011 Categories MC's postsTags Go-Kaiger Goseiger Super Sentai 199 Hero Great War, Go-KaiSilver, henshinGARB, Kaizoku Sentai Go-kaiger, Super SentaiLeave a comment on Go-Kaiger Ep.17 Pics: Ooh, shiny!
OVER 10,000!!!!!!! YAAAAAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's right folks! We have finally hit the 10000th visitor mark! And I just want to say thank you to everyone that has visited the site. You guys are great! Now if you would only visit the shop and buy stuff. (http://henshingarb.spreadshirt.com) But in all seriousness, I really would like to just thank all of you just for being awesome and for coming back day after day, and just… I don't know what to say. But really thank you, gracias, gratiz, obrigado, Большое спасибо, terima kasih banyak, xie xie, arrigato gozaimasu, and thank you to everyone in the other languages that I forgot to include. And remember to keep coming back here for news, updates, and anything else I wanna throw at you. You never know what I'm going to do next. 😉
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on May 25, 2011 Categories Who Knows, Who Cares?Tags 10000 visits!, henshinGARB, Henshinhead, thank you!Leave a comment on OVER 10,000!!!!!!! YAAAAAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
henshinGARB Catalogue 4: Or why people like to stop at trilogies.
Hey everyone! It's that time of the season when there is absolutely no big toku news. So guess what I'm going to do? That's right! I'm going to push my own stuff onto you! Because of such underwhelming demand, and an ever-expanding product list, I decided that it was time to publish a new catalogue. And this time, I'm including EVERYTHING that's currently in the shop. I've got a lot of old stuff, a lot of new stuff, and a lot of stuff you might not even be interested in. So let's get to it!
First up we have the henshinhead logo tee, available in multiple sizes and colors, available for men and women. Only $12.00.
New to the shop is this tee with the mini logo on the left side of the chest, so that you can have the logo of your favorite blog site on your heart. Available in multiple sizes and colors, for men and women, and for only $12.00.
Here we have the newly re-designed HENSHINHEAD RULES! tee, I've changed the font, and played around with the sizes, and you've got to admit, it looks nicer. Available in men's and women's sizes, in multiple colors, and available for only $10.00.
Still available are these re-designed Heroes for Japan Tees. Now, I know that the Super Hero Time Japan Relief Effort has been over for some time, and that I originally designed these shirts for that charity, but these are still cool designs, and the message is still the same. Available for only $12.00.
Also still available are these Still Standing Tees, showing the Kamen Rider statue in Miyagi after the tsunami devastated the area, still standing after a massive earthquake and a raging tsunami. The ultimate symbol of Japan's strength and resilience. Available for only $16.00.
And of course, one of our favorites, the GOOOO-KAIJA! Tees. Both men's and women's sizes are available in multiple sizes and colors. Men's shirt for only $12.00, and women's slim fit AA shirt for $19.00.
And now for one of my favorites, the Don't make me Push my Buttons! Tee. It's a pun with a toku twist! Now available for women's sizes. Available for $16.00.
We've now made it to our Toku Allegience line, and here we're starting with Super Sentai. Based off of the Goranger costumes, it now includes Akaranger and Momoranger designs. Each available for only $12.00.
Also still available as part of the Toku Allegience line are these designs based off of Kamen Rider and Ultraman. Each also only $12.00.
Sorry ladies, I'm still working on female equivalent designs for Kamen Rider and Ultraman. But you can always get the Momoranger shirt.
Next up we have the popular Bouken Spirits Tees, featuring the Boukenger compass logo on the chest, which are equal in size and position as they appear on the Boukengers' uniforms. Available in multiple sizes and colors, $12.00 for men's, $19.00 for women's.
And new to the shop is the Bioman Badge Tee. Because I've been watching a lot of the dubbed episodes of Bioman lately, I've become somewhat of a fan of the show, and wanted to express that in t-shirt form. Available in multiple sizes and colors, $12.00 for men's, $19.00. for women's.
And along with this line of retro series, I decided to through in these new Aura Power! Tees. With the Maskman logo in the proper place on the t-shirt as it was on the uniform, even you can use the power of aura and kung fu skills to fight evil. Available in multiple sizes and colors, $12.00 for men's, $19.00 for women's.
And because I am apparently one of the few people who actually likes either version of this series, we have these Gingaman in a Lost Galaxy Tees. With the iconic Charlie Brown-esque jagged line marks across the midsection, these shirts properly pay tribute to this series. Available in multiple sizes, men's muscle shirt $17.00, women's standard weight t-shirts only $12.00.
And now for a random series of buttons.
As you may or may not be able to tell, I really like buttons. We've got six different button designs, all available in small and large size buttons. The majority cost $5.00 for the small buttons, and $6.00 for the large buttons. The only exceptions are the Still Standing buttons, which are $4.00 for small, $5.00 for large.
So that is everything currently available in the shop, hope you guys like this stuff. If you're interested in any of this stuff, or just want to check out the store, just click the henshinGARB link in the blogroll on the side, under the section labeled "Stuff I actually have anything to do with", and it should take you straight there. And if it's anymore of an enticement, there is a Spreadshirt special going on for the month of May, buy four short-sleeve shirts and get one free. Details in the coupon below. (Note: you do not need a physical copy of the coupon, just the coupon code listed below.)
UPDATE: Okay, I understand that the KRFan SUCKS! Tees were in bad taste, so I've gotten rid of them. But the sentiment is still there.
UPDATE: (5/21/11) Hey, added some new stuff, ckeck it out:
It's all part of my new Abare Guts! line of products. We have men's shirts available in red, blue, and black for $12.00, a yellow women's shirt available for $19.00, and two sets of buttons for $5 and $6. So if that doesn't entice you to buy something, I don't know what will. And for anybody who just can't find the link to the shop it's right here: http://henshingarb.spreadshirt.com/
Could somebody buy something please?! I just can't keep waiting on PaladinZeo to get paid. Come on, I will do whatever you want, make whatever you want, if you want me to modify the designs or make them available in different sizes or colors I'll do it, just please say something. It's all about the customer here at henshinGARB.
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on May 17, 2011 May 21, 2011 Categories Who Knows, Who Cares?Tags Bioman, Boukenger, Gingaman, Goranger, henshinGARB, Henshinhead, JAKQ, Kaizoku Sentai Go-kaiger, Kamen Rider, KRFan sucks!, Maskman, Super Hero Time!, Super Sentai, Ultraman2 Comments on henshinGARB Catalogue 4: Or why people like to stop at trilogies.
henshinGARB Update: See, I do have a customer!
Hey there everybody. As you all should know by now, I run a shop in conjunction with this website called henshinGARB (yes, spelled that way), and I recently had to re-open it. You see, I had closed it down at one point because I basically had no customers for over a month, and even though people were visiting, no one was actually buying anything. Plus there was this guy, KRFan he called himself, who basically said my designs were terrible. To which my reply still is that he is a big jerk. But anyway, after all of that, I decided to close the shop, at least for the time being. But then out of the blue, someone calling himself PaladinZeo left a comment on the blog talking about how he was interested in my merchandise, and that he had finally gotten the money to buy what he was interested in just as I had closed my shop. So, as per his request, I reopened the shop, and he went in and got what he wanted, and over the weekend he recieved his first order! And, as per my request, he sent some pics of what he ordered! So let's take a look:
So we're clear, this is NOT me. I wanted to be honest and wait for someone else to buy my stuff. You gotta admit, they turned out pretty good. Anyway, if you want to some for yourself, just click the link under the the category "Stuff I actually have anything to do with" and you can get some unofficial, appropriatly-sized clothing and fun buttons! I've recently added a bunch of new products and designs, and just about everything is available in men's and women's sizes, and I can guarantee the some of the lowest prices around, so check it out!
*Accelular not included.
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on May 16, 2011 Categories MC's postsTags Boukenger, henshinGARB, Henshinhead, Kaizoku Sentai Go-kaiger1 Comment on henshinGARB Update: See, I do have a customer!
henshinGARB New Catalogue: I'm shoving this thing so far down your throat…
Boy is it just me or has it been a slow news week for tokusatsu? And I had this week off, too. I guess I'll just have to fill the void with my own stuff. And since I happened to reopen my shop, I guess I'll just have to talk about that.
Now, this isn't some planned publicity stunt to bring attention to the shop, quite frankly I'm not good at planning stuff, the shop was reopened at visitor request, specifically at the request of PaladinZeo. And as any long-time visitors of the site (do any of you exist?, because I know that at least PaladinZeo over there is a subscriber) know, I go to great lengths for my visitors. Doesn't seem like it, but that's because all you see is the finished product. And so, for those of you who are interested, the site is open and active, and I've included some new products and updated some old ones. So let's see what I've got!
Starting with the updated products first, we have…
The henshinhead logo tee! I've updated the appearance of the logo, so now there isn't an awkward out-of-place black box. Available in a variety of colors and sizes for only $12.00.
And here we have an update Heroes For Japan Tee. I've made the background of the design transparent so it blends with the shirt better, and I threw out the belt. Available for only $12.00.
A bit of an unexpected one (not really) that I've update is this one from the Toku Allegience line, the Ultraman Tee. I got rid of the grey in the design, so now it flows from the t-shirt. Once again, only $12.00.
These prices are so low, you might as well be stealing! Hey, come back here with that!
And now for new stuff!
Presenting the brand new Bouken Spirits! tees. With this famous compass design, you'll never be lost, brave adventurer! Available in multiple colors and in Men's and Women's sizes. That's $11.00 for Men's standard weight tee, $18.00 for Women's AA Slim Fit Tee.
And because I like buttons, I have a whole new batch of them! First we have the henshinhead logo buttons, available in two sizes, and each come in a standard 5 pack. That's $5 for the smaller buttons, and $6 for the larger buttons. I know, there a dollar more than the other, but that's just from the commission on the logo design.
And because I like the way this design came out, I made it into a button too! The Bouken Spirits! button comes in two sizes, five-to-a-pack, and is available for only $4 for the small buttons, and $5 for the large buttons.
And that should be everything that's new in the shop. Anything else that isn't here that you've seen before is probably still in the shop. There are some other changes that I've made that I haven't covered here, you'll just have to look and see for yourself. And in case you're wondering, the Go-Kaiger stuff is still there as well.
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on May 4, 2011 Categories Who Knows, Who Cares?Tags Battle Fever J, Boukenger, henshinGARB, Henshinhead, PaladinZeo, UltramanLeave a comment on henshinGARB New Catalogue: I'm shoving this thing so far down your throat…
And the phoenix rose from the flames: henshinGARB is back baby!
Well that didn't take too long. Recently I took down henshinGARB because of a lack of interest in the merch. I promise, I will never use the word "merch" again. Anyway, about a week after I made that announcement, someone commented that they actually wanted to buy my stuff, and I closed up shop just as he got the money to do so. Sorry about that, PaladinZeo, but KRFan really got to me, and like I said before, well over 200 people visited the site, but nobody bought a thing until now(?). So for you PaladinZeo, and for anyone else interested, the site is now active again, and the link is back in the Blogroll (under "Stuff I actually have anything to do with"), so go out and shop 'til you drop!
Oh, and KRFan, I just want to say that 1) You're still a jerk, and 2) if you don't like my stuff, then don't buy it.
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on May 3, 2011 Categories MC's posts, Who Knows, Who Cares?Tags henshinGARB, Henshinhead, KRFan sucks!, PaladinZeo2 Comments on And the phoenix rose from the flames: henshinGARB is back baby!
henshinGARB: Hissatsu Waza Sale: Slashing prices left and right in one big finisher!
Hey there everybody, I'm just here pushing my shop henshinGARB again, and bringing you new deals and new products. While this isn't a new official catalogue, it is free advertising for me. So let's get to it!
Starting with new price cuts, the ever-popular henshinhead logo tee has been drop-kicked down to just $12.00, for men's and women's tees. Here's another pic for those who haven't seen it:
I've also gone down on the price for the GOOO-KAIJA! Men's tees, now down to $11.
Sorry ladies, no price reduction for the women's tees. Not without losing yellow.
Also reduced is the "Don't make me push my buttons!" Tee, now down to $16.
If you look real close, you can see the kanji for henshin on the phone screen. Thought you'd like that.
While SHT might have ended, I will still be offering the stuff I made specifically for it, namely the two tee shirts at reduced price.
Starting with the Heroes for Japan tees, their price has been reduced to just $12. I have also taken the writing off the back, but the message still rings true.
And the Still Standing Tee (featuring the picture of the Kamen Rider Statue in Miyagi still standing after the quake and tsunami) has been reduced to $16.
And that is everything that has been reduced. And just so were clear these price changes are permanent. Because our Hissatsu Waza sales cut prices down to size, and makes sure they stay down!
But before I forget, I have three new products available, as part of my new line called "Toku Allegience". While we all love every tokusatsu series, we do have our favorites. And you can show it we these new tees. Available currently for Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, and Ultraman. And each available for only $12.
If you like to see any other genre or series, be sure to let me know. I'll even do bad guys if you want.
And that's all for now. If you see anything you like, be sure to click the link in the blog roll, under the category "Things I actually have anything to do with". And be sure to visit to see what else is available. And as always, keep checking here for all the latest in toku news.
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on April 10, 2011 Categories MC's postsTags henshinGARB, Henshinhead, Kaizoku Sentai Go-kaiger, Kamen Rider, Super Hero Time!, Super Sentai, Ultraman1 Comment on henshinGARB: Hissatsu Waza Sale: Slashing prices left and right in one big finisher!
henshinGARB Catalogue: Somebody buy something already! It's for charity.
Hey everybody, thought I would take this time to shamelessy plug my new online shop, henshinGARB! Since no one has visited it, I thought that I would bring the shop to you, in first official henshinGARB catalogue! So check it out!
henshinhead logo tee
First up is the official henshinhead logo tee, available in a variety of sizes and colors, with the logo of your favorite toku site (EVER) across the chest. Only $12.44 (plus shipping and handling)
henshinhead logo women's tee
Just for the ladies out there, available in various sizes and colors, and also only $12.44 (+s&h). Just a way to show your love people.
HENSHINHEAD RULES! Tee
For those of you that would prefer something a little simpler, here's your basic tee, which proclaims proudly and boldly your opinion of of your favorite toku-blog! Only $9.79. Available in a variety of sizes and colors.
Super Hero Time Support: Heroes for Japan
Invoking the spirit behind the creation of the Super Hero Time Japan Relief Effort, this design symbolizes the toku hero in all of us. Show your support, and buy in bulk. All proceeds to benefit SHT. Available for only $17.40.
And now for something that might actually interest you.
GOOOO-KAIJA! Men's Tee
Arrgh! The logo for one of the best sentai series ever blazen across your chest for all to see (so long as it's not someone from the Toei legal department). Available in red, blue, green, black and what I'm calling silver (it's grey). Only $11.40.
GOOOO-KAIJA! Women's AA Tee
Ahoy! Show your inner space pirate with this cool tee. Available in red, yellow, pink, light blue, and black. Only $18.00 (sorry for the price jump, but Spreadshirt didn't have the color range I needed in standard weight women's tees).
Still Standing
Made with the pic of the Kamen Rider statue in Miyagi that withstood the devastating earthquake and tsunami. It's the ultimate symbol of the strength and resilience of the Japanese people, and stands as an inspiration to us all. Benefits to proceed the Super Hero Time Japan Relief Effort. Only $19.69. It's for a good cause.
And now for some things that aren't t-shirts.
Go-Kaiger Buttons
Your favorite Sentai, now in button form! These come five-to-a-pack, and are available in the larger 2.25 in (56 mm) buttons. $4.00 for the small buttons, $5.00 for the large buttons.
Still Standing Buttons
A button of the Kamen Rider statue in Miyagi, standing tall following the tsunami. Show your support for the Japanese people and the Super Hero Time Japan Relief Effort. Only $4.00 for the small button five-pack, and $5.00 for the large button five-pack.
That's whats in the shop right now, about 22 items all together. If any of this interests you, please visit the shop. From now til April 9th, I will donate all proceeds from all the products to the Super Hero Time Japan Relief Effort, if that in any way entices you. And of course, if there is anything else you would be interested in seeing in the shop, just let me know.
UPDATE: (3/27/11) Hey, new design has been added, check it out!
Don't make me push my buttons! Tee
It's a men's heavyweight tee, and a fun play on words with a toku twist! Hand-drawn (with Photoshop) design by me! Available for only $17.00!
And for anyone that wants to save a buck, there are now $15, $25, and $50 e-gift vouchers available. So feel free to visit. And please, SOMEBODY BUY SOMETHING! If not for me, then at least for charity! I know you've been to the shop, and there had to have been something you liked. If it's the prices, I can't help the pricing, Spreadshirt sets most of that. So help out someone struggling in Japan, and then maybe come back and help out a struggling college student. And in case you'd rather just give five bucks to SHT, follow the link here: http://superherotime.chipin.com/super-hero-time
It's like Luka says, "Money makes the world go 'round!"
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on March 26, 2011 March 27, 2011 Categories Who Knows, Who Cares?Tags henshinGARB, Henshinhead, Kaizoku Sentai Go-kaiger, Super Hero Time!, Super Sentai1 Comment on henshinGARB Catalogue: Somebody buy something already! It's for charity.
Go-Kaiger's and OOO's Glorious Return!
Today was a very special day in the world of tokusatsu. Both Go-Kaiger and OOO had new episodes today (Sunday 3/20) since they cancelled both shows last week due the earthquake and subsequent events following. And the videos came early and kept coming. This is such a big deal that I'm going to have actual episode reviews for both new episodes! I know I said before that I wouldn't have episode-to-episode reviews, but this is definitely an exception.
But before I get to the reviews, I want to talk about two things that happened in both episodes. First, both episodes were followed by the first airing of the previews for their upcoming movies, although they weren't any different from the previews on their official websites. Actually, the preview for the OOO movie was new, but the Go-Kaiger movie wasn't. After the new episode of Go-Kaiger was the ad for the upcoming Go-Kaiger Goseiger Super Sentai 199 Warriors movie, and after OOO came the OOO Den-O All Riders: Let's Go, Kamen Rider! movie. Both of course are special anniversary movies, and both I believe are coming sometime in April, I'm not sure if they changed the original release date or not. And something else that happened in both episodes that I noticed, which may be more important, is that neither show started or ended with the sponsors segment (i.e., the part where the voice over lady announces that the following businesses sponsored this episode of whatever it is). Now whether that is because they have no sponsors, or because they felt it was inappropriate to push sponsors after a major disaster, I'm not sure. No one has really said why. At least we got to see some really good shots for next week's episodes.
And now for the reviews.
Disclaimer: I cannot guarantee complete accuracy at this moment, at least not until I see subbed versions of these shows.
Go-Kaiger Chapter 5: Judgement Pirates
Episode starts out on the ship, where Luka is reading a newspaper from space (what, they don't have iPads in space? purely sarcastic remark), when she comes across a full two-page ad that has their wanted posters on it. While Marvelous dashes it off, everyone else is concerned about these wanted posters getting out. Then Navi gives some prediction, and they go off. Everyone is a little cautious, I guess from Navi's prediction, but Marvelous just goes running off straight into a police station, where he is immediately identified from his wanted poster. And who is there to make the arrest? Why it's Jasmine/DekaYellow, who tries to bring him in and threatens to arrest the other for piracy. They try to talk her out of it, saying that Zangyack placed those charges against them, and that Zangyack is the real enemy, but she's more concerned with bringing in Marvelous. So, they run a distraction for all the other cops in the room, while Marvelous makes a break for it. As soon as he gets outside though, he's stopped by Doggie Krueger/DekaMaster. And since Doggie was bringing him in, he took Marvelous' mobirate. Of course, right after Doggie has him where he wants him, that's when Zangyack's MOTW (monster of the week) shows up and starts the countdown on a very menacing-looking device. Of course, since they were criminals committing a crime right in front of a cop, Krueger had to step in and try to stop them, even risking himself to keep Marvelous out-of-the-way. While that fight was going on, the others ran into other Gomin, and fought them using Go-onger and Dairanger powers. The scene turns back to Krueger and Marvelous who just managed to get away from the fight, and Marvelous is still trying to get Krueger to let him go, but since Krueger is a cop and has sworn to turn in all criminals, he just won't, and tells him to stay in that hiding spot while he goes back to stop them. It seems that he also doesn't have his sentai powers even though he didn't fight in the Legendary War, just thought I should include that. But when he left, Marvelous notices blood on the floor and remembers seeing Krueger getting shot while protecting him. So, just before they finish off Krueger, Marvelous swoops in and manages to save him. They find themselves back in the room they were hiding in, and as a form of gratitude, and as a way of acknowledging that Marvelous isn't just some evil space pirate, he un-cuffs him and gives him back his mobirate. And of course now that Marvelous has his mobirate back, he takes care of the motw's Gomins and destroys the machine just in time. Of course, now that that's happened, the fight continues outside where he meets up with everyone else, and they all change into Dekaranger, and just like in chapter 3, they go through the Dekaranger henshin sequence and an instrumental version of the main theme of Dekaranger plays in the background. They even use one a Dekaranger signature finisher to take down the motw. And all this while Doggie Krueger looks on. But of course, the fight doesn't end there. This time, only the motw is made giant, and threatens to use the weapon himself, so it's Go-KaiOh time. And now that they unlock the full powers of Dekaranger, they get DekaRacer, forming DekaGo-KaiOh. If you need a picture, just check the last gallery. Not only does it separate, and drive up the side of a building to fight the monster, but when it recombines with Go-KaiOh, its twin blasters separate and Go-KaiOh can use them. And for the big finish, the parts of DekaRacer in the arms and legs act like gatling guns and blow the motw to kingdom come. Later they are back on the ground, trying to get Krueger to help, when they rum into armed officers with their weapons at the ready (again) when Ban/DekaRed shows up and basically declares that they won't recognize the claims that the Go-Kaigers are pirates. There is some dialogue between Ban and Marvelous, and like in chp.3, the DekaRed uniform appears in front of Ban for a moment. And then everyone goes on their merry way. And from what I could see of next week's episode, it will definitely be centered in Luka.
UPDATE: (3/23/11) Hey, wanted to do this earlier, but something was up with WordPress. Anyway, it seems that Zangyack had almost doubled the reward for all of them, to which everyone was impressed but not too concerned about. Marvelous asked Navi for another prediction, and after hitting his head on the ceiling, he told them "If you're looking for something, it's always a good idea to ask at a police station". So that's why they went to the police station. Marvelous ran in, asked if anyone knew where the greatest treasure in the universe was, and Jasmine/DekaYellow tricked him into allowing her to arrest him. She told the other to turn themselves in, they acted like they were going to fight, and then ran for it. Marvelous fought off the cops and managed to escape, but was caught by Doggie Kruger. Then Zangyack showed up, still didn't catch his name, and motw was starting the countdown on a series of underground drilling missiles targeted at every major city in the world. Kruger was just observing then, but Ahim, who safely got back to the ship with the others, called Marvelous' mobirate right then, and they were forced to reveal themselves and fight their way out. They got away, Kruger refused to let Marvelous go, and went back to bring in the motw. But Marvelous saw a blood trail following Kruger and realized that Kruger was hurt. Back inside the oddly unoccupied warehouse, Kruger managed to get to this upper level right above the Zangyack, but before he could act, the wound flared up, causing him to convulse, and a drop of his blood fell on motw's head. He turn's around shoots at Kruger, and Kruger falls into a bunch barrels. As they were going to finish off Kruger, Marvelous swooped in and got him out. Outside, the others, who were tracking Marvelous using their mobirates, ran into Gomins outside of the warehouse, and fought them using Go-onger and Dairanger powers. Back to Marvelous and Kruger, Kruger asked why he came back to save him, and why he didn't try to run. Marvelous said that he owed Kruger for getting hurt protecting him, and that he was following his honor code. Kruger was surprised to see that a pirate had an honor code, and went on to say that even of Marvelous had run away, that SPD and Zangyack pursue him and his crew, and that there would be no place to hide. Marvelous said he didn't care, that he would do what he needed to, and that he would live the way he does, even if the whole universe was his enemy. And as he was turning around to deal with old motw, Kruger uncuffed him and gave him back his mobirate, telling him not to just leave. Marvelous joked about not blaming him for what might happen, and then he went back and destroyed the machine after taking out the Gomin in the warehouse, with a second left on the clock. The fight went outside, the others showed up, they thought he had just run away from SPD, but he told them that he was helped out by a "goody two-shoes space cop", and Kruger came out and said it was he that was helped by a goody two-shoes space pirate. They turned around, started fighting motw, and halfway through, changed into Dekaranger, and blew him up. In the Zangyack ship, Gil was losing it, and ordered Inzan to fire the reviving laser (that has no official name btw). Needless to say, motw got bigger, threatened to use the missiles himself, Go-KaiOh was called in, and they started fighting. They managed to get the missile away from him and sent it into the fleet, where Gil got pissed off even more. Then Kruger called to them and said that they should now be able to use Dekaranger's full power. They did the little key turn thing, and they changed into DekaGo-KaiOh, and could then use Pat-Striker (sorry I got the name wrong the first time, I didn't actually watch Dekaranger, or that much of Power Rangers SPD now that I think about it). It ran around on its own, shot at motw a few times, drove up the side of a building and shot at him some more, then it recombined with Go-KaiOh and it's blasters separated into two guns that Go-KaiOh could use on motw, and they shot at him gansta-style, too. Man, Go-KaiOh is awesome! Any way, they finished motw off with what they called Gokai Full Burst, where they shot at motw with the gattling guns stored in Pat-Striker's wheel base. Monster go boom, fight over. Later, they were carrying Kruger out, when they were swarmed by officers, again. Then Ban/DekaRed showed up, and declared that their special investigation into Go-Kaiger revealed that the charges of piracy were false, and that they were nothing more than lies perpetrated by Zangyack, and that they were free to go. As the Go-Kaigers were leaving, Ban called to them and said that they better be careful with the Dekaranger's powers. To which Marvelous replied that if they had any complaints, they knew how to find them.
UPDATE: (3/24/11) The moster's name was Bramdu. That is all.
Kamen Rider OOO ep. 26: Ankh, the Fighter, and Full Armament
Starts out with Date treating Eiji's wounds from his fight with the Parrot Yummy, and them trying to figure out just what the Yummy has been doing and what he did with the boxer. Because it is a bird Yummy, and Ankh attempted to protect it during the last fight, there are many implications that Ankh created it in the first place (of course we already knew he didn't, but they didn't know, so they had to figure it out). Even Eiji seems unsure at this point, and wants to go right back out there to find out for sure, but his injuries were too much then and he was forced to sit out while Date and Gotou went to look for the Yummy and the boxer. Of course, Hina is worried that Eiji might be suffering from the same kind of punch-drunk effects that the boxer showed signs of, due to all the fights and physical drain caused by the combos. Date tried to reassure her, but they needed to leave then to make sure that the Parrot didn't attack any more boxers. In the mean time, the Yummy is trying to get the boxer to act on his still-present desire to fight, even going out and getting the boxer that he was supposed to fight before his injury forced him to retire. Of course, Date shows up and tries to stop him, but to no luck, leaving them with the task of trying to find out where they are. At this point in the episode, we come to Dr.Maki sitting in his car, which is parked about 20 ft from the entrance to Cous Coussier, while he is watching Chiyoko. And it's revealed that his freak out over seeing her picture in that pamphlet is because she looks exactly like his older sister who died when he was young, which might explain his obsession with endings. Of course by this point, Eiji is out trying to help, but his injuries are still very severe and he can barely make his way around. He managed to run into Date and Gotou, who tried to convince him to go back, but he still felt like Ankh was innocent and that he had to help out him and the boxer, so he jumped on a RideVendor and drove off. Later the boxer and the person he was supposed to fight before meet up and prepare to fight one another. As they fight, Ankh gets caught in a fight with the Parrot Yummy, and is just saved by Eiji, who fights the Yummy in TaToBa form, while Date and Gotou try to stop the fight between the boxers. They end up having to go after the Yummy, leaving the boxers to fight alone. As they corner the Yummy, Date henshins into Birth, and reveals Birth's BirthDay form, as he has all weapons deployed. And Eiji manages to finish off the Yummy using ShaUTa form. Back in the ring, both boxers had knocked each other down, and the feathers on the boxer's broken hand had disappeared. Even though there was no winner, the boxer was glad that he was able to have that last fight, so that he could end his career in dignity. As the show ended, Kougami was finishing a new cake, and wishing "Happy Birthday!" to Ankh's left hand, which was seen at the end. And in next week's episode, they are all filming a Kamen Rider movie (refering to Ichigo) and it appears that OOO will have to face two different Yummies.
UPDATE: (3/23/11) I wasn't too far off on this one. While Date was trying to treat Eiji's wounds, Eiji was still defending Ankh, saying that Ankh didn't revive like the other, that he can't produce his own Yummies, that he let the Yummy live to find out who had his Core Medals. Date and Gotou decided to leave to try to find Okamura (the boxer) and stop the Parrot Yummy (which Date kept calling a chicken) before it hurt anyone else. Hina was worried about Eiji possibly being punch-drunk like Okamura, and tried to ask Date if he knew anything, but neither him nor Gotou knew enough about how being OOO and using combos affected his system, which left them all even more worried. It then went to Date and Gotou in a different part of town talking about how neither of them really got involved with any of that at Kougami because of their own circumstances (Date because he was just in it for the money at the time, and Gotou because he was so anxoius to fight), and Gotou said that he wanted to go back to Kougami. Elsewhere, Cazari was talking to Dr. Maki about the new Yummy and where it came from. After that, Dr. Maki went on to spy on Chiyoko, who, as it turns out, greatly resembles Dr. Maki's deceased older sister. In the mean time, the Yummy was trying to get Okamura to act on his desires to box again, and of course, was successful in doing so. But in order for his desire to be completely fulfilled, he has to fight Takeda (the other boxer he was supposed to fight for the title). So the Yummy swoops into the gym Takeda is training at, and tells him that the man that he was meant to fight is ready for him. Date has already transformed and tries to fight the Yummy, but in the end, Takeda chooses to go with the Yummy to wherever Okamura is. At this point, Hina realizes that Eiji is missing from his room. He managed to catch up with Date and Gotou while they are looking for Okamura, and tells them about the gym Okamura trained at before he went pro, and that the Yummy probably took him there. They try to tell Eiji that they can handle this on their own, but Eiji refuses to go back, and when they try to talk him out of fighting, on the chance that Ankh could join in, Eiji tells them that he has been prepared to fight Ankh since the very beginning, but today wasn't that day. Eiji hops on a RideVendor and heads out, leaving Date and Gotou to find their own way there. Back at the gym where the Yummy is hiding Okamura and Takeda, the Yummy starts the fight, while starting a fight with Ankh, whose been spying on the Yummy this whole time. Before the Yummy has a chance to finish off Ankh, Eiji pulls up and tells Ankh that he was onto Ankh's real plan, to allow the Yummy to survive and find out who had Ankh's Core Medals, and that he gave Eiji his Cores as insurance that they wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. And Ankh harkened back with a contrite remark about how sharp Eiji was despite being a fool, and then it was OOO time. While he fought the Yummy outside, Okamura and Takeda were going at it inside. Date and Gotou showed up and tried to stop their fight, but even with Okamura still punch-drunk, there was no way they would stop. Then OOO and the Yummy came crashing through the ceiling, and Date was forced to deal with that instead. Outside, Eiji was losing steam, even this short fight was almost too much. Date came in, henshined into Birth, and took over the fight, even revealing BirthDay form. Then OOO finished off the Yummy in ShaUTa form. Back inside the ring, both boxers had knocked each other out, and the Yummies effect wore off. But that didn't deter Okamura, who decided then that he was going to go through physical therapy and get back in the ring, and Takeda promised to make sure that he kept the championship title until then. And I already told you how it ended before, so I am done.
That's all for now. I'll try to keep you updated about these shows and others. Sorry, I won't do an episode review for the new episode of Power Rangers Samurai, but I'll try to report any news about that too. And any other major toku-related news that might pop up, I will report on that. Once again, I ask that you donate to the Super Hero Time Japan Relief Effort(http://superherotime.chipin.com/super-hero-time ) , and to check out henshinGARB, but only if you're interested. Check in later.
Author M.F. CalhounPosted on March 21, 2011 March 24, 2011 Categories MC's postsTags henshinGARB, Kaizoku Sentai Go-kaiger, Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider DEN-O, Kamen Rider OOO, Super Hero Time!, Super Sentai, Tensou Sentai GoseigerLeave a comment on Go-Kaiger's and OOO's Glorious Return! | {
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If you are an Arizona marketer, fill out the below to add a location or make an edit to your current listing. We recommend consumer-facing information. All locations need to be within 50 miles of an Arizona ZIP Code. Additions will be confirmed within 5-7 business days of receipt. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
Eye On Sports Media: Is Rick Majerus the One, True Billiken?
Is Rick Majerus the One, True Billiken?
Unlike fellow Jesuit university Georgetown and its Hoyas, and the MAAC's Manhattan College with its Jaspers, the answer is more straightforward. In fact, a whole page of the school's media guide is dedicated to the explanation, which is as follows.
One of the truly unique mascots in college athletics, the Billiken is a symbol of good luck that became a national craze in the early 1900s.
In 1908, Florence Pretz, an art teacher and illustrator in Kansas City, Mo., received a patent for her version of an ancient Asian figure – a chubby character with pixie ears, fat cheeks and an ear-to-ear grin. A year later, the Billiken Company of Chicago adopted the likeness, giving it its name. Initially manufactured as a bank and statuette, the Billiken reached its peak of popularity in 1911, when it was widely recognized as a universal symbol of good fortune. How the name became associated with Saint Louis University remains a hotly debated issue. Whatever version you accept, it happened between 1910 and 1911 at the height of Billikenmania.
After practice, McNamara drew a cartoon of Bender as a Billiken, posted it in a local drugstore window and tabbed the football team "Bender's Billikens." The sporting public took up the name with such enthusiasm that it soon became the official nickname of all SLU teams.
Legend has it that the Billiken has three kinds of luck – good, better and best. To buy a Billiken gives the buyer good luck. To have one given to you is better luck. The best luck comes if the Billiken is stolen.
A chubby character with pixie ears, fat cheeks and an ear-to-ear grin? Except for the pixie ear part, could it be that Majerus might be the reincarnation of the original Billiken? | {
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Home Industry What Nintendo & Wii U Need to Do – Part 1:Fire your...
What Nintendo & Wii U Need to Do – Part 1:Fire your Marketing Team
First I would like to state that I love my Wii U, its a unique console and offers what others consoles don't. However here in lies the problem with the Wii U, Nintendo has failed to properly market the features that sets itself apart from the rest of the group. In an effort to maybe help Nintendo, (or at the very least, shine a light on the problems Nintendo is facing) I have decided to write a three part article going over what those issues are and how I feel Nintendo should fix them.
Part 1- Fire your Marketing Team
Well you don't exactly have to fire them, just have them market other Nintendo products that sell themselves like the 3DS . One of the major problems the Wii U has been facing and even Nintendo as a whole has been dealing with is branding issues, from people thinking the Wii U is an extension to the Wii all the way down to the craziness that ensued when the 2DS was announced in one of the poorest ways possible. Suffice it to say Nintendo has a marketing problem and needs to fix it asap before it's beyond salvation.
This is honestly the biggest problem that faces the Wii U is the name itself; due to its strange naming convention it doesn't actually make you aware that it's a new console. A perfect example would be to look at how Sony has marketed the Playstation versions by using a similar strategy for different types of the same console: Take the name of the base model for example Playstation 3 and add an extra description such as the Playstation 3 Slim. For someone who knows nothing about the Playstation 3, they will assume that the Playstation 3 Slim is simply a different model of the Playstation 3 but still a Playstation 3. This same logic has worked its way over to the Wii and Wii U where consumers perceives the Wii U as simply a different version of the Wii where obviously this is not the case. This just speaks to the basics of introducing a newer version of a product you either :
A) Add a number to the end of the name and increase said number to represent newer versions
B) Add an additional word that imparts the idea of being "improved" for example : Super (see Super Nintendo)
It's a very simple formula that Nintendo decided to abandon , not without reason mind you. Nintendo's goal was to hopefully ride off the coattails of the Wii's success by keeping the same base name so consumers would know that the Wii U was Nintendo's next console. This is all well and good for gamers who follow this sort of information but for those who simply play video games (those that made the Wii the success it was), they had no idea as the name didn't denote an improvement and resulted in the naming scheme failing on both accounts.
We already touched on the message a little when dealing with the Wii U's name. However, there is more to a message then just the name , a lot more. Lets take a quick look at a Wii U advertisement:
Once again, we see that Nintendo is confused in what exactly they want to do with the console at release. We have a video showing all the group and party options that the Wii U offers to appeal to the crowd that the Wii gathered. Yet, in no part of the video does it try to separate the Wii and Wii U. This could have been done by showing a comparison in graphics to show that the WiiU is, in fact, a new console, but, as you can clearly see, this did not happen. It's important to remember that the Wii U's goal was to bring the focus back to the gamers but this video does not appeal to or show anything that a gamer would want in their purchase and while gamers are not the ones who make up the majority of console sales they are the ones who drive the direction of sales.
Another issue with the message lies in Nintendo's failure to advertise the Wii U's strengths. The Wii U has unique strengths to make up for its downfalls in comparison to PS4 or Xbox, but Nintendo needs to communicate those strengths. A perfect example would be off-TV play. Nintendo advertises the feature as great when someone else wants to watch the TV. I don't know about you, but I have never run into this problem because I wasn't born in the 1950's and TV's practically fall off of trees, they are so common. But there are more features that are never advertised. For example, you can take the Game Pad ANYWHERE in the house! This feature alone should warrant its very own commercial because not only would it be funny, but it would provide another honest reason to purchase a Wii U, which is good for everyone. Here are but some of the many examples the Game Pad off TV screen provide:
Cooking in the Kitchen? Put Netflix on and keep watching or Youtube to follow a recipe
Outside having a smoke? No more Angry Birds with that cig; you're now hunting Rathalos in Monster Hunter
Taking an extended sit on the toilet ? Words with friends pffffft; you're now playing Mario in a tanooki suit stomping on goombas in Super Mario Bros U
In the tub taking a bath? No more just listening to music; you're captaining the Jack Doll and finding booty in Assassins Creed 4
Socializing in the Living room with family you're not fond of? No more fondling your phone hoping for someone to get back to you to save you from this misery; you get to hunt down the Joker and his thugs because you're Batman!
You see where I'm going with this. It's a simple commercial idea and hits the mark on several levels. Its funny due to the absurd situations you can set up; it describes a feature's ability to the extreme by showing all of those situations you did not consider; and above all, it provides awareness to the other pertinent features that come with owning a Wii U. Then you could take all those absurd situations and have them all end the same way, which is whatever the person was doing coming back to the TV and hitting one button and resuming their game there. It's straight forward ,simple, funny, has room for variety, and above all helps Nintendo spread the word while better informing its potential customers.
Not only does Nintendo suffer from not truly knowing who to target with their advertising, they also aren't using other media outlets beyond the Internet. Currently Nintendo's main advertising is what is termed "Nintendo Direct's, " which are videos that are published once a month explaining new features and what is coming next from Nintendo. The problem is that, for the most part, these videos are for those who have already purchased the products (WiiU & 3DS) as they are only placed on YouTube or easily accessible from the respective consoles. Information about upcoming games, especially exclusives, should be marketed to a far broader audience in other venues.
It really comes down to Nintendo making you look to find this information. People don't want to look until they get interested and they won't get interested until you show them what to get interested about. That wraps up part one of this article; follow the link for part 2! | {
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Saudi Arabia will lift a ban on internet phone calls, a government spokesman said, part of efforts to attract more business to the country. All online voice and video call services such as Microsoft's Skype and Facebook's WhatsApp that satisfy regulatory requirements will become accessible at midnight (2100 GMT), Adel Abu Hameed, spokesman for the telecoms regulator CITC said on Twitter on Wednesday.
The policy reversal represents part of the Saudi government's broad reforms to diversify the economy partly in response to low oil prices, which have hit the country's finances. "Digital transformation is one of the key kick-starters for the Saudi economy, as it will incentivise the growth of internet-based businesses, especially in the media and entertainment industries," a statement from the information ministry said. "Access to VoIP (voice over internet protocol) will reduce operational costs and spur digital entrepreneurship – that's why it is such an important step in the Kingdom's internet regulation," it said.
Perhaps they found the backdoors. | {
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Fantasy Flight Games have announced a new TX-225 GAVw Occupier Combat Assault Tank Unit Expansion for the Star Wars: Legion miniatures game.
It will be released in the second quarter of 2019 and is priced at $59.99.
Will you be adding this Assault Tank to your Legion list? | {
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import os
from setuptools import setup, find_packages
from salad import VERSION
ROOT_DIR = os.path.dirname(__file__)
SOURCE_DIR = os.path.join(ROOT_DIR)
requirements = ["nose", "splinter>=0.11.0", "zope.testbrowser", "lettuce>=0.2.10.1"]
try: import argparse
except ImportError: requirements.append('argparse')
setup(
name="salad",
description="A nice mix of great BDD ingredients",
author="Steven Skoczen",
author_email="[email protected]",
url="https://github.com/wieden-kennedy/salad",
version=VERSION,
download_url = ['https://github.com/skoczen/lettuce/tarball/fork', ],
install_requires=requirements,
dependency_links = ['https://github.com/skoczen/lettuce/tarball/fork#egg=lettuce-0.2.10.1', ],
packages=find_packages(),
zip_safe=False,
include_package_data=True,
classifiers=[
"Programming Language :: Python",
"License :: OSI Approved :: BSD License",
"Operating System :: OS Independent",
"Development Status :: 4 - Beta",
"Environment :: Web Environment",
"Intended Audience :: Developers",
"Topic :: Internet :: WWW/HTTP",
"Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: Python Modules",
],
entry_points={
'console_scripts': ['salad = salad.cli:main'],
},
)
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} |
/*
* srm_env.c - Access to SRM environment
* variables through linux' procfs
*
* (C) 2001,2002,2006 by Jan-Benedict Glaw <[email protected]>
*
* This driver is at all a modified version of Erik Mouw's
* Documentation/DocBook/procfs_example.c, so: thank
* you, Erik! He can be reached via email at
* <[email protected]>. It is based on an idea
* provided by DEC^WCompaq^WIntel's "Jumpstart" CD. They
* included a patch like this as well. Thanks for idea!
*
* This program is free software; you can redistribute
* it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
* Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software
* Foundation.
*
* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be
* useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
* warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
* PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more
* details.
*
* You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
* License along with this program; if not, write to the
* Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place,
* Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
*
*/
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/init.h>
#include <linux/proc_fs.h>
#include <asm/console.h>
#include <asm/uaccess.h>
#include <asm/machvec.h>
#define BASE_DIR "srm_environment" /* Subdir in /proc/ */
#define NAMED_DIR "named_variables" /* Subdir for known variables */
#define NUMBERED_DIR "numbered_variables" /* Subdir for all variables */
#define VERSION "0.0.6" /* Module version */
#define NAME "srm_env" /* Module name */
MODULE_AUTHOR("Jan-Benedict Glaw <[email protected]>");
MODULE_DESCRIPTION("Accessing Alpha SRM environment through procfs interface");
MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");
typedef struct _srm_env {
char *name;
unsigned long id;
struct proc_dir_entry *proc_entry;
} srm_env_t;
static struct proc_dir_entry *base_dir;
static struct proc_dir_entry *named_dir;
static struct proc_dir_entry *numbered_dir;
static char number[256][4];
static srm_env_t srm_named_entries[] = {
{ "auto_action", ENV_AUTO_ACTION },
{ "boot_dev", ENV_BOOT_DEV },
{ "bootdef_dev", ENV_BOOTDEF_DEV },
{ "booted_dev", ENV_BOOTED_DEV },
{ "boot_file", ENV_BOOT_FILE },
{ "booted_file", ENV_BOOTED_FILE },
{ "boot_osflags", ENV_BOOT_OSFLAGS },
{ "booted_osflags", ENV_BOOTED_OSFLAGS },
{ "boot_reset", ENV_BOOT_RESET },
{ "dump_dev", ENV_DUMP_DEV },
{ "enable_audit", ENV_ENABLE_AUDIT },
{ "license", ENV_LICENSE },
{ "char_set", ENV_CHAR_SET },
{ "language", ENV_LANGUAGE },
{ "tty_dev", ENV_TTY_DEV },
{ NULL, 0 },
};
static srm_env_t srm_numbered_entries[256];
static int
srm_env_read(char *page, char **start, off_t off, int count, int *eof,
void *data)
{
int nbytes;
unsigned long ret;
srm_env_t *entry;
if (off != 0) {
*eof = 1;
return 0;
}
entry = (srm_env_t *) data;
ret = callback_getenv(entry->id, page, count);
if ((ret >> 61) == 0) {
nbytes = (int) ret;
*eof = 1;
} else
nbytes = -EFAULT;
return nbytes;
}
static int
srm_env_write(struct file *file, const char __user *buffer, unsigned long count,
void *data)
{
int res;
srm_env_t *entry;
char *buf = (char *) __get_free_page(GFP_USER);
unsigned long ret1, ret2;
entry = (srm_env_t *) data;
if (!buf)
return -ENOMEM;
res = -EINVAL;
if (count >= PAGE_SIZE)
goto out;
res = -EFAULT;
if (copy_from_user(buf, buffer, count))
goto out;
buf[count] = '\0';
ret1 = callback_setenv(entry->id, buf, count);
if ((ret1 >> 61) == 0) {
do
ret2 = callback_save_env();
while((ret2 >> 61) == 1);
res = (int) ret1;
}
out:
free_page((unsigned long)buf);
return res;
}
static void
srm_env_cleanup(void)
{
srm_env_t *entry;
unsigned long var_num;
if (base_dir) {
/*
* Remove named entries
*/
if (named_dir) {
entry = srm_named_entries;
while (entry->name != NULL && entry->id != 0) {
if (entry->proc_entry) {
remove_proc_entry(entry->name,
named_dir);
entry->proc_entry = NULL;
}
entry++;
}
remove_proc_entry(NAMED_DIR, base_dir);
}
/*
* Remove numbered entries
*/
if (numbered_dir) {
for (var_num = 0; var_num <= 255; var_num++) {
entry = &srm_numbered_entries[var_num];
if (entry->proc_entry) {
remove_proc_entry(entry->name,
numbered_dir);
entry->proc_entry = NULL;
entry->name = NULL;
}
}
remove_proc_entry(NUMBERED_DIR, base_dir);
}
remove_proc_entry(BASE_DIR, NULL);
}
return;
}
static int __init
srm_env_init(void)
{
srm_env_t *entry;
unsigned long var_num;
/*
* Check system
*/
if (!alpha_using_srm) {
printk(KERN_INFO "%s: This Alpha system doesn't "
"know about SRM (or you've booted "
"SRM->MILO->Linux, which gets "
"misdetected)...\n", __FUNCTION__);
return -ENODEV;
}
/*
* Init numbers
*/
for (var_num = 0; var_num <= 255; var_num++)
sprintf(number[var_num], "%ld", var_num);
/*
* Create base directory
*/
base_dir = proc_mkdir(BASE_DIR, NULL);
if (!base_dir) {
printk(KERN_ERR "Couldn't create base dir /proc/%s\n",
BASE_DIR);
goto cleanup;
}
base_dir->owner = THIS_MODULE;
/*
* Create per-name subdirectory
*/
named_dir = proc_mkdir(NAMED_DIR, base_dir);
if (!named_dir) {
printk(KERN_ERR "Couldn't create dir /proc/%s/%s\n",
BASE_DIR, NAMED_DIR);
goto cleanup;
}
named_dir->owner = THIS_MODULE;
/*
* Create per-number subdirectory
*/
numbered_dir = proc_mkdir(NUMBERED_DIR, base_dir);
if (!numbered_dir) {
printk(KERN_ERR "Couldn't create dir /proc/%s/%s\n",
BASE_DIR, NUMBERED_DIR);
goto cleanup;
}
numbered_dir->owner = THIS_MODULE;
/*
* Create all named nodes
*/
entry = srm_named_entries;
while (entry->name && entry->id) {
entry->proc_entry = create_proc_entry(entry->name,
0644, named_dir);
if (!entry->proc_entry)
goto cleanup;
entry->proc_entry->data = (void *) entry;
entry->proc_entry->owner = THIS_MODULE;
entry->proc_entry->read_proc = srm_env_read;
entry->proc_entry->write_proc = srm_env_write;
entry++;
}
/*
* Create all numbered nodes
*/
for (var_num = 0; var_num <= 255; var_num++) {
entry = &srm_numbered_entries[var_num];
entry->name = number[var_num];
entry->proc_entry = create_proc_entry(entry->name,
0644, numbered_dir);
if (!entry->proc_entry)
goto cleanup;
entry->id = var_num;
entry->proc_entry->data = (void *) entry;
entry->proc_entry->owner = THIS_MODULE;
entry->proc_entry->read_proc = srm_env_read;
entry->proc_entry->write_proc = srm_env_write;
}
printk(KERN_INFO "%s: version %s loaded successfully\n", NAME,
VERSION);
return 0;
cleanup:
srm_env_cleanup();
return -ENOMEM;
}
static void __exit
srm_env_exit(void)
{
srm_env_cleanup();
printk(KERN_INFO "%s: unloaded successfully\n", NAME);
return;
}
module_init(srm_env_init);
module_exit(srm_env_exit);
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} |
Business, Gender, News
He-E-Os: lack of female leadership even in female dominated industries
Date: April 27, 2020Author: ontherecord 2 Comments
Females are enrolling in higher education courses more than their male counterparts but remain underrepresented in leadership roles in the workforce, so why is this? (Image source: Ji Sub Jeong/Huffpost)
By Helen Karakulak | @Helen_Karakulak
The idea that a lack of women in leadership roles is due to disinterest has been disproven by female graduates in recent years.
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) higher education enrolments and graduate labour market statistics indicate that lack of interest is an invalid argument as women outnumber men in higher education completion rates.
The key findings from this data demonstrates the expansion of women's participation in higher education as women represent 58.4% of enrolled domestic students across all institutions nationwide since 2017.
However, despite women obtaining more tertiary qualifications, senior roles across various fields are still held predominantly by men, even in industries that are considered female dominated.
The WGEA data, gathered by the Department of Education and Training, is presented to indicate the gender composition of domestic enrolments by field of study, outlining female dominated, mixed and male dominated industries.
One of the largest female-dominated fields of study is Health, with 73.6% of undergraduate enrolments being female and a mere 26.4% of enrolments being male as of 2017.
Following higher education completion comes entering the labour market, with the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) national graduate outcome survey finding that overall employment outcomes after undergraduate study, again, slightly favours women statistically.
As of 2018, an overall 88.2% of women with an undergraduate degree had found employment, as opposed to 84.8% of male graduates.
Despite this, according to the WGEA, 82.9% of senior leadership positions in the non-public sector are held by men.
Along with being one of the largest female-dominated fields of study, figures collected by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 2019 indicate that women make up 53% of early-career practitioners yet are not progressing to senior positions.
According to the WGEA, the Healthcare industry has the highest representation of females in CEO roles, but this 39.8% can hardly be considered equitable.
So, while we can see that lack of participation in education and employment isn't an issue for women, why is it that we see so few females in leadership roles?
Researcher from UniSA's Centre for Workplace Excellence, Dr Jill Gould, says that there's enough evidence indicating women are just as ambitious as men, yet a gender bias is still present in the workplace.
"I still hear that women don't want those senior roles, but that's an archaic approach that's just plain wrong," she said.
"Something is happening to graduates, something gendered, I don't think anyone can argue that, the numbers are there."
Dr Gould said that a second-generation gender bias contributes to a disproportionate number of women in leadership roles, which can often go unnoticed.
"Second-generation gender bias is much more subtle. Perpetrators may not even be aware of it or that they're perpetuating it," she said.
Second-generation gender bias in the workplace stems from the concept of an ideal worker which typically exhibits traditionally masculine qualities.
These qualities stem from widespread traditional gender roles, such as considering men more suited for confrontation than women.
Second-generation gender bias is often present in the wording of roles and basis of workplace activities that are biased against the inclusion of women, such as 7am meetings and after-work drinks, which typically would cut into out-of-hours family time.
"Workplaces and structures were created when men populated them and women were at home," Dr Gould says.
"This idea of an ideal worker, someone who works 24/7 and focuses on work over family, is an issue … this has an effect on both men and women, because men enjoy the flexibility just as much."
Part of Dr Gould's research explores practices for increasing women's representation in leadership roles, identifying the "trickle-down effect" which found companies appointing women to their corporate boards experienced a spike in women on their executive teams.
The research conducted regarding the trickle-down effect focused on large organisations listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).
The outcome of the study specified that while these results were promising, it's difficult to generalise to other sectors.
However, Dr Gould believes it would be beneficial for similar research to be conducted in other sectors to inform decision making at an executive level within other organisations.
"When researchers talk about generalising their findings, they need to conduct research across contexts," she said.
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Pingback: There's a lack of female leadership even in female-dominated industries - Leadership Lite | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} |
Mlače () is a settlement on the left bank of the Dravinja River east of Loče in the Municipality of Slovenske Konjice in eastern Slovenia. The entire municipality is part of the traditional region of Styria and is now included in the Savinja Statistical Region.
There is an early 17th-century mansion with an arcaded courtyard in the settlement.
References
External links
Mlače at Geopedia
Populated places in the Municipality of Slovenske Konjice | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} |
What is a Genebank?
The Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben, Germany. (Photo: Luis Salazar/Crop Trust)
By Crop Diversity Digest Staff
Have you ever wondered what a genebank does? The short answer is that genebanks store genes. Not literally, although there are some specialized genebanks that do manage genes – the actual bits of DNA that give living things their distinct characteristics.
The vast majority of genebanks contain living things, or parts of them, such as seeds, which themselves contain the collection of different genes that make each plant variety or animal breed unique. Genebanks ensure that these genetic materials are safely conserved and available for people to use.
The most common type of material in genebanks is seeds, many of which have evolved to last a long time if they are kept cool and dry.
Some plants have seeds that cannot be dried and cooled for storage. These plants are often conserved as small plantlets, growing very slowly under specialized conditions in test tubes in an in-vitro genebank, or else frozen in liquid nitrogen. Others, like fruit trees, can be conserved as adult living specimens in a field genebank. That is also true for livestock breeds, although eggs and sperm are also cryopreserved for the long term in liquid nitrogen.
Why We Need Genebanks
The diversity genebanks contain is the foundation on which we build the future of our food systems. Specific genes are what make a crop variety resistant to heat and drought, for example, or tolerant of pests and diseases, and are, therefore, the basis of agricultural adaptation.
If farmers and breeders are to respond to the climate emergency, they need access to diversity that might contain the solution to their problem. And yet, modern agriculture means that the diversity created by generations of attentive farmers is being lost. Hence the need to conserve as much of that diversity as possible, because once lost, a crop variety or livestock breed is gone forever.
That is just one difference between a genebank and other banks; genebank deposits are alive, which has consequences.
Genebanks need to ensure that their holdings remain alive, which requires appropriate technology and processes to check the viability of samples (during which scientists test whether a plant would be able to grow into a productive plants) and produce fresh material, if necessary. It also means that genebanks need good backup systems, sending duplicate samples for safe keeping in other genebanks and, ultimately, in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle. Even in the best genebanks, things can occasionally go disastrously wrong.
Right now, you are lucky to earn more than 2% interest on a financial deposit. Studies of various crops have shown a return on investment of up to 20% per year. No wonder The Economist described genebanks as "a vital safeguard against hunger".
Putting Diversity to Good Use
Genebanks are vital to the future of people on Earth, and in a sense they are much more valuable than ordinary banks.
Perhaps the most important use of the diversity in genebanks is to prepare crops to cope with climate emergencies. Future food security depends on more resilient varieties that deliver better nutrition and protect the environment.
Plant breeders can draw on genebanks in their search for particular traits that they need. Farmers too can try many different varieties to find those that will thrive under their conditions. All this depends on information.
Genebanks describe and assess their holdings to gather data on each sample's good and bad points. They know where it was collected, and the climate there. They need to make all this information freely available so that farmers, breeders and all other interested parties can find the genetic diversity that will help them improve the global food system.
What Role Does The Crop Trust Play?
The Crop Trust manages an endowment fund that supports a global network of genebanks, ensuring that they are efficient, effective, and sustainably financed.
It co-manages the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the ultimate safety deposit box for the world's crop genetic diversity.
It leads a project called BOLD: Biodiversity for Opportunities, Livelihoods and Development, which is funded by the Government of Norway to strengthen food and nutrition security worldwide by supporting the conservation and use of crop diversity in genebanks around the world.
Another project, Seeds for Resilience, is funded by the Federal Government of Germany to work with five national genebanks in Africa to improve their ability to conserve and distribute crop diversity.
The work of the Crop Trust and genebanks contributes to meeting target 2.5 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, conserving genetic diversity, as a key element in achieving zero hunger by 2030.
Genebanks by the Numbers
More than 1,750 genebanks – ranging from national, regional and international – around the world conserve, between them, about 7.4 million samples of crop diversity.
Since 2012, the international genebanks have distributed close to 1 million samples to users in more than 120 countries.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, holds duplicates of more than 1 million seed samples from genebanks around the world.
In 2019, seeds were returned from Svalbard to restock an international genebank destroyed by the war in Syria.
Brewing up a Genebank Success Story
An International Rescue Mission from Syria to Svalbard
African Genebanks Move from Strength to Strength
A Nutritious Future Starts in Genebanks | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} |
"Direct quantification of circulating MiRNAs in different stages of nas" by See-Lok Ho, Ho-Man Chan et al.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNAs that regulate human gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Growing evidence indicates that the expression profile of miRNAs is highly correlated with the occurrence of human diseases including cancers. Playing important roles in complex gene regulation processes, the aberrant expression pattern of various miRNAs is implicated in different types and even stages of cancer. Besides localizing in cells, many of these miRNAs are found circulating around the body in a wide variety of fluids such as urine, serum and saliva. Surprisingly, these extracellular circulating miRNAs are highly stable and resistant to degradation, and therefore, are considered as promising biomarkers for early cancer diagnostic via noninvasive extraction from body fluids. Unfortunately, the abundance of these small RNAs is ultralow in the body fluids, making it challenging to quantify them in complex sample matrixes. Establishing a sensitive, specific yet simple assay for an accurate quantification of circulating miRNAs is therefore desirable. Our group previously reported a sensitive and specific detection assay of miRNAs in single molecule level with the aid of total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy. In this work, we advanced the assay to differentiate the expression of a nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) up-regulator hsa-mir-205 (mir-205) in serum collected from patients of different stages of NPC. To overcome the background matrix interference in serum, a locked nucleic acid-modified molecular beacon (LNA/MB) was applied as the detection probe to hybridize, capture and detect target mir-205 in serum matrix with enhanced sensitivity and specificity. A detection limit of 500 fM was achieved. The as-developed method was capable of differentiating NPC stages by the level of mir-205 quantified in serum with only 10 L of serum and the whole assay can be completed in 1 h. The experimental results agreed well with those previously reported whereas the quantity of miR-205 determined by our assay was found comparable to that of quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), supporting that this assay can be served as a promising noninvasive detection tool for early NPC diagnosis, monitoring and staging.
This work is supported by the Young Scientists Fund from the National Science Foundation of China (21205006), and the University Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (GRF/HKBU201612, AoE/M06/08), and Faculty Research Grant of Hong Kong Baptist University (FRG2/12-13/035). | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
module API
module V1
class VersionController < APIController
abstract!
#place here common logic to all V1 controllers
end
end
end
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} |
One man chose CBD for ADHD instead of pharmaceuticals.
Tyler Hurst didn't have any friends in college. His ADHD caused him to be impulsive, way over-stimulated, and affected his ability to have conversations with people. He needed his peers to speed up to catch up to him, and he was always anxious about stuttering or stammering because he could think and type faster than he could talk.
At the time, he was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder instead of ADHD. He was given Lithium and popular antidepressant drugs, like Prozac, but they didn't do much for his symptoms. It wasn't until he graduated college and went to a new psychiatrist that he learned he had an attention problem, not manic depression, and started taking Ritalin for ADHD.
Before taking stimulants, Hurst describes his ADHD as giving him "brain fog." He's a writer and so much of his self-worth revolves around his new ideas and producing work. But he only had "fuzzy versions" of those ideas, which Hurst explains was really frustrating, until stimulants made them clearer. "The second I got on ADHD medication my outlook improved tremendously," he says.
Dr. Edward Hallowell, ADHD expert and NY Times bestselling author says "stimulant medication is the best [for ADHD]" and this is a popular opinion among doctors. In fact, 50 million stimulant prescriptions were written in 2011 in the U.S. alone.
Hallowell also tells Herb that people with ADHD struggle in many ways. "Prisons are full of people with undiagnosed ADD," he says. He explains it's because folks with ADHD can struggle with impulsivity, reckless, and addictive behaviors. "At worst, it can be living hell having ADHD," says Hallowell.
Adult ADHD can also affect relationships and a person's ability to hold down a job, which became Hurst's problem when he wanted to stop the stimulant medication.
Stimulants like Ritalin, which is methylphenidate, and Adderall, which is amphetamine, help those with ADD/ADHD to "slow down" and focus. But they also come with a slew of side effects. Hallowell says the most common side effect is decreased appetite. Elevated heart rate and blood pressure are also common, as are headaches, tremor, and insomnia. "Those are all controllable by simply stopping the medication," says Hallowell.
But for Hurst, Ritalin, and Adderall affected him more seriously, mainly by causing him a lot of anxiety. He says he constantly had a "low-level anxiety" for the years he was on prescription stimulants, especially physical symptoms like sweatiness, but he didn't fully realize it.
Sleep was hard to come by during those years. Although the Adderall would wear off around five o'clock in the afternoon, Hurst would consume caffeinated drinks throughout the day that would keep him up at night. Then, he had to either drink himself to sleep, take over-the-counter sleeping pills like Tylenol PM, or exercise so hard he passed out. But he couldn't simply shut down naturally and fall asleep, and he rarely got a full night's rest – not helping his erratic mood and behavior.
Eventually, Hurst was prescribed a combination of Adderall and Lexapro, an anti-depressant. But after six years on prescription stimulants, he had enough of their side effects and stopped taking them completely.
Taking Lexapro and massive amounts of caffeine daily, his work and relationships suffered. He says he was impulsive, short with people, and irritable. He also had "no filter" as he describes it, and would be too honest with colleagues to the point that it hurt the magazine he was an editor for at the time.
Eventually, that magazine went under, a major regret of Hurst's. "My mistakes are part of why it dissolved," he says. He then bounced around jobs, but his ADHD got in the way of him keeping anything stable. He had trouble sitting at his desk and paying attention at meetings; he would miss phone calls and would stress the people around him out. Off the ADHD meds, Hurst was eventually without steady employment for two years. He needed a change.
Hurst began smoking cannabis recreationally in the evenings in the midst of his struggle to properly medicate his ADHD. It made him feel good, he says, and calmed his anxiety, both physical and mental. He also noticed he could get a ton of work done; when his partner would go to sleep, he could get nine hours of work done in three.
He moved to Portland, Oregon around this time and became a medical cannabis patient to experiment with different strains and products. Hurst also began using cannabis during the day for ADHD, but found high THC strains affected his short term memory too much for him to concentrate and be very productive.
When Hurst began experimenting with high CBD strains, things began to click. Although he admits, it was a trial and error process. "I smoked CBD and I noticed I felt calm and able to do stuff as opposed to high THC strains when I also felt calmer, but had a few delusions, at times," says Hurst.
He explains that CBD calms his mind and his body; that often his anxiety and ADHD manifests itself physically, making his hands and feet sweaty and making him hyper-aware of his surroundings. For example, if a leaf blower is going on outside, he can't tune it out and focus on whatever he's doing. "So what the CBD did was make those things less of a big deal. I still notice them but I don't freak out about them," describes Hurst.
After a couple months of smoking high-CBD flower, Hurst stopped taking Lexapro and starting medicating completely with cannabis. He was using different medical cannabis products, and says he particularly liked an oil that was around 5:1 or 6:1 CBD to THC.
Basically, cannabis "kicks out" dopamine from their binding sites, Bearman explains, and replaces it with cannabinoids. This causes slower moving neural impulses, "which means you have basically less competition between concepts and ideas and other kinds of neural inputs in each of the frontal lobes," says Bearman.
Neurologically speaking, stimulants act on dopamine in the brain in a similar way. Although it interacts with the binding site differently, the result is similar: stimulants also cause "slower moving neural impulses going to the brain," Bearman explains.
About a year ago, Hurst found a source of hemp-derived CBD oil that he trusted, and it's been his primary ADHD medication ever since. He takes 5 to 10 mg of hemp-CBD two to three times a day, in the morning, afternoon, and night. Eating hemp caviar on the go and vaping low-THC flower with added CBD isolate is also part of his routine. "Low THC is key," Hurst says.
Bearman agrees with Hurst, that including THC into a routine for ADD/ADHD – or any medical ailment – will provide more relief than CBD alone.
"There's too much of a love affair with CBD. We need to have a love affair with the whole plant," Bearman tells Herb.
Bearman suggests taking 2.5 to 5 mg of THC along with 2.5 to 5 mg of CBD two to three times a day for ADHD. "Possibly double the amount of CBD if you want," says Bearman. He also explains that everyone's endocannabinoid system is different, so there's no "one size fits all," but a 1:1 CBD:THC oil would be a good place to start.
Now that Hurst found something that works for his ADHD, he says his plans are to "be the person I was supposed to be before my anxiety stopped it." He recently started writing again, hosts a cannabis-centric podcast called The Burning Bush, and also became a certified yoga instructor. His goal now is to start a plant-based trauma recovery class or retreat that will incorporate movement, cannabis, and maybe even psilocybin and ayahuasca, to help people overcome trauma and get their lives back. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
Privatizing America's Rogue Military, In A Way
Given the current corruption, inefficiency, and deception that plagues our military's bureaucracy, a change is much needed.
After a century of major American involvement in world affairs, it's safe to say that the U.S. Military has definitely deviated from what the founding fathers had intended it to be: A national defense force committed solely to protecting the American homeland, and on rare circumstances, lending a hand to allies in need. But after 250 years of mutating "policy", what America has instead is an invasive, destabilizing, and extremely expensive attack force that has become a corrupt extension of our equally destructive government.
Instead of focusing on defending America and its closest allies, the U.S. Military has completely destabilized regions worldwide, with the best examples being the Middle East and North Africa, and the developing Korean conflict. What started as an effort to combat proxy extensions of the Soviet Union ended up creating a worldwide terrorist organization and subsequent "War on Terror" that has destroyed or destabilized the greater part of the Middle Eastern region. It has resulted in the deaths or assassinations of several leaders and heads of state (and subsequent power vacuums), killing millions of civilians and soldiers, and costing trillions of dollars, and a bill that has been footed squarely by the American public.
Most of the events in this chapter of US Military history were intended to "solve" the geopolitical mess that the U.S. Government directly intensified by directing the U.S. Military to distribute weapons equipment and training to insurgents in countries such as Afghanistan in the 1970s under the Reagan Administration.
Inefficiency and Waste
However, the fecklessness isn't limited to actual combat and geopolitical failures. The military is also precariously inefficient, enabled by the lobbyists who have intertwined their companies with American communities, and by extension, the jobs that the families of those communities rely on. A prime example of this is in the years late, tens-of-billions over budget F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. In 2006, the US Military began the F-35 JSF program, with the hope that it would eventually become the next-generation fighter of the future, replacing older, cold-war era jets, and work in tandem with current 4th generation aircraft, such as the F-22 Raptor.
Even before the program got underway, there were doubts about the timelines and costs of this 5th generation fighter jet. However, as the project progressed, it quickly became crystal clear that the aircraft wouldn't be anywhere near ready by the original deadline: due in part, to short-sighted forecasts that failed to account for delays, as well as the military industrial complex's 'build first, fix later' mentality, which caused F-35 jets to have to constantly be sent back to the production factories any time a major design flaw was discovered, a process which was costly in terms of both time and funding.
Another cause of delays was the massive amount of subcontractors and parts suppliers who were involved with the construction of all different parts of the aircraft, which caused significant logistical delays, especially when faulty parts or labor needed to be tracked down, or replacement parts remade. Instead of imposing tighter limits, cutting off funding, or making major adjustments to the program, the Pentagon, enabled by members of Congress (who were content to keep the funds flowing so long as the jobs they had promised to their constituents stayed put) kept funneling money into the program, akin to the way a gambler keeps withdrawing cash from the bank in hopes of finally winning, all the while fighting a losing battle.
Deception and 'Dark Matter'
This inefficiency has also caused corruption and secrecy to become common tactics used to mask the flows of money and the inherent inefficiency of government bureaucracy. The most recent example of this occurred in 2015, when a report by the Defense Business Board (DBB), a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants, found that the Pentagon was operating extremely inefficiently.
A whopping 23% of its total $580 Billion budget being spent not on equipment, or on troop-related costs, but on overhead, back-office bureaucracy operations. Its total labor pool (1.01M) rivaled the total number of active troops (1.3M), which is at a level not seen since 1940. Almost half of those back-office personnel — a whopping 457,000 full-time employees — were assigned to logistics or supply-chain jobs, which on its own exceeds the size of United Parcel Service's (UPS) total global workforce.
The DBB report detailed methods and reforms by which the Pentagon could save $125 Billion over a five year period, not by resorting to layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel, but by utilizing methods such as renegotiating contracts, cutting out high-priced contractors, hiring less expensive workers, and making better use of data analytics.
However, the report was quickly censored, details classified and documents removed from the Pentagon's website soon after their release, because Pentagon officials feared that if Congress and the White House were to see the detailed DBB report, it would heavily undermine their public narrative that the Pentagon was cash-strapped and in need of additional funds to furnish soldiers with necessary equipment. According to the Washington Post, the details of the report were never intended to be seen by the American people from the very beginning, because "a $2.9 million consulting contract signed by the Pentagon stipulated that none of the data or analysis could be released to the news media or the public" (Whitlock, Woodward).
According to the same WaPo article, attempts to analyze the information in databases that tracked both civilian and military personnel, as well as labor and contractor costs, were stymied by "the armed forces and a multitude of defense agencies", many of whom "had fought to hide the data from outsiders and bureaucratic rivals, according to documents and interviews". But the infighting and secrecy didn't end there — "Information on contractor labor, in particular, was so cloaked in mystery that McKinsey described it as 'dark matter'". Several times, Deputy Secretary Work himself had to step in, in order to allow the Defense Business Board to access the information it needed for the analysis, with disorganization being so rampant that "at one point, more than 100 people were feeding data from different sectors of the bureaucracy".
The Pentagon has since implemented very few of the highlighted reforms, instead opting to implement reforms that had already been planned, as well as other unrelated changes. It has also changed its attitude towards the report, with Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, one of the officials who oversaw the report, doing a sudden 180 on his previous advocacies of the reforms and claiming that the $125 Billion in savings is "unrealistic".
This recent incident isn't the only attempt to enact significant change. Notable pushes by defense secretaries from 1997, 2010, and 2013 all dissipated after the reform instigators left office. A quote from Dov Zakheim, former comptroller under President George W. Bush, sums up the main cause of the inability of Pentagon reform-seekers to enact change: "Because we turn over our secretaries and deputy secretaries so often, the bureaucracy just waits things out. You can't do it at the tail end of an administration. It's not going to work. Either you leave the starting block with a very clear program, or you're not going to get it done." Overall, this is just another example of the extreme incompetence and obstruction that Pentagon bureaucrats impose on necessary change.
Resistance to Update Technology
In addition to its numerous geopolitical failures, the Pentagon has also resisted several notable efforts to update manned equipment with next-generation automation, in favor of the old ways of the military-industrial complex. This was recently seen when the effort to introduce pilotless, jet-powered, aircraft carrier-capable drones, such as Boeing's X-45, and Northrop Grumman's X-47, both of which were part of the UCLASS (Unmanned Carrier-Launched Strike & Surveillance aircraft) killer stealth drone program, failed, when the Pentagon abruptly decided to end the program in 2017.
The Pentagon's decision was reflected in the its defense proposal budget for 2017, which after showing a combined $818 million allocated for the project in 2015 and 2016, disappeared completely for the fiscal year 2017, replaced partially by a program to develop mid-air refueling aimed at supplementing current piloted attack aircraft that would receive a fraction of the funding. This occurred amid reluctance from military bureaucrats over the absence of the human element; the robot warplanes posed a clear threat to the pilot-centric cultures of the Air Force and the Navy's aviation arm. The UCLASS project almost became reality a decade ago, in 2006, but was sidelined by similar anti-A.I. sentiment and an overwhelming preference for manned aircraft.
After the recent dismissal of the program, a Boeing engineer who was involved with the project (but who desired to remain anonymous for obvious reasons), criticized the military holdouts over their illogical and counterproductive loyalty to manned aircraft, remarking that "the reason that was given [for the ending of the UCLASS program] was that we were expected to be too good in key areas and that we would have caused disruption to the efforts to 'keep F-22 but moreover JSF sold," the engineer said. "If we had flown and things like survivability had been assessed and Congress had gotten a hold of the data, JSF would have been in trouble"" (Axe). This refusal to eliminate the human element from welfare could possibly place US airpower at a disadvantage in the future, with competitors not far behind, and the current F-35 program facing significant hiccups and disadvantages to programs such as UCLASS, which is billed as (and which has demonstrated the capacity to become) a replacement to the concept of manned attack aircraft altogether.
One such advantage over the F-35 that the UCLASS drones have is that since they require no pilot (who subsequently needs regular training to keep his skills in top condition), but instead rely on simulation and training programs combined with the occasional training sortie, they can be kept in storage until needed in a conflict, and occasionally updated as needed, eliminating many billions of dollars per year in training costs, wages, fuel and maintenance costs.
The Military of the Future
What is the point of detailing these issues? The corruption and short-sightedness that has plagued the military for years have sidelined our nation with unnecessary war, criminal levels of inefficiency, and a lack of advancement to match the global military market and its next-generation aspirations. The American military behemoth has destabilized entire regions, resulted in the deaths of millions and indoctrinated the vast majority of the American people to believe in blind support of the military, all in the name of "patriotism". But what we have today is hardly something to be proud of.
The solution? Revolutionize the US military by implementing major logistical and managerial overhauls, and increasing military accountability and transparency by making the military completely dependent on its "shareholders": the American people. They would voluntarily fund the defense-only force, transitioning the current active forces to a need-based defense force which would operate from its current facilities on American soil.
The new system would also eliminate the current power structure that rewards officials who are older with more power, (which promotes corruption and an aversion to change) and instead replace it with a distinct state/regional system in which the people of a certain area would be able to vote at certain intervals on which management methods and defense packages that they would prefer. In contrast to the current system that runs on virtually endless government funding (and which violates libertarian principles of voluntaryism), the new system would allow communities to see where their money goes inside the military and would allow the people to effectively control unsavory military behavior by cutting off funding.
This "military 2.0" would also eliminate the need for much of the military budget, and would also eliminate the need for the multitude of (sometimes fraudulent and greedy) contractors that currently supplement military manpower and equipment needs. This includes the likes of Blackwater and other controversial private military companies, several of whom have committed atrocities abroad (A prime example being the 2007 Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq, in which a group of power-drunk Blackwater guards cruelly gunned down 14 civilians and later claimed to have been attacked by insurgents), which reflects poorly on the image of the United States in those countries. The smaller defense force would allow for a stronger community connection between military forces and the people they serve. Most importantly, this military 2.0 would eliminate the tragic loss of life that has been a heartbreaking side effect of the Middle Eastern wars and American imperialism as a whole.
This proposal is a clear step away from the corrupt imperialistic military that America has had since the late 20th century and a step towards a streamlined, transparent, and efficient self defense-focused military that all Americans can have a say in, and which all Americans can be proud to support. It is a change that is very much needed, given the current corruption, inefficiency, and deception that plagues our military's bureaucracy. But it is also a proposal that will need the full effort of the people, given the heavy resistance that has doomed past efforts. Whether or not reform is implemented is up to the American people. Let's hope the American people make the right choice.
Apuzzo, Matt. "Ex-Blackwater Guards Given Long Terms for Killing Iraqis." The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 Apr. 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/us/ex-blackwater-guards-sentenced-to-prison-in-2007-killings-of-iraqi-civilians.html.
Axe, David. "Pentagon Kills Its Killer Drone Fleet." The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast Company, 11 Feb. 2016, http://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-kills-its-killer-drone-fleet.
Whitlock, Craig, and Bob Woodward. "Pentagon Buries Evidence of $125 Billion in Bureaucratic Waste." The Washington Post, WP Company, 5 Dec. 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-buries-evidence-of-125-billion-in-bureaucratic-waste/2016/12/05/e0668c76-9af6-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html?utm_term=.398653bc33c4.
About Joshua Cox
I write opinion and argumentative pieces about the military, drug policy, liberty, government and lack thereof, and niche subjects within politics and society. I also write about global politics in the Asian and European theaters. I am a student at Carmel High School in Indiana, and will be attending Butler University in 2018, with majors in Political Science/Social Studies Education and Entrepreneurial Management.
Rightwingism The Americas
Re: Immigration
The Death Of Capitalism | {
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2009-03-30 Assigned to INTEL CORPORATION reassignment INTEL CORPORATION ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: SENGUPTA, UTTAM K., THAKKAR, SHREEKANT S.
Device, system, and method of wireless transfer of files. For example, a method includes: identifying a selection of a representation of a digital object stored in a mobile device by detecting contact on a touch-sensitive surface of the mobile device at a contact position that corresponds to said representation; identifying a directional movement of said contact position on the touch-sensitive surface; and in response to said directional movement, wirelessly transferring data corresponding to the digital object to a nearby computing device.
A user may utilize a mobile device (e.g., a laptop computer, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) device, a mobile phone, or the like) in order to maintain and use various files, for example, image files, audio files, video files, and word processing files. Such files may be created by the user (e.g., using a keyboard or keypad, by recording using a microphone, or using a digital camera) or may be received from third parties (e.g., via electronic mail, or by downloading from the World Wide Web).
Transferring or copying a file from the mobile device to another device may be time consuming, effort consuming, or error-prone. For example, the user may be required to physically connect cables between the devices, and/or to set and configure communication protocols between the devices.
FIG. 2 is a schematic block diagram illustration of a sending device in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention.
FIG. 3 is a schematic block diagram illustration of a system in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention.
FIG. 4 is a schematic block diagram illustration of a system in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention.
FIG. 5 is a schematic flow-chart of a method of wireless transfer of digital objects in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention.
FIG. 6 is a schematic block diagram illustration of a sending device in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention.
In the following detailed description, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of some embodiments of the invention. However, it will be understood by persons of ordinary skill in the art that some embodiments may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known methods, procedures, components, units and/or circuits have not been described in detail so as not to obscure the discussion.
Some embodiments may be used in conjunction with various devices and systems, for example, a Personal Computer (PC), a desktop computer, a mobile computer, a laptop computer, a notebook computer, a tablet computer, a server computer, a handheld computer, a handheld device, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) device, a handheld PDA device, a "Carry Small Live Large" (CSLL) device, an Ultra Mobile Device (UMD), an Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), a Mobile Internet Device (MID), a Consumer Electronic (CE) device, an on-board device, an off-board device, a hybrid device (e.g., a device incorporating functionalities of multiple types of devices, for example, PDA functionality and cellular phone functionality), a vehicular device, a non-vehicular device, a mobile or portable device, a non-mobile or non-portable device, a wireless communication station, a wireless communication device, a wireless Access Point (AP), a wireless Base Station (BS), a Mobile Subscriber Station (MSS), a wired or wireless Network Interface Card (NIC), a wired or wireless router, a wired or wireless modem, a wired or wireless network, a Local Area Network (LAN), a Wireless LAN (WLAN), a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), a Wireless MAN (WMAN), a Wide Area Network (WAN), a Wireless WAN (WWAN), a Personal Area Network (PAN), a Wireless PAN (WPAN), devices and/or networks operating in accordance with existing IEEE 802.11, 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.16, 802.16d, 802.16e, 802.16m standards and/or future versions and/or derivatives and/or Long Term Evolution (LTE) of the above standards, units and/or devices which are part of the above networks, one way and/or two-way radio communication systems, cellular radio-telephone communication systems, a cellular telephone, a wireless telephone, a Personal Communication Systems (PCS) device, a PDA device which incorporates a wireless communication device, a mobile or portable Global Positioning System (GPS) device, a device which incorporates a GPS receiver or transceiver or chip, a device which incorporates an RFID element or tag or transponder, a device which utilizes Near-Field Communication (NFC), a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) transceiver or device, a Single Input Multiple Output (SIMO) transceiver or device, a Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) transceiver or device, a device having one or more internal antennas and/or external antennas, a "smartphone" device, a wired or wireless handheld device (e.g., BlackBerry®, Palm®Treo™, a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) device, or the like.
Some embodiments may be used in conjunction with one or more types of wireless communication signals and/or systems, for example, Radio Frequency (RF), Infra Red (IR), Frequency-Division Multiplexing (FDM), Orthogonal FDM (OFDM), OFDM Access (OFDMA), Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM), Time-Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Extended TDMA (E-TDMA), General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), extended GPRS, Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Wideband CDMA (WCDMA), CDMA 2000, Multi-Carrier Modulation (MDM), Discrete Multi-Tone (DMT), Bluetooth®, Global Positioning System (GPS), IEEE 802.11 ("Wi-Fi"), IEEE 802.16 ("Wi-Max"), ZigBee™, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), Global System for Mobile communication (GSM), 2G, 2.5G, 3G, Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), 3.5G, or the like. Some embodiments may be used in conjunction with various other devices, systems and/or networks.
The terms "wireless device" or "wireless computing device" as used herein include, for example, a device capable of wireless communication, a communication device or communication station capable of wireless communication, a desktop computer capable of wireless communication, a mobile phone, a cellular phone, a laptop or notebook computer capable of wireless communication, a PDA capable of wireless communication, a handheld device capable of wireless communication, a portable or non-portable device capable of wireless communication, or the like.
The terms "mobile device" or "mobile computing device" as used herein include, for example, a device capable of wireless communication, a communication device or communication station capable of wireless communication, a computer capable of wireless communication, a mobile phone, a cellular phone, a laptop or notebook computer capable of wireless communication, a PDA capable of wireless communication, a handheld device capable of wireless communication, a portable device capable of wireless communication, or the like.
The terms "file" or "digital file" or "object" or "digital object" include, for example, a digital item which is the subject of transferring or copying between a first device and a second device; a software application; a computer file; an executable file; an installable file or software application; a set of files; an archive of one or more files; an audio file (e.g., representing music, a song, or an audio album); a video file or audio/video file (e.g., representing a movie or a movie clip); an image file; a photograph file; a set of image or photograph files; a compressed or encoded file; a computer game; a computer application; a utility application; a data file (e.g., a word processing file, a spreadsheet, or a presentation); a multimedia file; an electronic book (e-book); a combination or set of multiple types of digital items; or the like.
The terms "sending device" or "source device" as used herein include, for example, a device that sends, transfer or copies a digital object using a wireless medium to another device. The terms "receiving device" or "destination device" or "target device" as used herein include, for example, a device that receives (or is intended to receive) a digital object using a wireless medium from the sending device.
The term "user" as used herein includes, for example, a person or entity that owns a computing device or a wireless device; a person or entity that operates or utilizes a computing device or a wireless device; or a person or entity that is otherwise associated with a computing device or a wireless device.
The term "touch-screen" as used herein includes, for example, a touch-sensitive or contact-sensitive surface or screen; a touch-responsive screen or surface; a screen or surface able to sense touching by a human finger and/or by a stylus or other pointing device; a screen or surface able to present or display text and/or graphics as well as able to sense touching by a human finger and/or by a stylus or other pointing device; a display able to detect the location of touch(es) within the display area or within portions thereof; a screen capable of operating as a display unit and as an input unit; a touch-screen of a PDA device; a touch-screen of a mobile phone; a touch-screen of a tablet PC; a resistive based touch-screen; a capacitive based touch-screen; an InfraRed (IR) based touch-screen; a Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) touch-screen; a strain gauge touch-screen; an optical imaging based touch-screen; a dispersive signal based touch-screen; an acoustic pulse based touch-screen; an internal reflection based touch-screen; or the like. In some embodiments, the touch-screen may include a touchpad or touch-sensitive surface which operates as an input unit and does not necessarily operate as a display unit.
The terms "launch", "throw" or "flick" as used herein include, for example, rapid or accelerated directional movement of a user's finger or fingers over a touch-screen which resembles a one-way throwing or launching of an item towards an external target; a movement of a user's finger (or other pointer, e.g., stylus) starting by touching a representation of an object on the touch-screen, then rapidly (or using accelerative movement) dragging that representation towards a margin or border of the touch-screen, and then rapid releasing the representation of the object (e.g., without decelerating the movement, or without guiding the movement into a representation of a target file or a target folder); or other pre-defined movement or dragging of a representation of an object using a touch-screen, optionally resembling a throwing or launching movement of a small object, using a tip of a finger or a stylus or a pointing device.
FIG. 1 schematically illustrates a block diagram of a system 100 in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention. System 100 includes, for example, a sending device 110 and a receiving device 120. For demonstrative purposes, sending device 110 is shown implemented as a PDA device, and receiving device 120 is shown implemented as a laptop computer. Other types of devices may be used.
Sending device 110 may include, for example, a laptop computer, a notebook computer, a tablet computer, a PDA device, a cellular phone, a mobile phone, a hybrid device (e.g., combining one or more cellular phone functionalities with one or more PDA device functionalities), a portable audio player, a portable video player, a portable audio/video player, a portable media player, a portable device having a touch-screen, a relatively small computing device, a non-desktop computer or computing device, a portable device, a handheld device, a "Carry Small Live Large" (CSLL) device, an Ultra Mobile Device (UMD), an Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), a Mobile Internet Device (MID), a Consumer Electronic (CE) device, an "Origami" device or computing device, a device that supports Dynamically Composable Computing (DCC), a context-aware device, or the like.
Receiving device 120 may include, for example, a laptop computer, a notebook computer, a tablet computer, a PDA device, a cellular phone, a mobile phone, a hybrid device (e.g., combining cellular phone functionalities with PDA device functionalities), a relatively small computing device, a non-desktop computer or computing device, a portable device, a handheld device, a "Carry Small Live Large" (CSLL) device, an Ultra Mobile Device (UMD), an Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), a Mobile Internet Device (MID), an "Origami" device or computing device, a device that supports Dynamically Composable Computing (DCC), a context-aware device, or the like.
In some embodiments, receiving device 120 may include non-mobile computing devices or peripherals, for example, a desktop computer, a Personal Computer (PC), a server computer, a printer, a laser printer, an inkjet printer, a color printer, a stereo system, an audio system, a video playback system, a DVD playback system a television system, a television set-top box, a television "cable box", a television converter box, a digital jukebox, a digital Disk Jockey (DJ) system or console, a media player system, a home theater or home cinema system, or the like.
In some embodiments, the sending device 110 may optionally include, for example, a processor, a memory unit, a storage unit, an input unit, an output unit, a communication unit (e.g., a wireless transmitter, a wireless receiver, a wireless transceiver), an Operating System (OS), one or more software applications, or other suitable hardware components and/or software components. Similarly, receiving device 120 may optionally include, for example, a processor, a memory unit, a storage unit, an input unit, an output unit, a communication unit (e.g., a wireless transmitter, a wireless receiver, a wireless transceiver), an Operating System (OS), one or more software applications, or other suitable hardware components and/or software components.
Sending device 110 may include a touch-screen 111, which may display a textual and/or graphical representation of a digital object 131. A user of the sending device 110 may point, position or orient the sending device 110 towards the receiving device 120 or in the direction of the receiving device 120; and may utilize his or her finger to launch or throw the representation of the digital object 131 towards the receiving device 120. The sending device 110 automatically detects the throwing movement, and wirelessly transfers to the receiving device 120 a copy 132 of the digital object 131. Accordingly, a screen 121 (e.g., not necessarily a touch-screen) of the receiving device 120 shows a representation of the copy 132 of the digital object 131.
In some embodiments, prior to "throwing" the digital object 131, the user of sending device 110 may be required to approve, activate, or turn-on the capability of sending device 110 to detect "throw" movements and to transfer digital object in response thereto. In some embodiments, the rights management on the digital object 131 to be thrown is checked, in order to determine whether or not that digital object 131 is allowed or authorized to be thrown. In other embodiments, sending device 110 may be pre-configured, as a default configuration, to be capable of detecting "throw" movements and of transferring digital object in response thereto, and the user of sending device 110 may selectively deactivate, disable, or turn-off this capability.
Similarly, in some embodiments, prior to "throwing" the digital object 131, the user of receiving device 120 may be required to approve, activate, or turn-on the capability of receiving device 120 to receive and/or accept digital objects "thrown" wirelessly at receiving device 120. In other embodiments, receiving device 120 may be pre-configured, as a default configuration, to receive and/or accept digital objects "thrown" wirelessly at receiving device 120, and the user of receiving device 120 may selectively deactivate, disable, or turn-off this capability.
In some embodiments, once the sending device 110 detects a "throw", the sending device 110 may notify the user of sending device 110 (e.g., using a textual notification, a graphical notification, an animated notification, an audio notification, or a video notification) that the "throw" operation was detected and that the copying of the digital object 131 is in progress (e.g., optionally showing a progress bar and/or a reverse time counter). Once the digital object 131 is successfully copied to receiving device 120, the sending device 110 may notify the user of sending device 110 that the "throw" operation was completed successfully. If the copying operation fails, sending device 110 may notify the user of sending device 110 that the "throw" operation failed, and may optionally provide details about possible reason(s) for the failure.
Similarly, once the receiving device 120 detects a commencement of an incoming wireless transfer of a "thrown" digital object 131, the receiving device 120 may notify the user of the receiving device 120 that a "throw" operation is in progress and that the copying of the digital object 131 is in progress (e.g., optionally showing a progress bar and/or a reverse time counter). Once the digital object 131 is successfully copied to the receiving device 120, the receiving device 120 may notify the user of the receiving device 120 that the "throw" operation was successfully completed. If the copying operation fails, the receiving device 120 may notify the user of the receiving device 120 that the "throw" operation failed, and may optionally provide details about the reason(s) or about possible reasons for the failure.
In some embodiments, optionally, the receiving device 120 may be configured to automatically perform one or more operations with the received copy 132 of the digital object 131. Such operations may include, for example, requesting a user's approval to open or execute the received digital object; automatically opening or executing the received objects; asking the user of the receiving device 120 whether to keep or to delete the received digital object; playing the received digital object; adding the received digital object to a play-list; performing a virus scan on the received digital object; or the like. In some embodiments, the digital object received may also be governed by Digital Rights Management (DRM) policies as defined by the content issuer or creator, for example, indicating the duration of persistence on the receiving device 120, the number of times that the content may viewed or played, or the like.
The wireless transferring or copying of digital object 131 from sending device 110 to receiving device 120 is performed using a wireless medium (indicated by arrows 142), using one or more wireless links, e.g., using IEEE 802.11 communication, IEEE 802.16 communication, Bluetooth communication, Ultra WideBand (UWB) communication, Near Field Communication (NFC), direct high-bandwidth PAN connections, InfraRed (IR) communication, Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) compliant or compatible communication, InfraRed Data Association (IRDA) compliant or compatible communication, synchronous or a-synchronous wireless communication, burstable or non-burstable wireless communication, ad-hoc wireless communication, LAN or PAN wireless communication, or the like.
Some embodiments may provide a User Interface (UI) method and mechanism which may be used for inter-device interaction and communication. For example, in some embodiments, sending device 110 is a portable or handheld device which stores a user's image files, audio files and video files; receiving device 120 is a nearby digital jukebox or a media player system; and when the sending device 110 is in proximity to the receiving device 120, the user of the sending device "throws" a representation of an audio file from his sending device 110 towards the receiving device 120; the receiving device 120 receives a copy of the "thrown" audio file, and plays it or adds it to the list of audio files to be played.
In some embodiments, the sending device 110 may combine capabilities of a CE device, a mobile phone and/or a computing device into a relatively small-sized device and/or using a highly mobile form factor. The sending device 110 may be used for On-The-Go (OTG) usage models, for example, Internet access OTG, location-based services OTG, entertainment OTG, or the like. In some embodiments, OTG usages of the sending device 110 may be performed in small locations (e.g., a back of car, or sitting in an airplane); in locations or situations that allow a user to utilize only one hand (e.g., standing in crowded bus or train or subway train); in crowded; while the user is walking or traveling, or the like.
In some embodiments, "throwing" of digital object(s) between devices may allow various Peer-to-Peer (P2P) interactions in which files are transferred by selecting and "launching" items towards the destination device by use of fingers; this operation may be user friendly, and the ability to perform this operation may be acquired by users who already know how to use a drag-and-drop interface. For example, in a conventional drag-and-drop interface, a representation of a digital item is dragged towards, and dropped on, a representation of a destination folder or a destination application, which are shown on the touch-screen 111 of the sending device 110, namely, on the same touch-screen 111 which displays the digital object being dragged-and-dropped and/or the source folder. In contrast, a "throw" interface involves dragging and releasing of the representation of the digital object towards, or at the direction of, another device located externally to the sending device 110, and/or towards another device which does not have a representation in the touch-screen 111 of the sending device.
In some embodiments, the touch-screen 111 of the sending device 110 has a relatively small size, e.g., a diagonal size of approximately 2 inches, 3 inches, 4 inches, 7 inches, or the like, less than 10 inches. In some embodiments, the sending device 110 does not include an input unit separate than the touch-screen 111 (e.g., a keyboard, a keypad, or a mouse).
Some embodiments may utilize methods or mechanism in order to detect and/or perform a "throw" of the digital item 131 from the sending device 110 to the receiving device 120, or in order to perform or detect pointing or relative alignment of devices 110 and 120. Some embodiments may utilize inter-device wireless communication, for example, Bluetooth or UWB (e.g., particularly if the distance between the sending device 110 and the receiving device 120 is smaller than 3 meters); IR or NFC (e.g., particularly if the distance between the sending device 110 and the receiving device 120 is smaller than 10 centimeters; and optionally using one or more directional sensors, a three-dimensional accelerator, or a digital compass.
In some embodiments, particularly if the distance between the sending device 110 and the receiving device 120 is greater than 10 centimeters, a "throw" operation may be performed only if it is determined that the sending device 110 points towards the receiving device 120 and/or that devices 110 and 120 are aligned. For example, location information of devices 110 and/or 120 may be determined and used, in addition to or instead of information from directional sensor(s). In some embodiments, security mechanism or pairing mechanisms may be used (e.g., optionally using cryptographic algorithms) in order to address security or pairing requirements.
In some embodiments, sending device 110 and receiving device 120 may have a common PAN connectivity, for example, Bluetooth communication, IEEE 802.11 communication, UWB communication, or the like. Optionally, the user(s) of devices 110 and/or 120 may perform pairing of sending device 110 and receiving device 120. The pairing may be performed using one or more suitable methods or mechanisms, for example, using methods and mechanisms described in United States Patent Application Publication Number 2008/0003978, titled "Method, System, and Apparatus for Improved Bluetooth Security During the Pairing Process".
In some embodiments, the user of the sending device 110 may be required to activate the "throwing" interface in sending device 110 prior to "throwing" digital object 131. The activation invokes applications or algorithms that detect the "throwing" movement, perform relevant calculations, and wirelessly transfer the "thrown" digital object 131 to the relevant destination.
In some embodiments, the user of sending device 110 may be required to set or enter the approximate or estimated distance between sending device 110 and receiving device 120, or to otherwise set the range for the "throwing" operation (e.g., in general, or for a particular "throw" operation). In some embodiments, the user of sending device 110 may select a distance from a list of pre-defined distance values, e.g., using a menu interface or a drop-down list interface.
In some embodiments, optionally, the user of the sending device 110 may be required to set or enter the approximate or estimated perimeter around the receiving device 120 (e.g., as a radius around receiving device 120). The perimeter may be defined by the user for "throw" operations in general, or for a particular "throw" operation. The perimeter is used, for example, such that a digital object 131 "thrown" into the defined perimeter is wirelessly transferred to the receiving device 120; whereas a digital object 131 that was "thrown" but is expected to "land" externally to the defined perimeter is not wirelessly transferred to the receiving device 120. In some embodiments, the user of the sending device 110 may select a perimeter from a list of pre-defined perimeter values, e.g., using a menu interface or a drop-down list interface.
FIG. 2 schematically illustrates a block diagram of a sending device 200 in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention. Sending device 200 may be a demonstrative example of sending device 110 of FIG. 1.
Sending device 200 includes a touch-screen 210, and optionally includes additional input units, for example, a keypad 201 and one or more keys or buttons 202. Touch-screen 210 is divided into an array or grid of smaller portions, e.g., rectangular or square portions 213; the division may be internal, operable, or invisible to the user of sending device 200.
The user of sending device 200 places the tip of her finger on a representation of a digital object at a first location 211 (denoted "X") in the touch-screen 210. Then, the user rapidly drags the representation of the digital object from the first location to the second location 212 (denoted "O") in the touch-screen 210. The second location 212 does not initially include any representation of a destination, a folder, a file, an application, or another digital object. Once the representation of the digital object reaches the second location 212 (or its vicinity), the user of sending device 200 releases the representation of the digital object, e.g., by raising or removing his finger from the touch-screen 210.
Sending device 200 may calculate or estimate the velocity of the "throw" movement. For example, sending device 200 may measure the distance (denoted d) between the first location 211 and the second location 212, based on vertical and horizontal coordinates associated with each portion 213 of the touch-screen 210. Sending device 200 may measure the time (denoted t) that it took the user's finger to move from the first location 211 to the second location 212. In some embodiments, the velocity of the "throw" movement (denoted v) may be calculated by dividing the distance d by the time t. Optionally, an initial acceleration or estimated acceleration (e.g., in the beginning of the "throw" movement) may be taken into account.
FIG. 3 schematically illustrates a block diagram of a system 300 in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention. System 300 includes a sending device 310 (e.g., similar to sending device 110 of FIG. 1) and a receiving device 320 (e.g., similar to receiving device 120 of FIG. 1).
Sending device 310 may be oriented at an angle, denoted θ, relative to the ground 312 or relative to a plane 311 parallel to the ground 312. The sending device 310 may determine, estimate, or sense the value of the orientation angle θ, or 2-axis or 3-axis tilt sensing, for example, using one or more accelerometers, motion sensors, tilt sensors, mechanism utilizing gyroscopes, mechanisms utilizing Hall effect, capacitive liquid based sensors, two-dimensional or three-dimensional accelerometers, digital compasses, or the like. In some embodiments, the sending device 310 may include or may utilize one or more tile sensors described in the following web-page: <www.SensorsPortal.com/HTML/SENSORS/Tilt_Sens_Manuf.htm>. In some embodiments, the orientation angle θ may be substantially equal to a "throwing" angle or "launching" angle in which the digital object is "thrown" or "launched".
In some embodiments, the sending device 310 and/or the receiving device 320 are able to calculate or estimate the distance between the sending device 310 and the receiving device 320. For example, the sending device 310 and/or the receiving device 320 may include a GPS receiver or other location-sensing mechanisms able to operate outdoors and/or indoors, and the distance between devices 310 and 320 may be measured using these components.
In some embodiments, precision IEEE 802.11 location or Precision Location Technology (PLT) may be utilized by system 300 in order to determine the distance between devices 310 and 320 and/or their relative location, for example, at sub-meter granularity. In according with PLT, a special data packet is sent (e.g., using IEEE 802.11 communication) back and forth between a wireless client device and at least two wireless Access Points (APs). Each wireless device time-stamps the packet, thereby allowing a determination of the travel time of the packet and a determination of the distance between the client and each AP. Once the wireless client device knows how far it is from the two APs, the wireless client device may triangulate its position. PLT may be used in some locations where GPS location is not utilized, indoors, or in urban environments that limit line-of-sight access to the GPS satellite network. Some embodiments may utilize PLT methods and systems similar to those described in a publication dated Aug. 25, 2005, titled "Intel Preps 'GPS for Wi-Fi' Location Tech", is available at the following web-page: <www.TheRegister.co.uk/2005/08/25/intel_gps_for_wifi/print.html>. Some embodiments may utilize devices, systems and/or methods described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,271,764, titled "Time of Arrival Estimation Mechanism". In some embodiments, determination of the precise locations of the sending device 310 and the receiving device 320 may allow determination of the distance L between devices 310 and 320. In some embodiments, RF fingerprinting technology may be utilized in order to further improve the determination of the locations, for example, utilizing device, systems and/or methods similar to those described in a publication dated Oct. 11, 2004, titled "RF Fingerprinting Pinpoints Location", available online at: <www.NetworkWorld.com/news/tech/2004/101104techupdate.html>.
Prior to performing the "throw" operation, the user of sending device 310 and/or the user of the receiving device 320 may set, select, or otherwise define a value of a parameter indicating a perimeter boundary around the sending device 310 and/or around receiving device 320. For example, in some embodiments, an area around the sending device 310 may be defined, such that only if the receiving device 320 is within this area, and the devices 310 and 320 are paired, then a "throw" movement from the sending device 310 will trigger a wireless transfer of the digital object to the receiving device 320; optionally subject to other proximity settings between the devices 310 and 320. In other embodiments, for example, an area around the receiving device 320 may be defined, such that only if the sending device 310 is within this area, and the devices 310 and 320 are paired, then a "throw" movement from the sending device 310 will trigger a wireless transfer of the digital object to the receiving device 320; optionally subject to other proximity settings between the devices 310 and 320. In still other embodiments, for example, an area around the receiving device 320 may be defined, such that only if the virtual "throwing" of the digital object is estimated to "land" within that area, then a "throw" movement from the sending device 310 will trigger a wireless transfer of the digital object to the receiving device 320; optionally subject to other proximity settings between the devices 310 and 320. For demonstrative purposes, FIG. 3 shows a perimeter around the receiving device 320 defined by a radius 321 (denoted R) of a circle 322 that includes the receiving device 320 at the center thereof. In some embodiments, the selected radius R may be, for example, one foot, two feet, three feet, one meter, or the like. In some embodiments, the configuration of the perimeter may be set in order to improve the success rate of the "throw" operation; optionally while taking into account accuracy requirements, such that only a trusted or authorized device receives the digital object. Other types of perimeters or boundaries, or combinations thereof, may be used.
FIG. 4 schematically illustrates a block diagram of a system 400 in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention. System 400 includes a sending device 410 (e.g., similar to sending device 110 of FIG. 1) and a receiving device 420 (e.g., similar to receiving device 120 of FIG. 1).
System 400 may utilize IR communication (e.g., in accordance with IrDA specifications) in order to implement and/or improve "throw" operations of digital objects. For example, the sending device 410 includes an IR sensor 431, and the receiving device 420 includes an IR sensor 432. Once the devices 410 and 420 are positioned such that their IR sensors 431 and 432 are aligned, and a Line Of Sight (LOS) 433 exists between them, the "throw" operation may be performed. In some embodiments, for example, the user of the sending device 410 may point and adjust the sending device 410 in order to achieve IR LOS alignment; once the two sensors 431 and 432 are aligned, the sending device 410 may generate a notification (e.g., an audio notification) indicating to the user that system 400 is now ready for a "throw" operation.
FIG. 5 is a schematic flow-chart of a method of wireless transfer of digital objects in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention. Operations of the method may be used, for example, by system 100 of FIG. 1, by sending device 200 of FIG. 2, by system 300 of FIG. 3, by system 400 of FIG. 4, and/or by other suitable devices or systems.
In some embodiments, the method may include, for example, activating or turning-on the "throw" UI (block 505), e.g., in the sending device.
In some embodiments, the method may include, for example, aiming the sending device (the source device) towards the receiving device (the destination device) (block 510); and then checking whether or not the sending device and the receiving device are aligned (block 515).
If the sending device and the receiving device are not aligned (arrow 521), then the method may include repeating the operation of block 510, namely, re-aiming or modifying the orientation of the sending device towards the receiving device.
In contrast, if the sending device and the receiving device are aligned (arrow 522), the method may proceed with the operations of block 525 and onward; for example, as indicated at block 525, the method may include providing a cue or notification that the sending device and the receiving device are aligned.
In some embodiments, the method may include, for example, selecting a digital object to be "thrown" from the sending device to the receiving device (block 530); as well as "throwing" the digital object from the sending device to the receiving device (block 535). These operations may include, for example, identifying a selection of a representation of the digital object by detecting contact on a touch-sensitive surface of the sending device at a contact position that corresponds to the representation; identifying a directional movement of the contact position on the touch-sensitive surface; and in response to the directional movement, wirelessly transferring data corresponding to the digital object to a nearby device (namely, the receiving device) located generally in the direction of said directional movement.
In some embodiments, identifying the "throwing" directional movement may optionally include, for example, detecting whether or not the directional movement is directed generally towards the nearby computing device (namely, the receiving device). This may be performed, for example, based on calculation of the velocity of the directional movement, the tilt angle of the sending device, the estimated or calculated distance between the sending device and the receiving device, and the estimated or calculated "throwing" range (e.g., based on the calculated velocity and the tilt angle). In some embodiments, for example, the sending device may determine whether or not the "throwing" directional movement has properties (e.g., velocity and tilt angle) which allow the "thrown" digital object to virtually "land" within a distance that is within a pre-defined "throwing range" associated with the sending device and/or the receiving device. In some embodiments, the sending device may determine that the directional movement is not directed towards the nearby computing device, but rather, for example, away from the nearby computing device, or towards the user of the sending device; may avoid performing a wireless transfer of the digital object from the sending device to the receiving device; and may notify the user of the sending device that a "throw" operation was not performed.
In some embodiments, the method may include, for example, checking whether or not the digital object was successfully transferred from the sending device to the receiving device (540).
If the digital object was not successfully transferred from the sending device to the receiving device (arrow 541), then the method may include, for example, diagnosing the cause(s) for the failure and optionally identifying remedies to the failure (block 545), as well as repeating the operations of block 530 and onward (arrow 547), e.g., to re-"throw" the digital object.
In contrast, if the digital object was successfully transferred from the sending device to the receiving device (arrow 548), then the method may include, for example, providing a cue or notification that the digital object was successfully transferred from the sending device to the receiving device (block 550), and proceeding with the operations of block 555 and onward.
In some embodiments, the method may include, for example, checking (or asking the user of the sending device) whether or not additional digital object(s) are to be "thrown" from the sending device to the receiving device (block 555).
If additional digital object(s) are to be "thrown" from the sending device to the receiving device (arrow 561), then the method may include, for example, repeating the operations of block 515 and onward.
In contrast, if no additional digital object(s) are to be "thrown" from the sending device to the receiving device (arrow 562), then the method may include, for example, deactivating or turning-off the "throw" UI (block 570), e.g., in the sending device.
Other operations may be used in accordance with some embodiments of the invention.
FIG. 6 schematically illustrates a block diagram of a sending device 600 in accordance with some demonstrative embodiments of the invention. Sending device 600 may be a demonstrative example of sending device 110 of FIG. 1, of sending device 200 of FIG. 2, of sending device 310 of FIG. 3, of sending device 410 of FIG. 4.
Sending device 600 may include one or more hardware components and/or software components, for example: a processor 601; a memory unit 602; a storage unit 603 able to store a digital object 604; a touch-screen 605; optionally, an additional input unit 606 (e.g., a keypad, a keyboard, or one or more buttons); optionally, an additional output unit 607 (e.g., audio speakers); an Operating System (OS) 608 associated with a "throw"-capable User Interface (UI) 609; one or more software applications 610; and a wireless transceiver 611 associated with one or more antennas 612. Optionally, sending device 600 may further include one or more logical units, hardware components and/or software components to perform operations described herein, for example, a tilt sensor 621, a GPS receiver 622, an IR sensor 623, a velocity calculator 624, a "throw" angle estimator 625, a "throw" range estimator 626, a three-dimensional accelerometer 627, a digital compass 628, a PLT module 629, a RF fingerprinting module 630, a distance estimator 631 to estimate a distance from a nearby device, and/or other suitable components.
In some embodiments, the sending device 600 may be configured to perform one or more operations upon detection of a "throwing" movement, for example, to wirelessly copy the digital object 604 (or data corresponding thereto) from the sending device 600 to a target receiving device; to wirelessly move the digital object 604 (or data corresponding thereto) from the sending device 600 to the target receiving device (e.g., by wirelessly copying the digital object 604 to the sending device, and deleting the original digital object 604 from the storage unit 603 of the sending device 600); to automatically and wirelessly copy or move a license (e.g., DRM license, DRM policy, or the like), associated with the digital object 604, from the sending device 600 to the target receiving device, in conjunction with a respective copy or move of the digital object 604; or other suitable operations.
While certain features of the invention have been illustrated and described herein, many modifications, substitutions, changes, and equivalents may occur to those skilled in the art. Therefore, the appended claims are intended to cover all such modifications and changes.
in response to said directional movement, wirelessly transferring data corresponding to the digital object to a nearby computing device.
detecting whether or not the directional movement is directed generally towards the nearby computing device.
3. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting contact comprises detecting contact by a finger of a user of the mobile device.
an estimated distance between the mobile device and the nearby computing device.
if the mobile device and the nearby computing device are in alignment, notifying a user of the mobile device that the mobile device and the nearby computing device are in alignment.
if the wireless transfer of the data corresponding to the digital object is unsuccessful, notifying a user of the mobile device that the wireless transfer of the data corresponding to the digital object is unsuccessful.
7. The method of claim 1, wherein the touch-sensitive surface comprises a touch-screen.
a wireless transmitter to wirelessly transmit data corresponding to the digital object to a nearby computing device.
a processor to calculate a throwing velocity of the digital object based on a measured distance of the directional movement on the touch-sensitive surface and a measured time of the directional movement on the touch-sensitive surface.
one or more sensors to sense a tilt angle of the wireless device relative to ground.
11. The wireless device of claim 10, wherein the processor is to calculate a throwing range of the digital object based on the throwing velocity and the tilt angle.
12. The wireless device of claim 8, wherein the processor is to estimate a distance between the wireless device and the nearby computing device based on Global Positioning System (GPS) information.
13. The wireless device of claim 8, wherein the processor is to estimate a distance between the wireless device and the nearby computing device based on Precision Location Technology (PLT).
14. The wireless device of claim 8, wherein the processor is to estimate a distance between the wireless device and the nearby computing device based on Radio Frequency fingerprinting.
wherein, if the line of sight exists, the user interface is to notify the user of the wireless device that the wireless device and the nearby computing device are in alignment.
16. The wireless device of claim 8, wherein the wireless device comprises a device selected from the group consisting of: a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), a cellular phone, a handheld device, a portable audio player, a portable video player, a portable audio/video player, a portable media player, an Ultra Mobile Device (UMD), an Ultra Mobile Personal Computer (UMPC), a Mobile Internet Device (MID), and a tablet computer.
17. The wireless device of claim 8, wherein the touch-sensitive surface comprises a touch-screen. | {
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Home SA Defence SA Defence Ramaphosa tells military and police they are fighting an invisible enemy
Ramaphosa tells military and police they are fighting an invisible enemy
Written by defenceWeb -
SANDF Commander-in-Chief President Cyril Ramaphosa and General Solly Shoke at the initial Op Notlela deployment.
President Cyril Ramaphosa added the phrase "invisible enemy" to the South African coronavirus lexicon when he addressed soldiers at the Doornkop military base prior to the first patrols of the three-week national lockdown.
Wearing military camouflage and an American style baseball cap, the Commander-in-Chief, without any rank insignia showing on his jacket collar, told soldiers their mission was to save lives.
"Your mission is to save lives. We are not the only country waging war against an invisible enemy – coronavirus. In you, our people have a defence mechanism. Tonight you begin the most important calling of your mission, to save the lives of South Africans," he told a parade ahead of the midnight lockdown.
Disrupting tradition and adhering to government's regulations of 100 people per gathering to contain the virus, 100 officers and soldiers were deployed for the President's send-off message.
"You are required to go out and save the lives of the 57 million South Africans who live in the borders of our country," Ramaphosa told SANDF members. "A lot rests on your shoulders. As soldiers you took an oath – an oath to be be faithful to the Republic of South Africa and defend the people of South Africa. That oath was not only to defend the people of South Africa against violence war, insurrection but also a danger like the one on our hands now – coronavirus.
"In you our people have a defence mechanism. You are not only the defender of our democracy but the defender of the lives of our people, their health and well-being. Tonight you begin the most important mission of your calling as soldiers, to give life to the people of south Africa and for that reason I say your mission is to restore the lives of the people of South Africa. That is what you are called on to do. You are required to support our police, work with them, walk among our people and defend them against this virus. You are required to do this in the most understanding way, in the most respectful way, in the most supportive way.
"I want after this mission the people of our country must look upon you as the SA National Defence Force and the SA Police Service and know you are the best in the world in that you will have been supportive to them, have given them assurance and have assisted in every way you can," Ramaphosa said.
In an apparent effort to allay fears of excessive force being used to enforce the stay at home and other lockdown regulations, Ramaphosa repeated what his defence and military veterans minister said a day earlier during a Cabinet security cluster briefing.
"This is not a moment for skop and donner. Throughout the country our people are going to be looking to you. I want you to execute your task with great respect to our people. I have confidence our people will abide by the regulations," he said.
Ahead of addressing troops, the President called on the SA Police Service College in Pretoria West. He urged the men and women in blue, who will be supported by SA National Defence Force (SANDF) elements to execute their "lifesaving mission with humility and respect".
"I send you off now to be among our people. I send you to conduct service among our people and shower our people with guidance, advice and leadership.
"Let us make sure we as the police service do not do anything to violate the rights of our people by mistake or unintentionally. Let us go and do right by the people of South Africa and save their lives. This is the hour. This is the moment you trained for," Ramaphosa said.
He emphasised to police and soldiers the deployment was not one of force, it was for the protection of citizens.
Coinciding with the President's address, was the announcement of the rise in confirmed coronavirus cases to 927 – an increase of 218 cases from Wednesday. This increased to over 1 000 on Friday, with the first two deaths reported in Western Cape.
SANDF highlights successes in FY 2019/20 report
Hensoldt South Africa executing Argos II contract for German police
Army seeking to renew equipment
Cape to move Centotaph, veterans approve | {
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The Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science at UOIT offers Master of Applied Science (MASc), Master of Engineering (MEng) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degrees in Mechanical Engineering.
These graduate programs allow a student to study a wide variety of areas associated with mechanical engineering. Focus areas of research include mechatronics and manufacturing, energy and thermofluids engineering, and automotive systems.
The MASc program is research-oriented and provides excellent preparation for a doctoral degree. The program entails a combination of course-based learning and a thesis that often involves original research.
The MEng program is a professional master's program for upgrading and expanding technical skills and knowledge. It has an emphasis on course-based learning, sometimes accompanied by a major project.
The PhD program leads to the highest academic degree, for careers such as a researcher in advanced technology development or a university professor. It involves a combination of academic coursework and a dissertation, which requires a significant and detailed body of original research leading to innovative new research outcomes. | {
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I suppose I had my one real insider's look at how Hollywood works some years ago, when I attended a screenwriters' session on how to "pitch ideas" to producers during an Austin Film Festival annual gathering of would-be writers.
A panel of so-called idea people (a Hollywood oxymoron if I ever heard one) sat at a table and critiqued writers' script ideas, based on approximately 30 seconds of monologue. If writers didn't have what the idea people called a high-concept proposal, if writers paused for a breath, if writers tried to explain a complex plot turn, they were toast.
Cursing and yelling seemed to be high on their list. "High concept," to these folks, who I must say all looked to be about 25 to 28 years old, meant explosions, gruesome terror, betrayal, deadly animals, killer robots, slasher horror, or Brad Pitt. This particular pitch session occurred as the movie "Snakes on a Plane" was in production. One of the idea people could hardly contain himself as he explained what a fantastic high-concept film this was going to be—a classic in the making.
I sat and wondered how this expert panel would have rated the opening scene to the 1951 epic "A Place in the Sun," in which Montgomery Clift is quietly thumbing for a ride along a lonely stretch of road. It was then and there I realized I would never be a Hollywood screenwriter. No, not sour grapes. I'm just not young and stupid enough.
Am I alone here? With very few notable exceptions, this is the state of film-making today. If it bites, blows up, bleeds, beheads people, or is Brad, it's got a green light. If we run out of ideas, we do it all over again as a sequel.
Did I say "Wind"? I meant "Dawn," of course. This latest gem, which opens in November, is a part two within a multi-part series of movies, mind you, all of which are looking more and more like the same vampire movie with simply fresh blood and longer fangs.
This got me thinking again. What if the great citizenry—that's us—rose up and dictated to Hollywood: No More Sequels! I know, I know what you're going to say, what about "Godfather II"? Simple, this is the exception that proves the rule. Just about every other sequel I can think of never should have seen the light of day. Here are just a few: "Basic Instinct 2," "Caddyshack II," "Grease 2," "Jaws: The Revenge," "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," "Dumb and Dumberer," "Blues Brothers 2000." The list is damn near eternal.
I shudder to think of the results if such movie-making titans as director Stuart Rosenberg ("Cool Hand Luke") or Robert Mulligan ("To Kill a Mockingbird") had been under similar pressure to squeeze out sequels. Oh, the horror.
Dont forget Zombies … Zombies rule movies, television, and video games right now. | {
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Want to learn how to play Keith Urban on the guitar? With this tutorial you can learn how to play "Tonight I Wanna Cry" by Keith Urban on the acoustic guitar. This version is a simplified version of the song and is not exactly how Keith Urban play it. This lesson is geared towards intermediate guitarists because it assumes prior knowledge of guitar playing. Watch this how to video and you will be able to sing and play along to "Tonight I Wanna Cry" by Keith Urban. | {
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The Sottezza II under mount roof system which is designed to mount flush under a sloping roof can also be used in large scale skylight windows giving the ultimate in interior heat protection. With sizes of up to 6m width and 5m projection being possible, this is truly an amazing solution for the most beautifully designed architectural skylights and Glass roofs. Running on a minimum of 3 degree pitch allows for the Sottezza to cover large projections relatively flat.
The new Optistretch technology makes for taught fabric without the traditional light gaps of other solutions. By far one of the most advanced under mount roof systems on the market, German design and quality with integrated LED lights, the Sottezza 2 is living proof the Germanys know how to do things right!
Download the Sottezza II brochure containing all product details and and full technical specifications. | {
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Please read these Terms and Conditions ("Terms", "Terms and Conditions") carefully before using the http://www.latestjankari.com website (the "Service") operated by Latest jankari ("us", "we", or "our").
By accessing or using the Service you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you disagree with any part of the terms then you may not access the Service. This Terms & Conditions agreement is licensed by TermsFeed to Latest jankari.
Our Service may contain links to third-party web sites or services that are not owned or controlled by Latest jankari.
Latest jankari has no control over, and assumes no responsibility for, the content, privacy policies, or practices of any third party web sites or services. You further acknowledge and agree that Latest jankari shall not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with use of or reliance on any such content, goods or services available on or through any such web sites or services. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
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**Begin Reading**
Table of Contents
A Preview of _The Power_
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In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.
For my teachers. Especially those who taught me Latin and Hebrew: the gift of double vision.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything
turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure.
"Musée des Beaux Arts," W. H. Auden
THIS WAS HOW it happened.
It is important to quiet the lamb, that is the first thing. A young man, learning the skills of priesthood, sometimes approaches the task with brutality. But it must be done softly, even lovingly. Lambs are trusting creatures. Touch it on the forehead just above the spot between the eyes. Breathe slowly and evenly, close enough to the creature to inhale the meaty scent of wool. It will know if you are nervous. Hold yourself steady. Whisper the sacred words. Grasp the knife as you have practiced. Plunge the blade into the neck swiftly, just below the jaw. There must be no pausing. The knife must be sharp enough that almost no pressure is needed. Move it down evenly and quickly, severing the tendons and nerves as the blood begins to flow and the lamb's muscles spasm. Withdraw. The entire motion should take less than the time of one in-breath.
Hold the lamb so that the blood gushes down, that it may be caught in the sacred cup. There is a great deal of blood; the life is in the blood. It is appropriate at this point to meditate on the blood in your own body, on how quickly and easily it could be released, on how one day it will cease to flow. Sacrifice is a meditation on vulnerability. Your blood is no redder than this creature's. Your skin is no tougher. Your understanding of the events which will lead to your own death is probably no greater than this lamb's comprehension.
The smell of it is strong: iron and salt and sharpness. A priest catches the blood in the cup. The cup becomes full. The priest scatters the blood, spatters it to the four corners of the altar. The smell increases. The lamb stops twitching. The last traces of life are gone from it. This is how quickly it happens. When the blood is drained, slice open the skin and pull it from the carcass. Now the creature is meat. Every living being is meat for another. Do you think that the mosquito—one of the smallest of God's creatures—looks on us as anything other than food? Worms will one day devour you—do you imagine they will notice your intellect, your kindness, your riches, your beauty? Everything is eaten by some other thing. Do not think that because you have knives of bronze you are more than this lamb. All of us are lambs before the Almighty.
Remove the sacred organs from the flesh. Pull them, separating and cutting the sinews which hold them in place. Moments ago, they had purpose: like each man in the Temple, they had their functions to perform. Now they are objects to be burned in the holy fires. Take care not to pierce the bowel—the stench will be appalling. This is no ritual of the spirit, it is a matter of the body. Remember that your bowel too contains feces, that the woman whom you most desire in all the world is, at this moment as at all others, full of mucus and feces. Be humble. Remove the forbidden fats which may not be eaten: the sheet of fat across the abdomen, the fat of the kidneys.
Place the organs and the forbidden fats into the fire of the altar. As they burn, offer up praises to the Almighty, who has given us this holy duty, who has given us the wit to understand His works, who has placed us above the beasts in knowledge and in wisdom. As the fats burn, their outer membranes blackening, the soft white matter liquefying and dripping down among the burning branches, the smell will be sweet and delicious. These are the sweet savors for the Lord. Your mouth will begin to salivate, your stomach, if you have not eaten for some time, may begin to growl. You are not an angel, a disembodied spirit without desire. You are a body, like this lamb. You want to eat this flesh. You are a soul also, the more to praise your Creator. Remember what you are. Give thanks. When the fats and organs are consumed, the animal's carcass may be removed. It will be cooked for you and your fellow priests. Thus you will share the meal with God.
This is the daily sacrifice. Every day, twice a day, morning and evening, a year-old lamb, healthy and without blemish. Every time, it is a sacred thing. Every time, the animal is slain for the glory of God, not for the mere satisfaction of our hungers. Every time, as the life bleeds out, the priest should look, and notice, and give thanks for the animal whose life has returned to its Creator and whose flesh provides sweet savors for the Lord and nourishment for His servants.
They knew it would be that day. It is impossible to follow the fortunes of a battle closely without knowing when they are reaching their conclusion. Especially when that battle concerns the city in which you live.
They had fought off the army as long as they were able. They had the advantage, to begin with: the walls were high, the ramparts thick. As the army worked below, filling the ravine with boulders and felled trees, they hurled down rocks and arrows upon them. They worked in shifts, night and day, pulling the matter out of the moat by the cellar doors as quickly as it was placed there. They struggled. But they were undone by God.
The Lord commanded them to rest on the holy Sabbath. On this day, the besieging enemy was able to gain ground. Week by week, Sabbath by Sabbath, cubit by cubit, the ravine was filled in. They worked double time, but it was not enough. The invading army worked harder. They saw that soon the ravine would be so full of debris that a platform could be erected on it, that ladders could be raised and battering rams employed.
On the day that the platforms went down, they knew the end was coming. They were not afraid: fear would be a long time coming still, they had not yet seen starvation leading to cannibalism, to murder, to infanticide. Instead of fear, they were angry. They occupied a land between the river and the sea; it was a necessary foothold for anyone hoping to hold this region. They happened to stand in the way. It seemed wrong to them that the world should operate in such a manner. They raised angry cries to the Lord.
In the Temple, the High Priest heard the battering ram pounding on the city wall night and day now. Each resounding bang did little damage by itself. A small amount of dust, perhaps a tiny shift in one of the stones. Accumulating, night and day, those cedars twice as thick as the arm span of a man would destroy the wall. The people could see the stones being bowed inward.
It was just before dawn when the first stone fell. It was towards the base of the wall, not quite at the bottom, and in the glittering early morning light the motes of dust around it seemed to shimmer as it tumbled, as it crashed to the ground. When it fell, there was a silence in the city. Outside, the soldiers whooped and shouted and redoubled their efforts. But for a moment, inside the city, there was only an astonished horror. They had known it must come and yet had not believed it until they saw. The impregnable wall was breached. Then there were cries. Bring men, bring fire, bring swords, keep the invaders back!
Inside the Temple, the young priests ran towards their master, crying out what they had heard. The High Priest watched them run, their robes flapping, their feet slipping on the blood-slick floor. He knew what they had come to tell him. Everyone in the city knew what it meant that the great banging had ceased. Were the sacrifices needed less now? Did the people no longer need to be brought close to God, to understand the shortness of their own lives?
He listened to their breathless words. One pleaded with him to leave the Temple. Another demanded that all the able-bodied young priests should take arms. A third suggested that they go out to meet the conqueror with a show of welcome. The conqueror was coming, he repeated, he was making for the Temple.
The High Priest said to them, "Two lambs, without blemish. One in the morning, one at dusk. Together with a grain offering of fine flour mixed with oil. This is the burnt offering instituted at Sinai. An offering to the Lord."
They became quiet. But, protested one, the conqueror is coming, he approaches. The others silenced him, stiffening their spines and pulling their robes around them. They hurried to their duties, their hands and legs knowing the ritual even as their minds blew here and there. This one began to burn the incense, that one to clean the ashes, those began to lay fresh wood.
As the sun rose above the horizon, they slew the lamb. They scattered its blood. Some of the priests were silently weeping. They could all hear the shouting outside the gates of the Temple. They continued nonetheless to separate the organs, the sacred forbidden fat. They heard the foot beat of the army, that terrible consolidated crunch of one hundred right feet going down in unison. The lie of uniformity. As if they could become one creature. As if each of them, like this lamb, would not be utterly alone at the moment of death. No one else will save you from your own death, that is certain.
They burned the sacred portions of flesh. The High Priest felt his stomach growl as he inhaled the sweet scent of meat, because even now he was still just a man. The noise had ceased outside the Temple. The great gates were opening. Either there was no one left to defend them or they had surrendered in the face of insurmountable numbers. Well, they would find out for themselves soon enough. They began to prepare the wheat-meal offering, singing the psalm of the day. They brought the flour cake from its store. They anointed it with oil and frankincense.
And it was as they were preparing this offering that the conqueror, together with his troops, entered the Temple.
The matter was dealt with swiftly. The soldiers poured into the inner courtyard, shouting words in their own language, issuing and obeying commands at a run. They did not pause, even at the sight of the holy rituals. One or two of the priests attempted to run and were cut down. The High Priest was pleased to note that most of the younger men simply continued with their duties: burning the incense, fanning the flames, pouring the libations of wine. And if their arms trembled or their heads jerked or their mouths cried out when a sword ran them through, would not God in His infinite mercy forgive it?
The Romans swept through the sanctuary so quickly that they themselves seemed surprised, even alarmed, at how easily the thing had been done. They glanced at each other. The city had been a fortress, well defended. Was its heart to be taken without resistance? They looked around. The only man left alive was the High Priest; they had spared him to speak to their leader, the commander who was even now arriving.
The High Priest had expected a larger man, a brute with muscles of iron and a towering height. And a young man, why had he expected that? Perhaps because his way of making war had been so energetic. Pompey was forty-five, with a rather vague air, the lines on his forehead suggesting eyebrows constantly raised. He might have been powerfully muscular once, but he had run a little too fat now. He wore not the armor of battle but the toga of state, as if about to attend a meeting in the Senate.
His centurion addressed the High Priest.
"Pompey, commander of the Eastern legions and the Euxine fleet, triumphant conqueror of Hispania, consul of Rome, first man of the Roman Empire, primus inter pares, bids you..."
The centurion continued to speak. The High Priest looked at the meal cake in his hand. Flour, oil, water, baked to a fine flat bread. He crumbled the soft cake and placed it in the fire as was his duty. The flames flickered green and blue. He watched the cake burn.
The centurion, angry to receive no response, grabbed the High Priest's arm roughly, seemed about to strike him, when a single word from Pompey stopped him.
Pompey motioned his men to lower their weapons. Together, they watched the meal cake burn, as flour cakes and lambs and oxen burned on the altars of Rome to their own many gods. The stone floor was thick with the blood of the slain, the bodies still warm. The sweet scent of the smoldering oil and flour traced a thread of delicious aroma through the iron stench of blood. The cake was entirely consumed. Pompey uttered a word. The centurion drew his sword, grabbed the priest's chin, pulling it up and back, and slit the man's throat.
This had been the last offering made by a free man in the Temple.
Pompey was not an ungenerous man. His Hebrew spies informed him that it was a grave offense among the Jews for an outsider to enter the holy inner sanctuary. This prohibition could not, of course, be adhered to, but nonetheless he made his survey of the Temple with courtesy, examining the objects and having his scribe record them.
How many talents of gold?
Two thousand.
What golden vessels?
The lampstand, the lamps, the table, the cups.
Spices?
Yes, great chests of them, a prince's ransom.
Because he was impressed by the people whom he had conquered, because he had no wish to humiliate them further, he allowed them to keep these sacred treasures. And because he wished the people to feel the magnanimity of Rome as well as its power, he summoned the other priests, those who had not had the duty to attend the Temple that day, and bade them clean the inner courtyard of the blood and bodies of their friends and to begin the services once more. In this he was an astonishingly charitable conqueror.
The position of High Priest, of course, was a powerful one which could not simply be given to the next man in seniority. Pompey put his friend in that place, a Jewish prince who had been most cooperative during the siege and whose men had fought for Rome. It was a fitting gift for a loyal ally. This business concluded, Pompey left a garrison at Jerusalem and headed back to Rome in triumph.
This was how it happened. And everything that came afterwards followed from this.
# Miryam
THERE IS A dead boy on the hillside, they say. Or maybe just almost dead. The herder Ephrayim found him when he was seeking a lost lamb, and does not know how long he has lain in the shallow cave between the pathways. Where has he come from? They don't know. The clothes look like those made in Shomron, but the shoes are Galilean. Sturdy shoes, said Ephrayim, laying thereby his claim should the boy be lost. Sturdy, but still he should not have tried to cross the hills alone. It has been six cold nights one after another. Snow has fallen although it is nearly spring.
Still, if he is dead he must be buried, and if he is not dead they must attempt, at least, to care for him. They bring him to Natzaret thrown over the back of a mule. This is where Miryam first sees him. He is breathing, just a little, very shallow breaths, and they have wrapped him in furs. As they bring him in, a crowd comes to see—is he someone's cousin? Someone's nephew? Why did he come to Natzaret at such a time of rough travel? No one recognizes him. They push Miryam to the front in any case, to take a good look. A mother would know her own son, however changed he might be. Though they know there is no hope and he is at least a decade too young. But just in case.
Her youngest son, Iov, tugs on her skirt and says, "Who is it, Ima? Who is it? Why does he look like that, Ima?"
She picks Iov up and passes him to her friend Rahav to hold as she stares intently at the man on the back of the mule. The half-dead man is not her son. How could he be? She notices that two fingers on his right hand are black. He'll lose them, painfully. If he's lucky.
They place him in Amala the widow's house and put him to bed with the dogs, for warmth. He sleeps the night, though they expect him to die, and in the morning begins to rouse, a little, enough to flutter his eyelids and take drips of water from a soaked rag. The pain from his blackened fingers keeps him moaning constantly, even in his sleep, a low keening wail like an abandoned newborn. He shivers and sweats and holds the injured hand like a claw. They fear a fever. They call for the blacksmith, who performs the necessary deed with kindness, that is to say: swiftly. He screams of course, a strangled, terrified howl, but that night he takes a little soup and sleeps deeply. He still has not spoken to say who he is, although he understands them when they say "soup" or "water." They wonder if he is a Jew at all, and not a Syrian or a Greek.
It is four more days until he speaks. They take turns feeding him bone soup or bread soaked in milk. Among themselves, they murmur. He is not as young as the light bundle of him crumpled in the cave had suggested, but not so old as the lines on his face. His beard has not come in yet, except in mottled patches. He is perhaps fifteen or sixteen. And where are his people? There is one obvious answer. Every year, some village rebels against the Romans, refuses to pay the tax, claims they cannot pay—often it is true, they cannot pay. And the tax collectors report the rebellion, and soldiers are dispatched. Every year, some village is burned, its men put to the sword, its women and children to flight. It is not likely that a boy as young as this would have been a ringleader, would be remembered by a soldier. It is not likely that it is dangerous to have him here. Nonetheless, the old men mutter.
On the fourth day, when they come to give him his soup, they find he has woken and is patting the dog with his whole hand, keeping the injured one close to his chest. He is murmuring to the dog in good, intelligible Aramaic.
He looks up guiltily as Amala and Rahav enter the room with his soup. He knows they have heard him speaking. His good hand is twined in the dog's fur and the animal stirs and whines as it feels him tense.
Rahav puts the tray on the floor, just out of the boy's reach. Her arms are folded. She glares at him. Rahav's children are the best behaved in the village, mostly out of fear.
"Well," she says, "we've fed you. Now, who are you?"
The boy glances between Amala and Rahav. He looks hungrily at the soup.
"Is this Natzaret?" he says. "Did I reach Natzaret?"
They tell him it is. He did.
A change comes over his face. He sits up a little straighter, sets his jaw, as if facing a difficult job.
"Natzaret in the Galil?"
They tell him yes, again. And they cannot discern whether he is glad or afraid, such a shining-eyed sharpness comes over his face.
"The village of Yehoshuah the Teacher?"
And Amala and Rahav glance at each other with a sort of sad surrender. Of course, this. Out in the street, the little boy Iov is playing with some of the other children. Rahav sends him to fetch his mother, Miryam.
The rabbis say: when a loved one dies the sword is at your throat, and every way you turn your head it is there, in front of you.
So, this is how she is. When she grinds the wheat, she thinks of him. And when she soaks the cloths, she thinks of him. And when her youngest son, Iov, comes running to her, yes, it is her Iov, the foolish child who got his hand stuck in a jar because he would not unclench his fist to let go of the dried fig he'd found. But it is also that first little boy, her eldest son, the first child who ever skidded to a halt in the muddy place by the chicken enclosure shouting "Ima, Ima!"—"Mummy! Mummy!" She is distracted by the constant double image.
Iov is saying something. He kicks at a stone. The snow has turned to slush and the thin rain will soon wash it away entirely. He digs his toe into the hole left by the stone.
"Don't do that," she says, "you'll wear out the leather."
And he looks at her sadly, because she spoke more sharply than she'd intended.
"But Ima, Ima, did you hear me? They're looking for you, at Amala's house, they're looking for you! They want you to go and see that man with half a hand!"
She asks him why, and his mouth twists and his eyes open very wide and she understands that he does not want to answer. So she has an idea, already, of what it is.
The women waiting outside Amala's home aren't waiting for her. They say nothing when she comes, most of them can't meet her eyes. One or two touch her on the back or shoulder as she passes. The rest are simply afraid. They want to know if this boy is a curse she has brought on them.
Inside the smoky, dark room, he is sitting on a heaped mattress. Someone has given him a woolen jerkin, with a thick robe on top of it. They add bulk to his thin frame. When she enters he stands, a little shakily, to greet her.
She says, "Who are you?"
He looks into her eyes. He has an unsettling trick: that every word he says, he seems to mean with a profound depth of feeling.
"I am Gidon," he says, "from Yaffo."
"And why have you come here, Gidon of Yaffo?"
His eyes are so clear and innocent that she becomes afraid. Innocence can destroy three times as quickly as guile. At least the cunning can be reasoned with or bribed.
"I have come to seek the village of Yehoshuah the Teacher, to find his friends and family here, to meet them and to befriend them."
She breathes in and breathes out.
"He was a traitor, a rabble-leader, a rebel, a liar and a pretender to the throne. We have tried to forget him here."
"Did you know him?" Gidon says.
She remains silent.
"Did you know him?" he repeats.
The fire spits. Some wet log sending a shower of sparks past the circle of stones onto the moist earth floor.
"I was his mother," she says.
A wetness is starting in his eyes, he is shaking.
"Oh, blessings are on you," he says, "blessings are on you, and on your womb and breasts, because of the son you have given the world. A thousand thousand blessings from He Who is in All Places, for your son Yehoshuah."
Her heart is a stone. Her mouth is a closed door.
"Go home."
His eyes are shining. She thinks he might be about to embrace her or kiss her hand or fall to his knees before her.
"Go home," she says again, before he can do any of these things. "We do not want you here."
And she leaves the room before he can say any more to her.
She remembers the screaming trees that night.
She thinks of them many days, and of what happens to those who challenge and fight and argue. And how little this boy seems to understand of where his words will lead.
She remembers the screaming trees and she thinks: if I can bear not to speak to him, it will be better for him. But she knows she does not have that strength.
The boy will not leave, of course. They do not understand how one simple, addle-headed, half-handed boy can be so stubborn. They offer him food for the journey. They offer him the warm clothes as a gift. When Sha'ul the merchant passes by on his way to Jerusalem, they suggest he take the boy with him as a help against bandits, and Sha'ul, whom they have known for twenty summers, is not unwilling—but the boy refuses.
He will work, he says. He will repay the kindness they have shown him. He will sleep in the stone shelter made for the goats. The weather is becoming warmer, it will not be a hardship to sleep there if he builds a small fire. His hand is mending, look, the wound has healed clean. He can work. If they will give him a bowl of food each day for his trouble, he will tend their crops and mind their animals and mend their gap-toothed walls. They shrug their shoulders at last. If he wants to be the madman of their village, so be it.
All of them know which house he will choose to settle by. Which byre will be his dwelling place. Whose fields he will clear of stones. Miryam is unsurprised when, one morning, she awakes to find him sitting patiently on a rock by her door.
He watches her stumble, morning-stiffened, to the well. She lowers the bucket and twists the rope just so, to make it dip under the water and fill, but when she tries to pull it up he is by her elbow.
"Let me do it."
And she is old and tired and her knuckles and wrists ache. It is easy to let him. If he wants to, why not let him? He hauls the full bucket up. He is a little clumsy with his half-hand, but he is adapting quickly, as children do. As she watches, he tests out different ways of gripping the rope, settling at last on using the arm with the injured hand to trap the rope close to his body and secure it, while the other hand works to bring up more. He reminds her of a blind man she saw once, reading his way along a wall with a light and interested touch, as though his fingers were eyes.
He carries the bucket for her, a little unsteadily, slopping out more than she would like. He brings it into the room where little Iov and his sister Michal are still sleeping, wrapped around each other. They do not stir. Gidon puts the bucket by the fire. Looks at her. Like a sheep, she thinks, looking for its flock.
"If you pour it into the pot," she says, "and put the pot on the fire, we can make hyssop tea." She nods at the bundle of dried leaves hanging from the ceiling beam. "There is bread from yesterday still."
Favoring his good hand, he hoists the bucket again, pours the water into the pot. Lifts the pot onto the raised stones over the fire. She pokes at the logs with a stick of wood.
"You do not want to talk to me."
His voice is not accusing. He is calm.
"No," she says.
"But you let me help you."
There is no trace of bitterness.
She shrugs. "Do we not read: 'The Lord will recompense you for the work you have done'?—and so is it not good to work?"
He starts, and stares at her. It is true, a woman of learning is not a common thing, but neither is it entirely unknown. All the people of the village know their letters; one or two of the other women could best her in quoting Torah passages. She knows it is not this which interests him.
"Tell me again," he says, "or again another thing."
She shakes her head.
"If you want to learn, there are better teachers than me. Go and seek out a teacher."
And he says, "I have already done so. My teacher cannot teach me anymore."
The water begins to boil. She dips in a jug, breaks dry leaves into the water and pours some into a small clay bowl for him, and for her. The well water is good, thank God. It is clean and pure and tastes of old stones.
"If you are willing to work then you are from the Lord. If you work then I will feed you, until the spring, when you should go back to your people."
There is such happiness in him when she says this that she knows what she has done.
There is a thing she often remembers. It was a little thing. When her first son was only a baby, and she was a new wife, and her husband was so young and strong that he lifted great boulders to make the walls of their sheep pen. In that part of their lives, she remembers, they passed evenings gazing at their little son sleeping. Every first baby seems like a miracle. The old women laugh and say: by number six she'll forget what name she gave the new one.
But this was their first child. Yosef, her husband, made the baby a cradle of woven branches. Yehoshuah was snug in there, on a bed of fur with a lamb's-wool blanket.
The thing she remembers is that there was a scorpion. It happened between one moment of looking and the next. The baby was sleeping, she looked away, and then there was a small yellow scorpion in his cradle. Poised over his heart. Yellow scorpions are the most dangerous. When she was a child, a man in the village was stung by a yellow scorpion like that, its tail dripping venom. He died of it, shaking and sweating and crying out for his mother. He was a man of forty and strong in himself.
She looked at the scorpion, sitting on the chest of her sleeping child, and there was not a thought in her head. Every mother knows how it is. There is no thinking or weighing one thing against another. She reached her hand into the cradle, plucked out the scorpion, threw it to the ground and crushed it beneath her shoe to oozing yellow muck.
She had been fast, but scorpions are also fast. It had grazed the skin of her hand with its sting, leaving a faint red score on her flesh. As the day passed, her hand grew hot and heavy, her limbs ached. Her heart pounded, her knees buckled. She thought: I shall die like that man in the village, but it is better that I should die than my baby. When Yosef came home from the fields in the evening, expecting his supper, he found her lying on the straw-filled mattress with hot dry skin and glassy eyes and the baby crying in her arms.
It was three days like that. Yosef brought her well water and she drank a little, and vomited, and the baby would not cease from crying though Yosef fed him goat's milk from a skin bag. But at the end of three days the fever broke. Yosef had to bring her a pot to piss in because she could not walk to the stone outhouse. Her right arm and right leg, the side the scorpion had stung, were numb like a fallen branch.
She recovered slowly. It was hard, with a small baby, but she was young and strong then and with God's help she grew well. Her right hand never regained all its cunning. Still it is slower than its fellow, still it will not close into a tight fist only a loose one. She cannot use a needle with the right finger and thumb and had to teach herself to use the left. But she never regretted her action, not as she saw him grow tall and wise and strong. When he was a grown man of twenty she would thank her own hand sometimes for his life. Her hand, and the guidance of God.
But this past year, she thinks: what was it for? What had been the point of all those thousand thousand acts of work and love that go to raise a child? What was the point of any of it, seeing what has happened, and that he has not left even a grandchild from his body to comfort her?
The boy Gidon works hard, there is that at least. Her own grown sons will help her if she is ill, but they have their families now, and Iov, the littlest one, is too small to be much use lifting and carrying. He minds the sheep, but he can scarcely keep his thoughts even on that. Gidon has the single-mindedness that impressed and frightened her the first time they met. He has cleared the back field, which has lain untended since her husband, Yosef, was with them. They will be able to plant wheat in it, or barley, in a month's time.
He has not asked her more questions. She has not mentioned Yehoshuah. Whenever she speaks of her sons, she says "my son Yirmiyahu, the second one" or "my son Iehuda, the fourth." So that he will know, and not think she is inviting conversation. He asks her, sometimes, questions about the Torah. She has taught him, a little. It is hard not to, when his yearning is so open within him.
He sees her once giving food to one of the beggars who pass through even an out-of-the-way village like this. A blind woman, making her way with a stick and a bundle of little dolls whittled from wood in her backpack. Miryam slips a few extra apples into the woman's pack before she walks on with some other travelers.
After she leaves, Gidon says, "My teacher said that the poor will always be with us."
And she cannot help herself.
"If he wasn't a fool, he meant that each of us can find someone who has less than us. Don't you know that every Jew is obliged to give charity? Even the beggars must give."
"Tell more," he says.
And she teaches him what she had learned when her parents took her to hear the great Rabbi Hillel speak, that our duty to love each other is the highest of all the commandments of God. That our duty of charity extends even to our own bodies, and we must care for them because our souls are guests in them.
He wants a mother, this boy, she can read it in the lines of him as he sits in the dust by her feet listening to her teach, until it is time for supper and the children come in bustling and hungry. He wants a mother to notice that he is there, and to teach him.
Later, Iov and Michal are sleeping and she tends the fire, banking it high so that it will burn slowly through the night. Gidon is still in the house, leaning his long, thin frame against the wall, whittling a wooden stick to a sharp point with his knife.
She says, "Who are your people?"
He says, "My family are those who believe what I believe."
She has heard of such groups. The Essenes are one—they live together and follow the same customs although they are not kin—and there are other small groups, those who follow the same principles or who gather around a teacher.
"And where are they?" she says, because she thinks he will say that it is a group who live in the caves, or in the desert, or in the wooded hills near Jerusalem.
"We are scattered," he says. "Now we who followed your son Yehoshuah are wandering. Teaching. We are spreading his words."
She looks at him. He is leaning forward on his haunches now, observing her. He moves towards her. Not to touch, but closer to her body.
"Become one of us," he says to her, softly. "Mother Miryam, listen to the teachings of your blessed son and tell us what you know of him. There must be stories"—his voice is low, so as not to wake the children, but he is speaking more quickly, with a dreadful urgency—"you can tell the holy stories of his birth, his childhood. No one sent me to ask this, but I had a dream. It was as the winter came on. In my dream, the clouds parted and a voice spoke from heaven telling me to find you. It said that I must come and help you and work with you, to learn the stories you could teach me."
She is tired now. Not angry anymore, barely afraid. He's a good worker and a kind lad, but she is tired.
"There are no stories," she says.
He reaches out towards her.
"There are no stories. He was a baby and then he was a child and then he was a man and then he was killed. That is the story."
"But," he says, "what kind of baby was he? How was his birth? What manner of child? How did his great wisdom first show itself? And where did he get his learning?"
She sighs.
"Gidon," she says, "you are a good boy. And you have no mother. Let me be a mother to you."
He toys with his pointed stick, saying nothing.
"If I were your mother, I would tell you this: take a wife. I know you have only eight of your fingers, but there are many girls who would have you willingly."
The daughter of Nechemiah for one, her mother has mentioned this to Miryam casually more than once now, has happened to ask if she knows whether Gidon has a wife somewhere.
"Learn a trade. You are skillful with your hands even still. Then take a wife. Fill her belly with sons and with daughters."
He blushes a little at this, his face becomes bashful.
"Then you will think of your wife and your craft and your sons and your daughters, and forget that you came here for any other reason. That is a good life."
But she sees from his face that this business is not over.
He had been, she admits it to herself now, a distant child. Not always distant. Often helpful, often sweet. But a child given to entertaining himself for hours. Yehoshuah could sit staring at the waving barley and when Yosef said, "What are you doing there, boy, sitting idle?" he would reply strangely, with an odd question, "Why did God make the locusts?" or simply say, "I am thinking, father." But for all that, he seemed happy. He made friends easily. He had a way with him that was charming.
She remembers a small boy, Ze'ev, the child of Batchamsa from the village. Yehoshuah and Ze'ev played together, some game of catching a ball and counting the throws. They were eight or nine. Yehoshuah threw the ball too far, Ze'ev made a lunge for it and fell in the mud. It was funny. Miryam, half watching while sifting the dried lentils for stones, laughed. The boy was covered in mud, brown streaks over his clothes and in his hair. Yehoshuah didn't laugh, he simply looked.
Later, when he was settling down to sleep, he asked her, "What did it mean, Ima, that Ze'ev fell down?"
"It didn't mean anything, sweet. He just fell."
"But what did it mean?"
He returned to this thought again and again. What did it mean that the rain fell? What did it mean that the dog died? As if the world were a book and each person and event in it had been carefully chosen, and their meanings could be understood if one only read aright.
She and Yosef argued about him.
"He's always hanging around your skirts," said Yosef, when he came in from his workshop and found Yehoshuah reading, or thinking, or whittling some wood by the fire when the other children were out playing in the orchards.
"He's different to other boys," said Miryam. "He doesn't like their rough-and-tumble games."
"You're making him weak," said Yosef. "You give in too easily."
"Give in what? I should throw him out of the house and force him to play?"
"Yes! Or give him work! He's nine, he's old enough to work! Give him some of your jobs, working your fingers to the bone. Set him to chop the wood, or carry the water. If he wants to be a woman, let him pluck the goose!"
"A woman? He should be like you?" said Miryam, and this was the start of their troubles.
"Like me? What do you mean like me?"
"Like you, never studying anymore as you did when you were young, never going to learn with the rabbi."
And so it went on. And Yehoshuah sat by the fire, and although he must have heard every word he said nothing, did nothing.
As he grew to adulthood she feared, for a time, that she had done something wrong. Her fears were only calmed when she saw that her younger sons were normal. Yirmiyahu was married at seventeen. Iehuda went to the wedding canopy at twenty. Shimon, the quiet one, developed such an ardent passion for a girl from the next village that no one could hold him back and the wedding was arranged when he was barely fifteen. But although they suggested girls to Yehoshuah, he would not meet them, and though they tried to persuade him, he did not hear their words.
As a young man, when he and Yosef could no longer be in the same home together, he began to travel. He stayed for a time among the Essenes, those men who live without women and refuse to defecate upon the Sabbath day. He took, for a year, more difficult vows. She had grandsons and granddaughters from her younger boys and the oldest was still unwed.
He came back home for a time when he was twenty-seven. Still no woman with him, though she had hoped that after his wandering he might return with a sweet bride and surprise them all with... what? With normality at last. But no. He was odder than ever, more distant and strange. He would not meet anyone's gaze, seemed always to be staring at something just out of view. He and Yosef argued. When would he found a family of his own? Build a house? There was that far field, if he wanted he could build himself a place there, but he could not live with them anymore, it wasn't right, a fully grown man living like a child, waited on hand and foot by his mother.
Yehoshuah was different now, though. Not quiet but angry, suddenly, with a violent rage that swept over his body and made him go stiff and white-faced.
"You know nothing," he said quietly, "old man." And then, his voice rising to a shriek, "You know nothing, you know nothing. You. Know. Nothing!" and he picked up a pot from the table and smashed it on the ground.
The other children were not there. They did not see what happened. Yosef and Miryam looked at the broken shards. Yehoshuah stared, with flared nostrils and rolling eyes, at his father and then darted for the door. It was three days, that time, before he returned.
He spoke to himself. Or he heard voices. Or demons. Only sometimes—not all the time, she told her other children when they complained. He does not do it all the time. He is engaged in his studies, she said. He is reciting the words of the Torah, to keep them pure and complete in his heart. Is it not praiseworthy? Yosef looked at him like a stranger at their table. Not a son, an odd, full-grown man, whom they had taken in for no reason.
The arguments grew worse. There came a day, if she was honest she had known it was coming, when Yehoshuah hit Yosef in a rage. Yosef had provoked it, probably. With a critical tone, angry words. And Yehoshuah rose up from his place by the fire and with the heel of his hand whacked his father hard on the temple. Yosef was a man nearing fifty and Yehoshuah was young and strong. Yosef stumbled, almost fell. Yehoshuah looked at his hand in disbelief. And Miryam found that she was saying, "Yosef! Why did you speak to him like that?" Because what will a mother not do for her son?
After that, Yehoshuah wandered farther from their village, into the desert, for days sometimes. He had not founded a family, he had no crops to tend or harvest to reap. When he returned from the wilderness he would not say who he had seen there or what he had done. And she remembered the charming child he had been, the one who would reach his little hand out for hers and show her a lizard he had seen, or a new fern, and she wondered when she had lost him.
Then one day, a week had passed, then two, and he did not return. For a month or two she thought he had died out there. In her dreams the scorpion returned, or its parent to exact vengeance on her son for her murder of its offspring. Her hand ached in its old wound and she thought perhaps it was a sign.
She and Yosef quarreled about it.
"Why were you always so hard with him?" she would say, and although she knew in her heart that there was no answer here, she could not stop. "Why could you never show him kindness?"
"He needed less kindness from you, woman! He needed to be taught to be a man, instead of you constantly keeping him near, mothering him!"
"I am his mother. What else should I have done?"
And Yosef made that disgusted noise he kept specially for arguments he knew he could not win with her.
She saw Yosef one day talking closely with the daughter of Ramatel, the blacksmith, a tall, well-built girl, but at that time she thought little of it. Her mind was occupied with chewing over Yehoshuah and what had become of him and whether she would ever hear from him or see him again, or if he had died somewhere out there in the desert and the wolves had had his bones.
And then she heard a tale from a merchant that he had been seen in Kfar Nachum, and he was preaching and working wonders like a holy man. And they said another thing. They said he was out of his mind.
And it is evening, and it is morning. And it is time to prepare for the Sabbath. She washes herself and the children. She bakes bread for today and for tomorrow. Just before sunset, she lights the oil lamps which will burn through the night and makes the blessing. And it is Friday morning, and it is Friday evening. The Sabbath day.
The boy Gidon goes to pray with the men in Ephrayim's field. She and the small children go to sit in the long barn and sing the women's songs welcoming the Sabbath. They share out bread and wine and make the blessings on it. They drink the sweet wine made in years when they were young, the jars sealed with wax by their fathers, keeping in those long-ago summers until this day.
Some of the women ask about Gidon. Not just, like Nechemiah's wife, because they have a daughter who has taken an interest in him. They have heard something. The news has come that there was a small rising in Yaffo several months ago, in the autumn. A man appeared claiming to be the rightful king of Judea, the son of the king the Romans slew. He had followers, only two or three hundred, but they tried to break into the armory. The soldiers quashed the rebellion easily enough, but the man himself, along with several of his most important followers, had escaped.
Does she think... Gidon was from Yaffo, they knew, does she think that he might be one of those men?
She shakes her head.
"He is what he says he is: a fool, not a liar."
Rahav puts a thin arm around her shoulder and hugs her.
"We still mourn with you."
Rahav kisses the side of Miryam's head. She's a kind soul, especially with a glass of warm fragrant wine in her.
It's Batchamsa who introduces a note of caution.
"They're looking, though," she says. "They've sent out armed men as far as S'de Raphael."
"They won't come this far north," says Rahav, "not for a fugitive from Yaffo."
"They might," says Batchamsa. "They just keep looking."
Rahav shakes her head. "One of his own people will betray him. They always do when they get scared or hungry and want to come home. In a month they'll have found him in a cave near Yaffo and that'll be the end of it."
Rahav does not say the part in the middle, Miryam notes. She does not say, "They'll find him and then they'll kill him and that'll be the end of it." Miryam supposes that this is Rahav's kindness.
She finds she feels a little protective of Gidon.
In the evening, they eat with her brother Shmuel's family. His wife has made soup and roast goat leg with wild garlic. Gidon eats with them. The village's decision to treat him as an imbecile has faded. He has done good work on Miryam's land. Those who work deserve to eat.
Shmuel sets in on him again, saying,
"But you will return to Yaffo in the spring, yes? Before Passover?"
Gidon shifts his shoulders awkwardly. He is less comfortable here than he is with her alone. He does not talk so readily.
"I might stay here," he says, and then seems about to say something more, but falls silent.
"He has been useful with the goats," she says. "Iov can never bring them all in. We lost two over the winter. Gidon gathers them safely in."
Shmuel nods and takes more bread and goat covered in the thick paste of herbs and olive oil. Her brother is the patriarch now, the one who makes the decisions since her husband has gone. But he's not an unkind man. He dips his bread into the green oil and swallows it, leaving a few emerald flecks in his beard.
"But you'll tell me when you get tired of him, yes?" he says, then grins widely, "so we can send him on his way with courtesy, of course."
They said he was out of his mind. This, they came to tell her. The sympathetic women from the villages nearby came, when they passed through for market day. "Passing through" was what they said, though Natzaret was a mile or more out of their way. People who had not visited her for five years came to tell her that her son was mad. Just as a kindness.
He had desecrated the Temple, they said, and she could not believe it. He had loved going to the Temple as a boy, buying the cake for a meal offering in the outer courtyard and accompanying the sacrifice.
He had done work on the Sabbath, they said, and she laughed and said, "Yehoshuah? Who never did a stick of work the other six days of the week?" And they laughed too, because nothing is funnier than a mother mocking her own son, and agreed that perhaps on this point she was right.
Yosef, she noticed, did not laugh at this joke.
As they were getting ready for sleep, he said to her, "It's not enough that he's run away? Now he brings disgrace on the family?"
She did not bother to argue. He wanted to lie with her that night, but she refused him, and he made that special noise again, of unconquerable exasperation.
Those friends who loved her best told her simply that Yehoshuah was changed. That he seemed frightening sometimes, or frightened himself. Those who loved her best told her that it had been hard to recognize him, that something in him had begun to work differently, that even his face was changed. One said she heard he had been questioned by the Roman guard but they had not held him.
"You should go to talk to him," she said to Yosef one night.
He looked at her.
"It's your job," she said, because this sometimes called him to his duty. "You are his father. You should go and see that all is well with him. I'm worried about him."
"You've always worried about him over the wrong things."
"Rahav said she'd heard that the guard questioned him. You should go there. Talk to him. Bring him home. Please."
He stared at her levelly. His beard was all gray now, and his eyes wrinkled and his skin burnished, and where now was the young strong husband who had lifted her up with one hand? And had loved her? She had thought that he had loved her.
"No," he said, "he will have no more from me."
"Then I will go myself."
He breathed in and out. She saw in his face the same lines as Yehoshuah's face. The same angry stiff mouth, the same twitching brow. They had the same anger, that was the problem.
"I forbid it. Do you understand? You are not to bring disgrace upon us. I forbid it."
She looked at him. Whatever he had been, he was not it anymore.
"I understand," she said.
It was around two weeks after that when Yosef went north to take a look at some lumber and to trade. And she called her grown sons to tell them what she intended, and they agreed to it.
She will not go with her family to Jerusalem this Passover. Her brother Shmuel will make a sacrifice for her. She and her sister and Shmuel's wife will stay behind, as they did when they were young women with many small children to care for. But still, although she will not eat the sacrificed lamb with them in Jerusalem, there are duties to be performed. The house must be cleaned, every jar that has held flour must be emptied and scoured.
Gidon helps her, carrying the wool blankets back from the stream when they are heavy and sodden and throwing them over the rope she has tied between two trees. He climbs into the back of the clay-and-reed flour store and washes the stone floor, bent double, inhaling the flour dust, so that when he comes out his eyes are red and his back cracks as he stands up. They do not speak of the anniversary that is fast approaching until the very eve of Passover.
The day before Passover is time to bake the matzot—the flat unrisen bread that they will eat for the next week. The flour cakes will last overnight, she will wrap them in cloth and put them in a stone jar to keep off insects and mold. She puts the flat stone into the fire to heat, takes three measures of flour from the jar and pulls up a bucket of cold clear water from the well. She begins to mix the water into the flour—swiftly, because her mother taught her that matzot should be made as quickly as possible—pulling it into a dough, forming round flat cakes, pummeling them out with the heel of her hand, stretching the dough to thinness. She makes dots in the surface of each cake with a wooden point, then quickly tosses them onto the heated stone, where they immediately begin to bubble and crisp, becoming fragrant with wood smoke and with flakes of burnt flour on the surface.
When she looks up, she sees that Gidon is watching her. She does not know how long he has been there. He watches her so tenderly. He must have seen his own mother perform this task.
"We ate them, the last meal with Yehoshuah," he says at last.
Her blood is chilled and her bones are old ash. She does not want to know what they did. She wants to know everything. Her mouth tries to say, "Don't tell me." Her breath longs to beg him for every detail. She is thirsty for every moment she missed. She wants to ask if there was a crumb in his beard from the unrisen bread. Did he remember to change his clothes before the festival started? Would anyone but a mother notice? The desire, always coiled in her, always ready to pounce, springs now: the desire to wail and say why was I not there at his last meal, why did I not force him to come home?
All this rises up in her. She throws another flat round matzo cake onto the hot stone. She looks at Gidon.
"I miss him too," the boy says.
And she cannot help herself. There are always tears in her now. Her voice cracks and she says, "You do not know what it means to miss him."
She picks raw dough from her fingertips and lifts the flat matzo from the stone.
Gidon's eyes, too, are filled with tears.
He says, "I have not your right."
She finishes the baking, wraps the flatbreads in a cloth. Her sister will arrive soon with the lamb, so she banks the fire up high, with the hyssop grass and herbs she has dried for the occasion. Gidon gathers armfuls of green branches to make a smoky fire, separating out the dry logs which will burn long and evenly.
She says, "Did he ever speak of me?"
Gidon pauses and thinks. She can see that he wants to be kind to her.
"He spoke about his father," he says, "or he told stories about a good father, and that father I think is God, who reigns above. There are many stories and sayings he told about fathers."
"But not mothers?" she says.
He shakes his head slowly, and she can see the thought is only now occurring to him.
"He told a story of a widow," he says. "Perhaps that widow called you to mind?"
"Perhaps," she says.
She believes Gidon that her son didn't talk of her, or ask for her, or even think of her. He had distanced himself from her deliberately a long time before.
People said he was out of his mind.
They agreed to journey to see him speak. Word came that he had circled round in a wide loop, through Hoshaya and Cana towards Emek. It was a long trek—a quarter of a day or a little more. Yosef would be away for several days longer and they need never tell him where they'd been. It was a bad business, to lie to him, but the brothers all agreed, and if the younger ones blurted something out, they could say that they had imagined it, dreamed it. Yehoshuah was their oldest brother and they wanted to see him.
They took the donkey, loaded it with water skins, bread and cheese and walked. At S'de Nachal, they met a woman on the way, her hair uncovered, carrying a baby at her breast wrapped in a woolen blanket.
She said, "Are you going to see the teacher?"
Iov opened his mouth to answer but Miryam interrupted him.
"What teacher is that?" she said.
The woman checked on the baby, fussing and pawing, its little hand waving as it struggled to latch on to the nipple. Though her breast was covered, the older boys looked away, disgusted or embarrassed.
She shrugged. "Some teacher. I saw one last winter who cast a live snake out of Rakhel who had the pain in her gut. She vomited, and it came up and crawled into the grass covered in her blood and slime. Rakhel was better for a while after that, and after that she was worse and then she died."
"Is that the same teacher as this one?"
The woman shook her head. "We wouldn't have him again in Emek. No, but this one will do cures, I expect, the same as the rest. Are you sick, any of you?"
She ran her eye appraisingly over the children. They had all come, leaving their families some of them. Yirmiyahu, tall and broad-shouldered, had a wife, Chana, with two months to go in her fourth pregnancy. Iehuda had two little boys with him. Shimon's wife had not yet borne a child and there were fears... well, it was too early to fear that yet. Dina was becoming a woman—time to think of finding a husband for her—while Michal and Iov were still children, she older, he younger, tracing patterns in the dirt while they waited for the grown-ups to finish their conversation. They were a healthy family, may the Evil Eye stay far off. Miryam did not like the look the woman gave them—a jealous look, as a poor man might give a rich man's flock.
"Thank God," Miryam said, "we're well. We're bored, that's all. The harvest is in and the sun is shining and we thought to entertain ourselves—perhaps we'll see this teacher."
The woman nodded. She knew Miryam was lying but could not quite tell why, or about what. She sniffed, moved her shoulders uneasily and the baby began to wail.
"He'll be working his wonders at the synagogue on the hill." She jerked her head towards the structure at the opposite side of the valley.
"May you be blessed in your going," said Miryam.
"And you in yours," said the woman, without a great deal of sincerity.
As soon as she passed out of sight, Iov tugged on her skirt and began:
"Why didn't you tell her, Ima? Why didn't you tell her we were going to see Yehoshuah? Why didn't you tell her he's our brother? He's my brother—" this last addressed to Michal, as if Yehoshuah weren't her brother too.
Yirmiyahu hoisted Iov onto his shoulders and said, "Not everything needs to be told, pipsqueak. Maybe Ima didn't want to make the woman jealous."
And this answer appeared to satisfy Iov for the time being.
They would not have needed directions. As they approached Emek, a great swarm of people became obvious, walking from every direction to the synagogue on the hill. Perhaps three or four hundred were here! A greater number than Miryam had seen anywhere outside Jerusalem. They pressed forward, towards the synagogue. Were all these come to see her son? His name must be larger than she thought. He had no such name in Natzaret, where the people remembered him as a stumbling infant, a complaining child, a petulant boy-man. The synagogue was full, the people had spilled out onto the street. At one side, a man was selling hot flour cakes to those waiting for the wonders.
Miryam did not see him at first, through the crowd—she, a woman with children, was kept to the back with the other women. But Iov wormed his way forward, tugging on her hand, until they were almost at the door of the synagogue. And two heads parted suddenly and there he was, speaking. Her body turned cold and then very warm. As if she were in love. Ridiculous! For her own son? The little boy she had washed and clothed and fed from her breast? She ought to have gone to him and washed his face off, where his forehead was always dirty because he would sit on the ground and sift the dirt and then rub his brow. She could see that little dirty smear even from where she stood. She ought to have strode over to him and said, "I am this child's mother—give me the seat of honor."
And she knew now why she had not done so, but she hadn't known it then. Only in the seat of her soul, she had faltered. She thought it was the way the other men looked at him. He was the kind of man her own father would have uncovered his head for, stood up in the house of learning for, told her to call "teacher." Yehoshuah looked so comfortable there.
He was debating with an older wise man—she heard others in the crowd call him Ezra the Teacher, his beard was as white as a lamb's fleece. There was a jar of wine on the floor and a table before them. Ezra dipped a cup in the jar and placed it with a sharp slam in front of Yehoshuah. He dipped a cup for himself, took a mouthful, swirled it around. He pulled on his beard. The crowd became silent. This was the debate they'd come to hear.
Ezra said, "I've heard it said that you work wonders and make cures in the name of God."
Yehoshuah nodded. Ezra smiled.
"Well, this is no crime. God gives great power to those who trust in him. When I was a child I saw Khoni the Circle Drawer bring down rain by his prayers from a cloudless sky. Those who are as old as me remember it."
Ezra looked around the room, indicating a few gray-bearded men with his finger who murmur, "Yes" and "I saw it."
"And many a man has come to this village to perform cures. And many of them found some success. Now tell me, is it true that you make your cures on the holy Sabbath day?"
Yehoshuah said, "It is true."
Ezra banged the table so violently that the cups of wine jumped and spattered.
"Then you make yourself greater than God!"
There was a low rumble from the crowd, a murmur of agreement from the people of the village, a mutter of discontent from Yehoshuah's friends.
Ezra turned to the crowd, bringing them with him as he spoke:
"Wasn't it enough for the Lord Almighty, God of Hosts, to have six days to create the world? And didn't he make man with one gesture of his finger"—Ezra flicked the little finger of his right hand—"on the very last hour before the Sabbath, along with all the diseases that plague us and, it must follow because God knows the end of all things, all the cures for those diseases?"
Yehoshuah stared directly ahead of him, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Miryam had seen that look on his face many times before, a way of staring that made her think he wasn't listening. Ezra evidently thought that Yehoshuah's lack of response meant that he was winning the debate.
Ezra raised his voice so that even those standing outside could hear him with perfect clarity: "And if He Who is in All Places could create the cures for all diseases in six days and rest on the seventh, who are you to challenge him? Who are you to do away with the commandment to rest on the Sabbath?"
He lowered his voice again and brought a chuckle to it—he was a skilled orator, taking the crowd with him as he spoke: "Now, I don't say it's wrong to heal the sick, of course not. But you couldn't do it on the other six days? Why make these unfortunate people wait till the Sabbath? Can't you heal them on a Friday, so they can be home to enjoy their soup with the family like everyone else?"
The crowd laughed. Miryam heard people whispering, "That's a good point," and "If even God could make the world in six days..." to each other.
"But of course"—Ezra was coming to a conclusion—"there is an explanation, isn't there?" His voice became hard again, low and firm and solid. "We know that our God rests on the Sabbath like all his creatures. And so if you heal the sick on that day, where does your power come from? Not from God." He banged the table again and shouted, "Not from God! We've seen you jerking and crying out as you heal, and we know what it means. If not from our God, the God of our forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, your power comes from a foreign god like Ba'al Zvuv!"
His voice was loud and strong, and as he finished speaking the crowd erupted into foot-stamping and shouts of agreement.
And then Miryam's son rose to speak. He spoke softly, rocking all the time on the spot and looking not at the crowd, as Ezra had done, but above their heads, as though reading from letters written in the air like a prophet.
He said, "Tell me, is it permitted to save a life on the Sabbath day?"
And one of his followers shouted out, "It is permitted!"
He said, "And is it permitted to do anything which might save a life? Even if the outcome is uncertain, is it permitted?"
One of the other men in the crowd, not one of Yehoshuah's friends, called out, "It is permitted!"
"Well then"—he turned his whole body round to Ezra in a jerking unsteady motion—"who are you to say that I should not perform a cure! For if I left them one more day, perhaps there would be no cure at all? And tell me"—now he spread his arms wide to the crowd, but still spoke quietly—"is it permitted to circumcise on the Sabbath, revered Ezra?"
Ezra, a little puzzled, but gracious, nodded to acknowledge the truth.
"It is permitted, of course. If the eighth day after the boy is born is a Sabbath, we circumcise on the Sabbath."
"Well then!" Yehoshuah turned to the crowd. "If we can put right one part of the body—and not even a part that is broken or hurting—all the more so we should be able to make right other parts!"
Emek was a pious village. But this argument made sense. There were some unwilling nods in the crowd.
Ezra stood up and, with all the appearance of good humor, said, "But God has told us to circumcise on the Sabbath! He has not told you to heal. Where is it written or handed down in the law? The Lord Himself rests on the Sabbath—this is how we know your power does not come from Him!"
Yehoshuah became angry now. It was swift and frightening to see him flash to sudden wrath.
"You say my power comes from Ba'al Zvuv, whom the Philistines call the prince of demons," he said, "but I drive out demons from sick men and women! You've seen me!"
He appealed to the section of the room containing his friends, but Miryam saw several others nodding.
"And can a demon drive out demons? Can the prince of devils drive out devils? A house divided against itself cannot stand!"
He thumped the table now and looked down for a moment breathing deeply. When he looked up, his face was dark.
"Listen," he said, "Rabbi Ezra, you're committing a grave sin. Because you're slandering God. Now, we all know"—he stared around the room—"that if you tell a lie about your friend and you ask forgiveness, if he forgives you God will also forgive it. But if you tell a lie about God," he was shouting now, "if you tell a lie about God there is no forgiveness for you! God will not forgive you, Rabbi Ezra, for lying that my power is not from Him!"
The arguments continued. At times Ezra seemed to hold the crowd's approval and at times they favored Yehoshuah. At one moment, when the crowd were shouting to Yehoshuah, "Praise God!" and "You speak the truth!" one woman called out, louder than the rest: "Blessed is the mother who gave birth to you, Yehoshuah, and blessed are the breasts that nursed you!"
Miryam saw which woman it was who said this. She was young, neatly dressed, no children with her. She thought: this woman does not even know me and yet she loves me. And she almost spoke up and said: it is me. I am here.
But Yehoshuah replied angrily, "No. Blessed are those who hear the word of God and obey it."
And she said nothing. And the debate went on.
There was a raving quality to Yehoshuah. As he spoke, spittle flew from his mouth, his face became red, his eyes looked wildly, angrily around the room. He quoted from the Torah and from words he'd heard listening to the sages. And she thought: is this my son? How did this man come from me? Every parent will think this about their child someday—all children become strangers to those who gave them birth. This was what she told herself.
When they finished speaking it was dark. Their arguments had twisted and turned, each of them had become angry and dissatisfied with the reasoning of the other. At last when it was evening Ezra called a halt and they embraced as friends, as was right. Ezra said: come, eat meat with us and bread and drink wine. And most of the crowd began to disperse. They had meals to eat in their own homes, or long walks to make. Only Yehoshuah's little band of friends, thirty or forty of them, and Ezra and the elders of the village remained while Ezra's wife and daughters brought roast lamb and bread and olives and fresh figs.
Miryam waited longer than she should, she supposed. She could have rushed through while the crowd was dispersing and touched Yehoshuah's arm, and perhaps he would have turned around and smiled and said, "Mother!" She sometimes occupies herself for hours imagining that that is what happened, imagining the smile on his face and her own swelling heart.
But by the time she had gathered the family and given the little children the last of the bread and cheese and straightened her robes and her head-covering the men were already in the smaller back room of the synagogue, eating. She walked around to the back of the building, holding Iov and Michal by the hand, the other brothers walking behind her. There was a sound of loud debate, noisy laughter from behind the old wooden door. She wormed her hand out of Iov's sticky grip and knocked.
A man opened the door a crack. She recognized him. It was a friend of Yehoshuah's. She had heard someone in the crowd point him out, Iehuda from Qeriot, a man with a curling beard and an anxious look. He frowned, as if she had said something entirely inappropriate before she even spoke.
"You are... Iehuda?" she said, trying to smile. "I'm... we are the family of Yehoshuah, your teacher. We are here to see him."
His frown deepened. "I'll ask if he wants to see you."
"If he..."
But he had closed the door already. They waited there. Her older sons met her glance and then looked away. The anger rose from their shoulders like the steam-wreathed breath off cattle in the early mornings.
He came back. He had the grace, at least, to look embarrassed now.
He shook his head.
"He doesn't want to see you," said Iehuda from Qeriot.
He stood there for a moment in silence.
"What did he say?" said Yirmiyahu, the anger hard in his voice.
Iehuda from Qeriot moved his shoulders uneasily.
"It doesn't..." He paused, breathed out through his nose, like a bull. "We are a family now," he said, "we who follow his teachings, we are like his family."
Through the open door she could hear her son's voice. The other guests had become quiet and he was teaching. It was his voice, the consonants of that little boy she had taught to feed himself with a spoon, and if she shouted out now he would hear her. She wondered for a moment if Iehuda from Qeriot was lying. But she knew he wasn't. She'd known as soon as she left for Emek. She'd known as soon as she'd heard that he was nearby, and in that same moment had realized that he hadn't sent word.
She turned around to look at her children. Yirmiyahu would have been willing to start a fight with Iehuda from Qeriot, she thought. She hoisted Iov up onto her shoulders.
"Come on," she said, "come on."
When she came back to the village, she could not be bothered to hide that she had seen him. The people in the village asked where they'd gone, the whole family all together, and she said: we went to see my son, Yehoshuah, preaching. We ate meat and drank wine with him but we were tired and preferred not to travel further. She knew this would find its way to her husband. She did not care any longer. Neither could she care what was true and what a lie. She found that she was waiting for Yosef's return not with fear but with a dull emptiness. She had sons and daughters but not one can fill the place of another, and she would never have another firstborn. She wanted to mingle truth with lies, and to have Yosef be angry with her for speaking to Yehoshuah, because that was better than remembering that he had not spoken to her at all.
She should have done it then, turned her heart into a stone. She should have said to herself, "My son is dead," and begun to mourn him. As if it were possible. As if we can begin to mourn for a death a moment before it comes, as if we can grieve for any destruction before it arises. Even if we have known for a hundred years that it must be so. Nothing can be anticipated in grief—for if we could bring our sorrow forward, would we not mourn for a baby on the day of its nativity? She should have mourned for him then, on the day he was born.
It is the first day of Passover. This is the day, of course. She knows it down to her fingers' ends. She has wondered how she would feel, but like the impact of an anticipated blow, contemplating it in advance cannot reduce the pain. Pinchas, her younger brother, knows it too. He has walked from S'de Raphael for the Passover feast. When he sees her, he makes a grimace at her and rises from blowing the embers of the fire. He puts his arm around her shoulders. His wool jerkin is damp, moss-scented. He pulls her close and says, "May your other sons live, Miryam! May they make you proud and bring you more grandchildren and great-grandchildren." He kisses the top of her head and she nestles against his shoulder, pressing her nose into that mushroomy fabric. It feels safe here. Safe like family.
She sniffs and pulls away.
"Better get that fire going."
He lets his hands fall to his sides.
"I still think about the ones Chava and I lost," he says at last.
And she does too, and she understands. She still thinks often of her two that died, the little ones—lost at the pinnacle of their sweetness and grace to a cough and a chill and the simple fact that she could not keep them here. And those that never quickened, or that quickened but did not hold. She thinks of them and it is an ordinary sadness, the kind most parents share. But this particular thing is different. Perhaps it is only different because there is anger in it too.
"It'll be like this all day," she says. "The cousins and the aunts and the nephews and their wives."
Pinchas shakes his head.
"Never. Some of them will forget."
"The others will tell them." Then, "Iov will remind them."
"Has he still got that gossiping tongue? Like a woman at the market."
She smiles. "Still."
"So he'll tell them, and they'll wish you that your other sons live."
This is how life continues. Learning to bear the unbearable.
Through the family feast Gidon watches and is mindful and says nothing. The family ask about him. She says, "He was lost in the mountains when the snow fell. He is staying here until he is well enough to make the journey home." And they glance at him, looking his rangy form up and down, seeing that he appears quite well, and they say nothing. It is Passover, when it is especially meritorious to take in the stranger and the wanderer. Some of them remind her of what happened this time last year, and some say nothing. She finds they cannot make it harder for her either way. At least they do not ask about her husband. They are mostly concerned with tales of the soldiers still scouring the country for the last of the rebels from Yaffo. They are coming nearer to Galilee because their search has not been fruitful farther south. The family shake their heads and worry. They eat the unleavened bread and drink wine.
When she wakes the next morning, Gidon has completed his chores and has a soup bubbling on the fire. He is cutting some vegetables for it—onions and leeks.
He smiles. "One who helps a widow," he quotes, "isn't his portion doubled or tripled under heaven? And she who gives succor to an orphan will find herself blessed, and God will turn His face to her."
She frowns. She thinks—I could tell him, and then he will know all my sorrow.
"I am not a widow," she says. "As far as I know."
Gidon's hands stop working.
"He was angry with me. I disobeyed him too often. I was a stubborn wife, and people told him that I had disobeyed his wishes in... a certain matter. He put me away," she speaks quickly and quietly, "he took another wife and moved her to another village. He gave me the _keritut,_ the contract of divorce, and told me I was permitted to other men."
She is not sorry he's gone. Apart from the strength in his shoulders, she barely misses him. She wants her children close to her and she wants her son back, and Yosef and his new young wife seem the least of her concerns.
Gidon says nothing. He knows she has told him a sad and lonely thing. Most women in her position would lie and say that the husband was dead.
She heard that Yehoshuah preached a teaching which had never been heard before. Many of his teachings were not new. He told them well, and with a force and skill that impressed the listeners, but the teachings themselves were as familiar to her as her own skin.
She herself had taught him the famous story of Rabbi Hillel. A man came to the two great rabbis, Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai, and made of each of them the same request: "Teach me the whole of the Torah while I stand on one leg." Rabbi Shammai chased him off with a broom. But Rabbi Hillel said: "Stand on one leg and I will teach you." And the man stood on one leg. And Rabbi Hillel said: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to other people. That is the whole of the law: all the rest is commentary. Go and learn."
When Yehoshuah said, "Treat others as you hope they'd treat you," it was not a new teaching. Rabbi Hillel was an old man when Yehoshuah was born.
But he taught a new thing, one of the women from Kfar Nachum told her. He said that if a man divorces his wife and takes another, it is the same as adultery. This saying was popular among women. They passed it one to another. Every village had some woman whose husband had put her away, scraping a living in her old age on the goats and land their marriage contract made him give her, with no rest for her aching bones even though she had borne him sons and daughters.
She wondered if this was a secret message for her, a sign that he thought of her still. But he did not send word to her. He did not speak about Yosef. He talked of having another father, spoke of God as his father. And she thought: he wants me to go to him again. Surely this means he wants to see me.
It is a curious thing, the growth of trust between two people. When two strangers meet, there is no trust. They may fear one another. They do not know if one is a spy, or a traitor, or a thief. There is no dramatic moment which marks the transition from mistrust to trust. Like the approach of summer, it walks a little farther on every day, so that when we come to notice it, it has already occurred. Suddenly one notices that, yes, this is a person whom I would have watch over my flocks, my children, my secrets.
She is moved by the softness of Gidon's features. His beard has hardly begun to come in, just a few patches of fuzz like a mountain dog in molt. His eyelashes are long, and his smell is the sweet thick scent of a young man in whom the sap is just rising. His elbows and knees are sharp, his shoulders are stiff. There is a wanting in him, and not yet an understanding of what he wants. Her son was just so when he was twenty. His tender eyes were just so. The way he holds the cup of warm liquid, cradling it close to him, rubbing his knuckles in the cold, he was just like this boy.
Her heart comes close to him. She says nothing more of her husband. For a long time, he says nothing more of her son. He works. They bank the fire down after the evening meal and talk of what could be done with the western field next year.
She went to Yehoshuah the winter before Gidon arrived in Natzaret. It was not such a harsh winter, there was no snow. She had heard that he had a mighty crowd of followers with him, perhaps five hundred people traveling in a great convoy. They were circling near to Natzaret, not half a day's journey, and she left the littlest children with Shimon's wife and wrapped woolen robes around her and borrowed a mule from Rahav and went to see her son.
It had been many a year, she thought, since she had last made such a journey alone. A young woman would never travel so unprotected. But there was a fierce freedom to it. Who could rob her now? What would they take from her? She had water, and hard bread, and a bag of apples. She kept to the main roads. She told her sons where she had gone and when to expect her return.
She ruminated as she rode. There was such an anger in her heart, she hadn't known it was there until she was alone on her mule, riding the iron-hard miles. She had never been a bad mother, never truly a bad wife. She'd cared for her children—she flexed her stiff fingers, reminding herself how much it had cost her to care—had made loaves of bread and meal cakes and soups and roasted meat and dried fruits, had washed the children and kept them free from disease, had lain with her husband even when she was tired or unwilling because these are the duties of a wife and a mother. She had vanished into it and not accounted it a loss. This is who she was: a mother.
And this child could not pay her the duties of a son? Not to visit her in glory with his mighty crowd of men? Not to give her a place at his table? Not to write to her or send word to her after all she had done? From the first red scored line that had popped open across her belly when she grew big with him to the last bowl of soup she had made for him before he vanished, was all of this nothing?
Her soul grew bitter as the miles passed and when she arrived at the encampment—there was no mistaking it, five hundred travelers make smell and noise and smoke—she felt as tough and unyielding as the frozen earth.
"Where is the tent of Yehoshuah of Natzaret?" she said to a Roman hanger-on with fine clothes.
"Who are you to ask?"
"I am his mother," she said.
The first they know of it is that the long barn is on fire. The barn at the edge of the village, the first one you come to if you're walking from the south. There are cries in the street of "fire, fire" and Miryam runs out like everyone else, carrying her bucket, ready to be part of a chain down to the river. It has been dry these past few weeks—a stray cinder from a careless fire could have set the barn ablaze.
They begin to run down the hill to the barn, barefooted mostly on the chalk-dry baked earth. Calling to one another that they should make for the river to bring water. And they see the crested plumes and the glittering spears and they hear the sound of the phalanx. And they are afraid.
It is only a scouting party, ten men with a guide who speaks the native language. Rome does not send its finest and best to seek out a small village sixty-five miles from Jerusalem. But even a scouting party brings with it the authority of those who sent it, the invisible chain stretching back from these ten to the centurions garrisoned at the capital, and from there to the Prefect, and from there to the Emperor himself. If these men are not satisfied, others will come. If those are not satisfied, more men will come. Eventually Rome will have its answer, or the place will be reduced to a bloody smear upon smoldering earth.
This is why they have burned the barn. It is not your barn, they are saying. It is ours. Rome owns you.
They come to a halt in the town square. The people gather there too. There is nothing to do now about the barn or the stores that will be lost.
The leader of the soldiers makes a brief statement. The people of the village do not understand the language. Some of them, those who go to the larger cities to trade, have learned a few words, but this speech is fast and complex.
They know the translator. He is a man who works for the tax overseer in Galilee. They have seen him often. He never brings good news. It is no surprise to see him now with the Roman soldiers; he has come before with mercenaries to exact his payments.
This time, he attempts to pretend that he is their friend. The Romans do not understand what he is saying, the people do not understand what the Romans have said. There is no way to be sure that he is even communicating the true message.
"They've brought me here," he says, "because they're looking for people who fled Yaffo. In the uprising a few months ago, I know you heard about it. Now, I've tried to reason with them, tried to persuade them. You're good people, you pay your taxes on time, you don't make trouble. But they've heard the rumor that a boy from Yaffo is living in the village now. A new boy. And I'm sure you don't want to harbor known criminals, not in a quiet place like Natzaret! So my best advice is, hand him over. They'll take him away and ask him questions and leave you alone. You might even have time to save some of the"—he inclines his head faintly towards the barn—"some of it, perhaps."
They look around at one another. Gidon is not there, he is in the hills with the new lambs, he will be there for a day or two probably. Miryam wonders if any of them will speak.
"He is living with me," she says, loudly and suddenly, surprising even herself a little. "But he is not the man you're seeking."
The tax collector smiles. The gold ring glitters on his thumb.
"Mother Miryam, I would never have thought it of you! Well, hand him over and we'll be on our way."
Miryam sees her brother Shmuel shift in the crowd. He would go and get the boy now, she realizes. He would mount a pony and gallop into the hills to find him and give him to the Romans.
"No," she says, "he is not the man you want."
Shmuel's body stiffens. He tries to catch her eye, to mouth something to her.
"We'll have to judge that ourselves, Mother Miryam."
"No," she says.
And something in the atmosphere turns. Perhaps it is that one of the soldiers fingers his spear, not understanding the conversation but hearing something in her tone.
The lead soldier bends to whisper a word or two in the tax collector's ear. The man nods.
"If you can't produce him, Mother Miryam," he says, and his voice is hard now, "we will take you instead. For questioning."
She tightens the muscles in her stomach. She will need to lie.
When she came in to see him, she found she was singing a song under her breath. It was a psalm, set to a tune the goat herders sing. She used to sing it to Yehoshuah when he was a tiny baby and perhaps some part of her thought that it would turn him back to the child he was, and he would remember how he used to need her.
He was sitting with three of his men, and when he saw her he frowned and she realized that for a moment he did not recognize her. Oh, this was heavy and cold. But at last, within a heartbeat, his face broke into a smile.
"Mother," he said.
They walked together, to soothe her sore legs, stiff from the ride. She told him at first all the news of the family, the nieces and nephews and the doings of the village. He listened but he seemed distant. He replied, "That is good," to news of a good harvest or "Those are sad tidings," to a death in childbed.
"And what of you?" she said at last. "Here you are, a mighty man with many followers."
She took his arm in hers and hugged it. "Are you going to set up a great school and be a teacher? I would be so proud to tell the people at home that you had founded a college, taken a wife..." She lets her voice trail off.
He paused his walking. She stopped too. He bent down so his face was level with hers.
"Mother," he said, "God has called me. He has told me to go to Jerusalem at Passover, because it is time for a new heaven and a new earth."
His eyes were unblinking. His face shone like the moon. There was a smudge of dirt in the center of his forehead.
She felt suddenly impatient.
"Jerusalem, yes, very well. A good place to find new followers, but then what? Will you wander like this forever? Like a tent-dweller, with no place to find rest?"
"God will show me. God Himself and no other."
She frowned.
"You should come back to Galilee. We have fine pastures, the fishing is good. Bring your people there. Settle. Be a great man in Galilee. Yes!"
"It is not mine to decide. I follow the will only of God."
And this enraged her. Thinking of all she had done for him and how he was as stupid as a stone.
"Grow up," she said. "The will of God is all very well, but we must also plan for ourselves. Be a man."
"Like my father?"
"I will bring your father!" She could not control herself now, she took any weapon to throw at him. "He will come here with your brothers and they will bring you back home and stop all this nonsense!"
Yehoshuah looked at her benignly. She felt afraid of him. What a foolishness, to be afraid of her own small boy.
"I love my father," he said.
"That is not what you used to say," she snapped back.
"I have learned a great many things," he said.
"And you have not learned to send for your mother, or send her word that you are well, or write to her, or give her the honored place at your table."
He drew her to him and kissed her on the top of her head. "Ima," he said, "you will see such things, you will be amazed."
But he would not come home.
"Gidon is my grandson," she says.
The tax collector knows her, and all her children and grand-children. He does not believe her. She can see his disbelief in his face. She will have to try harder.
"He is my grandson, son of my son Yehoshuah, who died. He got him on a whore in Yaffo many years ago and I did not know it till last year, when he came"—here she makes her voice waver like an old, grieving woman—"when he came and found me and told me signs and I saw in his face that he must be that child."
The tax collector laughs. He mutters something to the soldiers and they chuckle too. The mood has changed again. She does not know what they are joking about. That she has taken in the son of a whore, who could be any man's? That she boasts of it? That she has been deceived by an obvious fraudster looking for an easy home and meals provided? Perhaps among all this they will not notice another lie.
"He came last year, you say? About when?"
"In the summer," she says quickly, "between the Feast of Seven Weeks and New Year."
Around the square, there are looks from one to another, another to a third. It is a hard thing she is asking of them. If none of them contradict her, they will all be accomplices. If Rome finds out they have lied, the whole village will burn.
The tax collector looks at them suspiciously, waiting to see if any will break. No one speaks.
"Well," he chuckles, "if you have a whore's son in your home, don't let us detain you! Perhaps you find him as skillful as his mother!" He chuckles to himself, then, evidently disappointed by the lack of laughter from the crowd, translates his joke for the soldiers, who are as amused by it as he.
No one speaks to her after the soldiers leave. Rahav and Amala and Batchamsa are all there, but they do not embrace her or comfort her. Their looks are wary.
At last, Rahav says, "You have put us in danger, Miryam."
It's true. She will have to set it right.
Gidon comes down from the mountain after two days. He has heard what she's done before he sees her, she can read it in his solemn face.
He looks different now from the way he was when he first came to Natzaret. Working outdoors has weathered and darkened his skin. He is not so thin, that's her good stews and bread. The place where they took off his fingers has healed to a fine silver scar across the end of his right hand. The way he works now you'd think he'd been born like that. He will be all right, she tells herself, when he has to leave.
She gives him lentil soup with flatbread and he eats it greedily. A thin dribble of the sunny liquid drips down the scraggly beard on his chin. He finishes, and she tries to take the bowl from him to wash, but he holds on to it with his maimed right hand, the three fingers stronger than both her arms.
He says, "Why didn't you tell them where I was?"
She lets go of the bowl. She sits down opposite him.
He says, "I didn't come here to bring danger to you all. That isn't what I wanted, I didn't..."
He slams his good hand down on the table. The earthenware pot jumps. He reminds her of her son at that moment. The memory brings a sickness to her stomach, and the sickness makes her angry.
"Why did you come, then? What was it for? To stir up an old woman in her grief? To plague me with your love for a dead man?"
He looks as if he is about to say something, but stops.
She says, "There is no reason, except that you wanted a place to hide and knew that telling me your stories would make me take you in."
He stares down at his hand. At the place where his fingers were. He traces the line of the scar with his left thumbnail.
He says, "I came to bring you good news."
She says, "There is no good news. My son is dead. That is all the news there can be."
He says to her, so softly that she can barely hear the words, "He is risen."
She does not know what to say, does not think she has understood, so she says nothing.
He looks at her, to see if she has grasped the heart of his words.
There is such a wild hope in her.
She has had dreams like this. Dreams in which the men come to her and say, "It was a mistake! He has not died, he was rescued. He is still alive." And dreams, more painful yet, in which she knows that she has one day, one hour to speak to him, that he has returned so she could cradle his head against her body and smell the scent of him and hear the sound of his voice. She has lost the sound of his voice.
Gidon says, "He died and rose again. A miracle made by God. He showed himself to Shimon from Even, and to Miryam from Migdala, and to some others of his friends. He is alive, Mother Miryam."
His voice cracks and his eyes burn and water and his face glows with a fervent intensity and she finds a feeling rising up inside her so strong and so immediate that at first she cannot identify it until suddenly she finds that she is laughing.
She laughs as if she were vomiting, it is from the stomach not from a glad heart.
He is hurt by her laughter. He thinks she is mocking him, although this is not what is happening.
He says, affronted, "So laughed Sara our foremother, when God told her she would give birth to a child at ninety years old, and yet it came to pass."
And she stops laughing, although she cannot help a smile from creeping to her lips, as if she were merry.
She says, "You are too old, Gidon, to believe this."
He feels a flush across his cheeks.
He says, "They came to the tomb, Mother Miryam, the tomb where he had been laid, and the body was gone. He had risen."
And she laughs again. "Are you so foolish? Are you so unwise? Gidon, I sent my sons for his body as soon as the Sabbath was over. So that he would not lie in a stranger's cold chamber when he could be buried in the warm earth, like his forefathers."
He looks at her, puzzled and aggrieved, and mumbles, "Yet he is risen. He has been seen."
She says, "Did you come here for this? To convince an old woman that her dead son yet lives?"
He says nothing. She is angry now.
"If he lives, if they did not kill him, if he revived in the burial chamber, if God returned him to me, why is he not here, Gidon? Whom should he see more than his mother? Why would he show himself to Shimon and to Miryam from Migdala and not to me?"
And even as she says it she hears the voice in her head of Iehuda from Qeriot saying, "We are his family now, we who follow his teachings." She sees her son's face, the last time she spoke to him, when she felt afraid and did not know why. She knows he relinquished his family a long time before his death. If this child's story were true, it would not be to her that he would have come. And this is too much to bear. She stands up quickly, her knees cracking and her back aching at the strain, and without knowing that she is going to do so she raises her right hand and hits Gidon across his left cheek.
The sound is loud. Her hand stings. She stares at him because she is an old woman and he a young man and if he responded in kind he could easily kill her.
He does not respond with a blow. He does not move or try to flee. He looks at her levelly and turns his face so that the opposite side is towards her. He waits. It is a kind of invitation.
Her hand falls to her side.
"I would have known from across the world if he were still in it."
The first year she was a woman, her father had taken her to Jerusalem for Shavuot, the festival at the end of the seven weeks from Passover. It is a joyous festival, a simple one, a celebration of the harvest that is just beginning. Farmers bring the first fruits of their fields to the altar, to thank God for blessing their trees and their ripening vines and the swaying golden seas of their wheat. They stayed with her father's younger brother, Elihu, who lived so close to the Temple that they could see its walls from the roof of his house. The early summer light was golden, but the days blew with a sweet breeze so that the heat did not thicken or the air become still. She sat at the window on the first day, watching the never-ending procession of oxen-pulled carts filled with ripe pink pomegranates and furry yellow dates heading for the Temple, and her heart was glad.
It was a good time to come to Jerusalem—especially for a girl who had become a woman, her mother said. The people had come from all corners of the land. A young man might notice her, or she might notice a young man. There were many nervous, eager, excited girls like her, walking to the Temple with their fathers, and many young men too. In the courtyard, her father gave her the coins to buy the lamb for the offering. She examined the creatures closely, chose one tied to the back of the stall, not the largest but with the purest white wool.
There were soldiers outside the Temple, of course, auxiliaries employed by Rome. She heard another man tell her father there had been a skirmish, swiftly quashed, earlier in the day when three farmers had attacked a soldier. Miryam's father said nothing, though in the past she had heard him rail against the Romans, wishing that the people would rise up and drive them from the land. He put his arm around her shoulders as they entered the Temple and whispered, "If you see something like that while we are here, Miryam, run. The Romans cannot tell the guilty from the innocent. If there is a squabble, run to your uncle's house, you will be safe there."
They made their offering in peace. Seven baskets of the fruits of the land they brought to the priests: figs and barley, wheat and pomegranates, olives and dates and grapes dropping heavy on the vine. The pure white lamb was slaughtered, its blood scattered, its forbidden fats burned on the altar for the Lord. And they heard murmurings again as they left the Temple. The men gave one another secret signs, making a hand shape like a dagger and whispering low and confusing words.
Miryam's father kept a tight arm around her and brought his lips close to her ear. "You see nothing," he said. "You hear nothing. We feast with your uncle tonight and tomorrow we go home."
When it happened, it was swift. They were walking past the spice market, homebound, and as they came in sight of the Hippodrome, with its tall colonnades and its fluttering flags, she knew something was wrong. Her father's grip tightened on her shoulder. He stood still. Behind them, back the way they'd come, there was a tight knot of men, walking slowly but at a steady pace. The shutters on the buildings nearest the Hippodrome were shut and closed tight with wooden pegs. To the right, up the narrow alleyway, another small group of men. Burly farmers with corded muscular arms, each with a long bag on his back.
The soldiers on the steps of the Hippodrome were laughing. Two of them were throwing dice. The others had wagered money on the outcome. Some were on lookout, most were watching the game. Miryam's father's grip was like iron tongs on her shoulder. They were in a thin crowd—some other parents with children, or whole families, each looking as frightened as they. They walked into the Hippodrome square, moving as quickly as they could without breaking into a run. Passing an open doorway, she saw that the dark room beyond was full. She had the impression of watchful black eyes, of shifting flesh, of the dull sheen of metal. Men had come to Jerusalem from all over the country for this festival. The thing had been planned.
The day had grown overwarm and clouded, the sky off-white. The breeze faded away, the air was soft and moist as damp cloth. A splash of rain fell onto the cream marble plaza. A heavy, ripe droplet which burst on the dusty stone. And then another drop, and another. And as if the rain had been a signal they had agreed on long before, the men came.
Screaming, they ran. Dark-skinned and red-mouthed, letting every rasping breath go from their lungs with a cutting edge like their metal blades. Wild shouting, anger howling, swinging their iron arms like free men whose home was overrun by vermin, they pelted up the steps of the Hippodrome and began the slaughter. The first guards, shocked by the sudden inrush, legs trembling, died before they had unsheathed their swords. Miryam saw one split from stomach to throat—a quiet smiling man who had unloosened his breastplate with the hotness of the day. Another soldier went down screaming, calling to the garrison.
There were arms around her, suddenly. Strong arms around her waist and under her shoulders, lifting her up off the ground though she kicked and wrestled, pulling her back, gripping her close, and in her confusion it was several moments before she realized that the voice shouting in her ear, "Be still! Be still!" was her own father's.
He ran with her, as the rain fell more strongly and the men screamed, ran back through the crowd. Charged at them with his shoulder, held her pressed close into his chest so that she could only inch her face to the side to breathe and, with one eye open, see glimpses of those who pushed forward. They were smiling hot, blood-grins. It was those soldiers who had taken their land, it was this man, and this, who had stolen their harvest, their women, their God. Miryam did not see where her father was running to, only that he was striving against the sea, pushing away from the place of blood.
When at last they came to rest and the noise was more distant, she saw at once that her father had taken two gashes, one across his shoulder, through the fabric of his robe, and one to his ear, which was half gone, the top sliced off, and oozing dark blood. He had collapsed, with her still grasped firmly by one of his arms, on a pile of sacks. They were in a dark room across the courtyard from the Hippodrome. She tried to stand up, but her father pulled her back.
"Be still," he whispered, and fell back onto the sacks.
Clasped against his chest, Miryam could feel his breathing, rapid and shallow. His grip loosened, and she crawled out from under his arm, staying low. The shouting and the dreadful cries from the square were increasing. She saw a long trickle of blood run down her father's neck and, feeling with her fingers in the gloom, found a wet patch on his skull. He was still breathing though. She put a palm in the center of his chest to reassure herself of that. Still, yes.
She looked about. They must be in a stable, probably for a priest's family so close to the Temple. It had that clean smell of horseflesh and dry straw. They were just beneath the window, which was shuttered, but she pressed her eye up against a chink in the wood. Arrows were flying in the square—one thudded into the thick shutter, and she thought: what if one were to hit my eye?—but she could not look away.
The slaughter was endless. The soldiers at the Hippodrome had lowered the metal gate to keep the attackers out. They had the upper ground now, looking down the steps on the mass of Jews running up towards them. They fired arrows through the grille and she saw twenty men brought down as she watched, pierced through the stomach, the chest, the groin. Near to her hiding place a man slumped with an arrow sticking out of his thigh. He tried to pull it out and screamed. He was young, she thought, maybe eighteen or nineteen. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He looked around for a safe place to shelter. What if he came here? What if he opened the door and they were discovered? And if the soldiers came, what then? Another arrow found his neck with a crunching snapping sound and he fell back, dead. God forgive her, she was grateful.
As she watched, the Jews, unable to sustain the heavy losses from the archers, fell back into the surrounding streets. The square in front of the Hippodrome was dark with bodies, and running red—Roman blood and Jewish blood, she thought. One of the soldiers was still moving, moaning. She wondered how long his comrades would leave him there. Her father was still breathing. She moistened his lips from her water skin. He licked them. It was a good sign. It would be dark in two or three hours—perhaps he would be able to move then.
She heard cheering from the street outside. Were the Romans celebrating their victory? But the noise intensified. Not a cheering. A rising again of the raging voices. The clash of arms. She put her eye to the shutter a second time. From the roofs of nearby houses, the Jews had raised ladders and ropes, and had hoisted themselves to the upper levels of the colonnade. From there, they had the upper ground and were throwing down rocks, bricks pulled from the structure itself. There were boys with their slingshots, hurling down missiles—the more the Roman soldiers looked up, the greater the danger to them. She saw one man smashed in the mouth with a brick, his upper lip gone, his teeth out and the whole center of his face pouring blood and gouts of flesh. The Romans tried to fight back at first—they sent their arrows upwards and even pulled some of the men down bodily, and set on them with swords, cleaving their limbs and heads from their torsos.
But the advantage of holding the higher ground was too great. The Romans withdrew, sheltering in the back of the colonnade. The center of the Hippodrome, Miryam could see, was piled with the bodies of the fallen. There was a great cheering from the Jews on top of the Hippodrome, a victory cry. Miryam could not see what the Romans were doing. The Jews atop the colonnade could not see either.
She turned back to her father. His lips were moving. She wet the sleeve of her dress in her water skin and dripped a few drops into his mouth. He swallowed. The stable was dark and cool. She leaned close to his lips.
He was whispering, "Run, Miryam, run to your uncle Elihu's house. Run now."
She looked outside again. The square was quiet. She saw a weeping woman walking at the edge find a particular corpse and kneel, cradling a head in her arms. If she were to run, this would be the time for it. But if she ran, and soldiers retreating from the Hippodrome found her father here, they would kill him. At least if she were here, a young girl, she could plead for him. She could not leave.
"The danger has passed, father," she said, "the square is quiet. Rest, and when you are able to walk we will go together."
"Run," he kept saying, "run now."
His fingers and his legs were cold. He was shivering. Crawling on the floor, she brought more sacks and covered him. The shivering diminished. He moved onto his side and began to breathe more slowly and evenly. He was sleeping—a true sleep, not a faint.
There was a sound from the square like the sound of trees being felled. A great cracking sound. She wondered if the Romans had brought battering rams. There was a low, rumbling roar, like the sea heard from far off. She put her eye to the shutter again.
The Romans had set the Hippodrome on fire. The bottom part of the structure was stone, but the upper floors and galleries, the parts where the Jews had climbed, were wood. And the wood was crackling flame, like the altar of the Temple, like the smell of the burning sacrifices, the wood was on fire.
She saw that a great host of men had retreated to the very roof of the Hippodrome, where the clay tiles were not yet aflame. But there was no way down. The ladders had burned and no building was near enough the Hippodrome to jump. They were going to burn to death there, on the flat roof of the building. Some of the men were clinging to each other and some were on their knees praying and some were shaking and tearing their clothes and hair. She saw one man take five paces back from the edge of the roof and run forward, as if trying to jump to the next, but it was too far and he fell to the stone floor and did not move again.
There were others who joined him soon enough, jumping from the roof to escape a death by flames. She saw some as the fire crept up the wooden structure draw their swords and fall on them. And some did not jump and did not take a blade to end their lives but waited or tried to climb down through the flames and their cries were the loudest and most anguished of all. She had heard it said that a man who died as a martyr to Rome would be rewarded by heaven. The growling, unquenchable fire sent bright sparks up to the skies and she remembered how the life of a lamb goes back to its maker while the flesh remains here on earth, but the cries were so loud that after a time she could not think of anything else.
The square between the stables and the Hippodrome was stone and marble. The flames did not extend across them. She watched through the night, ready to drag her father behind her if he could not move himself and the flames jumped to the buildings nearby. But they did not. The soldiers had made a neat job of it. And the rain, coming and going, helped a little. The fire burned out while it was still night, leaving just blackened stumps of wood poking up into the sky from the stone base. Before dawn the next morning, Miryam shook her father until he woke and, stumbling, dizzy, crawling sometimes, he came with her to the house of his brother Elihu.
They stayed in her uncle's house then seventeen days, not daring to leave even to find food or to hear the news of what had passed in Jerusalem. They had the well, and wheat flour and dried fruit enough to live on, and her father grew stronger every day. He and her uncle agreed they must not go into the country—the Romans would be looking for anyone who fled Jerusalem, guilty or innocent. Anyone trying to leave the city would be branded a criminal and a traitor. Especially a man with fresh wounds showing.
When at last her father was well enough to attempt the long journey, and Elihu had made inquiries about the best time to attempt the gates and the best lies to tell there, they left. They went in the early morning. The soldiers at the Double Gate asked them what business they had and Miryam replied, as her father and uncle had schooled her, that they were citizens of Jerusalem, and she was betrothed to a boy from the north and they must attend the wedding or the dowry would be lost. The soldiers joshed among themselves and made bawdy jokes to her about her wedding night. She cast her eyes down and, tiring of the game at last, they let them go. It was only then that she saw what was to be seen.
Along the roads to Jerusalem, the Romans had erected wooden frames—two planks crossed, one over the other, a long upright and short crosspiece—making a shape like the letter _zayin._ There were thousands. They lined the road on either side as far as she could see, down the hill and curving around. And to each frame, they had nailed a man.
The day was warm. The sun was bright as if it knew not what it shone on. As if the Lord God Almighty, the Infinite One, He Who is Everywhere had forgotten this place.
There was the smell of blood. And the buzzing sound of flies. They gathered at the soft places—the ears, the nose, the eyes. And the beating wings and low tearing rip of the vultures and the crows. The blood had trickled down the frames, had pooled at the bases, had dried in brown drips. And there was the stench of rotting flesh, like a taste in her mouth. And there was the sound.
They walked along the rocky path. The men nearest the city had been nailed up first. They were already dead, their bodies contorted, their faces and flesh already eaten away by the carrion birds. As they went farther from the city, though, they came to the more recently captured rebels. These men had been there three days, four, five at most. It was they who were making the sound.
The soldiers, she knew, were still watching from the parapets of the walls of Jerusalem. No man could be cut down until the Prefect gave leave, and these men would rot here and the flesh would be eaten from their bones by the birds and the swarming things of the air. For all that, those who still had tongues in their heads pleaded for mercy, for a sponge to their brows or a swift sword to their throats. They cried for their mothers, she remembers. This was where she learned that all dying men call out for a mother. No matter what they said or thought before.
"Do not look up," her father whispered to her, "do not stop, do not hesitate. Look down. Walk on."
So she walked through the valley beshaded by the screaming trees.
This was the message of Rome to the people of Israel.
There are things which are too painful to think of. And she tries, she struggles constantly not to think of it. But she cannot make a day pass without remembering those men calling for their mothers. She knows what a man calls out when he is nailed to a crossbeam. She should have forced him to come home.
He sits on a rock a little way from her house. The wind brings news that summer will come soon.
She watches his sitting. This boy who is so very alive.
"Were you there," she says, "in the uprising in Yaffo? Were you one of the rebels with the pretender king? Was your hand injured before you ever came here, injured in the fighting?"
He says, "I was there."
"Following another master, Gidon? Another king of the Jews?"
He shrugs. Says what she has known to be true for a long time.
"They killed my family. My mother, my brothers, my father, my cousins and uncles. For a long time I followed anyone who promised to destroy them."
She nods. They are silent for a long while.
"I am different now," he says. "I did not lie that God told me to seek you out. It was after the rising in Yaffo, after we had been defeated, I was sleeping in the mountains waiting for spring and in a dream a voice as clear as a sword told me to come and find you."
She believes him.
"You cannot stay here now."
He nods.
"I'll leave tomorrow."
"No," she says, "too soon will raise suspicion. Wait another week or two. Start traveling with the early pilgrims for the next festival."
He nods again.
She sits next to him, on the rock. The place is warm where the sun has been. A lizard is heating its blood an arm's length away from them on another flat stone. She can feel his body next to hers as if they were touching. She sighs. He places his hand over hers. He clasps her hand. His thumb moves, feeling her fingers, absorbing them. She does not know whether he even sees her any longer or simply the man he hopes to reach through her. But he is so soft with her that her heart cracks open, she cannot help it.
She says, quietly, "You believe what you told me? You hold it in your heart?"
He says, "I do."
She says, "Then my son Yehoshuah lives in your heart."
He says, "And in the heart of all who believe it."
She nods. That is where the dead live. In the heart.
He begins to hum a little melody. It is the melody the goat herders often sing when they are moving the brindled flock to summer pastures. She joins in, letting her voice run alongside his, sometimes choosing the notes which harmonize, sometimes singing the same tune. It feels as though they are one person, singing like this.
And she will not, she will not. Her son is dead, he is gone, but when she closes her eyes she can believe that he is here now, that he has come back to her in the long notes and the tune and the piping warble at the back of the throat. He has not let go of her hand. He is so young, younger than her son was when she saw him last. His skin is soft, his hands uncalloused. She does not want to be moved but she cannot help herself. She is swept away.
The song ends. He looks at her, those eyes so full of longing. She knows what he wants from her, this young and beautiful man.
She says, "Shall I tell you a story?"
He sits perfectly calm, with those shining eyes.
"It is a story from long ago," she says, "when I first became pregnant with my child Yehoshuah."
She sees him mutter something under his breath as she says her son's name.
"Now I think of it," she says, and her voice has taken on the singsong quality of a child's storyteller, "now that I think of it, there were signs that his birth would be special." A chaffinch begins to sing in the thorn tree; a song of joy that the winter has, at last, receded. "There were birds," she says, "the birds seemed to follow me wherever I went, singing to the child in my womb. And once, there was a stranger..."
She pauses. Anyone who has read the Torah knows what a stranger is. A stranger could be anyone. A stranger could be the angel of the Lord come with a test of kindness or hospitality, and if you passed that test the angel might bless you. A stranger could be the Lord walking among you.
"There was a stranger in the village who saw my belly swollen with the child and began suddenly to speak, saying, 'Blessed are you, and blessed is that child whom you carry within you!'"
She continues to tell this story. She thinks of how all the stories she has ever heard must have come to be. There are only three ways: either they were true, or someone was mistaken, or someone lied. She knows that the story she is telling is a lie, but she says it anyway. Not in fear, and not in anger, and not even in hope of anything that is to come, but because it brings her comfort to see that he believes it. Even such a simple, foolish thing as this. It brings her son back here, for a moment, back to her side and his small head under her hand and his life again unfolding. It is too good a gift to turn down, this opportunity to return him to life. And she knows it is a sin, and that God holds special punishments in store for such sins, but she cannot imagine worse than she has already seen.
She had been in Jerusalem that last spring. After he was gone, after the first day of Passover, which is sacred and on which no work can be done, she heard that he had not hung long on that wooden frame. Her son, Yirmiyahu, brought her the news. One of Yehoshuah's friends, a wealthy man, had bribed the guards and taken him down and placed him in a tomb.
She thought on it for a day and a night. She remembered what he had said: they were not his family. They were not the ones he had called for, they were not the ones he had spent his last days with. But was it possible that he had died without thinking of her? He had no wife to mourn for him or children to carry on his name. If he had belonged to these friends in life, perhaps he was his family's again in death.
So she told her sons to go to the tomb and fetch his body to take it into the hills and bury him in the ground. She thought: at least the crows will not have him. He will be buried in the same warm soil that will take my bones one day and until then I will know where he lies, and this thought was a comfort to her.
Shimon, who was always the kindest, tried to lie to her.
"We found a shady spot for him, by an olive grove," he said, when they returned.
But when she asked him exactly where, when she asked them to take her there now so she could mark the spot in her mind, their story didn't hold.
They had not found him. The body was gone. Taken, they supposed, by his friends to some special burial place.
Even in death they would not give him back to her. She did not want to tell her sons her worst fear—that the Romans had the body, that she would see him again on the ramparts of the walls of Jerusalem, black and bloody and gouged by beaks and rotted away.
She left Jerusalem that day and did not look to see if there were bodies on the walls, and did not ask, and told herself that her sons must be right and his friends had surely buried him in honor.
It was as if he had never been now. As if that first son had been a curious dream, leaving behind no trace. Not a plowed field, not a grieving wife, not a grandson or granddaughter. No one in the village spoke of him. Her own children had tried to forget him. It had been as if she had never borne that first son, until Gidon came to Natzaret.
He leaves as they had planned, when it is coming close to the Feast of Seven Weeks and the farmers are making their way to Jerusalem with carts filled with first fruits. He'll be invisible among so many travelers.
She has filled him full of stories. Some have a measure of truth to them, with Yehoshuah's childhood curiosity and his interest in learning and the way he would sometimes say things that made the adults surprised. And some are things she hoped had happened, she wished had happened. She gives him hard cheeses and bread and dried fruit so that his knapsack is bursting and she imagines another bag on his back full of the tales he'll tell, the stories he'll take to his friends in Jerusalem and across the nation.
"I'll come back," he says, "when things are less dangerous for you."
She does not say that she is an old woman now, and does not expect to live to see the day when things are less dangerous.
She embraces him like a son, and he turns and begins to walk.
She watches him until he is out of sight. If the soldiers come back, she will say: he deceived me. He lied. A broken-hearted mother, he had no pity.
And perhaps they will listen, and perhaps they won't. It is like the scorpion, she thinks, rubbing her right hand with her left. Once a child is born, the mother's previous life is gone, all that matters is how she cares for the child, protects the child. Even that tiny part which is left when they are gone.
She turns. The children will be waking soon, little Iov demanding his breakfast. It is nearly the fourth hour since dawn and she has still not made bread. She goes to begin her work.
# Iehuda from Qeriot
IN THE MARKETPLACE, during Passover, he hears two strangers saying that he is dead.
He is examining some clay oil lamps decorated with a blue inlay from Tarshish. At a stall nearby selling ripe melons, two women, their hair modestly covered, are discussing the rising in Jerusalem last Passover. It is not much discussed any longer, but the return of the season and the festival have brought it to mind. One woman, wearing a yellow scarf trimmed with fringes, knows more than the other. When he looks at her closely he thinks he remembers that she is the sister of the wife of one of the rabble who joined them in the last few weeks. Perhaps.
"It is sad," she is saying, "so many of them fled. Or took on other names." She lists several of his former friends whose faces he never expects to see again in this world. Mattisyahu the former tax collector fled south to Africa, young Yirmiyahu to Egypt, Taddai to Syria. Others she has not heard about, or has heard only vague rumors. He stops to listen. This is more news than he has had of his former friends for months.
The woman seems well informed. At one point she implies that some of her friends here in Caesarea send and receive letters from the dispersed disciples. He has heard that there are rebels here, still—Caesarea is a Roman town, the capital of the region, a waypoint for trade, so a good place for all kinds of conspiracy. But it is a mark of how little they accomplished that it is not dangerous for her to mention Yehoshuah in the market square. No one is now afraid of those who followed him.
The woman shakes her head: "There are still so many mothers who do not know what became of their sons. And Iehuda from Qeriot died, of course. He threw himself from a rocky cliff onto a field of stones. Or I heard someone else say that some of the others threw him off." She shrugs.
"Where did you hear that?" he asks, before he has thought whether this is wise.
The women look at him curiously. He is dressed in a fine toga, his face is beardless, his hair neatly clipped. He is not a man who should pay them attention. They look modestly to the floor.
"I..." he says, "I was rather interested in the fellow at the time. Such amusing teachings."
He has learned the lines well. They come easily to him.
The woman who was just now so full of gossip opens and closes her mouth but no sound emerges.
At last she says, "Just rumors, sir. My brother is a sailor, he tells us tales. We have no common cause with traitors against Caesar."
Her tone is pleading.
He nods and smiles, allows his gaze to drift from them. He has no interest in scaring them.
The other woman has decided which melon she wants and buys it hurriedly. They move on, mumbling a good-bye, their eyes cast down. He wonders how many of their other snippets of news were outright lies or strange misheard half tales.
He turns the clay lamp over in his hand. He imagines throwing it to the floor, how the oil would spill forth, staining the hard earth with fragrance. It is a little time before he realizes that he is remembering the perfume bottle smashed on the ground, the room choking with its scent.
He wants to think about what he's heard. None of what the woman said might be true, or a portion of it, but if this is the tale being told among those who knew his friends, perhaps it is time to leave his hiding place. Perhaps he should find them, tell them he is still alive, try to explain what he did.
He walks home slowly, taking the long route around, west towards the harbor. Here the boats are constantly working. Even on the Sabbath, even on the festivals, men from fifty nations load and unload cargo. There are baskets of fresh fish, figs from the orchards in the north, oil and perfume from across the ocean, bolts of expensively dyed cloth, pretty stones and jewels for women, even silver mirrors and ivory combs for those who can afford such things. Caesarea is rich.
The harbor too is one of the wonders of the world. Herod's men slung it across the bay in seven years. They worked on the Sabbath, and in the seventh year, the year of rest. If he were still in Jerusalem, some preacher would even now be shouting to a crowd of followers that the harbor was cursed, that all who traded in it had earned God's eternal anger. But this is not Jerusalem and the work goes on.
He wonders if this is the freedom he had sought all along. To be in a place where one could decide to care or not to care about the laws for oneself. The Romans had brought that freedom, together with their statues of their little arguing gods, and he had never noticed.
It is a kind of freedom, he thinks, to be dead. If he is dead, he smiles at the thought, perhaps even God has ceased to care what he does.
And as he thinks this, he finds that his feet have taken him wandering past the small Syrian temple to one of their goddesses. From inside the squat marble building comes the sound of laryngeal chanting, the soft cries of the worshippers in response.
He has never visited before, but he is suddenly curious to see what the nations do with their many gods. And he is not ready to go home quite yet—not to face the crowd of Calidorus's perfumed friends with the smiling ironic face of a dead man. He picks up the hem of his cloak, ascends the dusty steps and, ducking under the curtain, enters the temple.
It is dark inside, and the smell of fragrant wood and oil is thick. Well-trimmed oil lamps are positioned in alcoves, but there are not enough of them to cast more than a glow. The people are tightly packed, crowding towards the altar, and for a while all he can see is an indistinguishable mass of humanity. But his eyes become accustomed to the gloom. At the front of the temple, on a raised marble platform, lit by the brightest lamps to draw the eye, the service is taking place.
It is not so different. They slaughter a pigeon and pour its blood onto the stone. Libations of wine are poured on the altar, prayers are uttered in Greek. The priests are women, of course, that is different. They are clad in white—he thinks he has heard that this symbolizes the fact that no man has had them. It's been a long time since Iehuda last had a woman—nearly a year now—and his body often aches to hold soft, yielding flesh again. He is sure that the other men must feel the same rushing in their loins when the soft virgins bend to pour the oil—does it make the moment more sacred for them? He has heard that they believe their gods are pleased with sexual congress.
And there is the idol, of course, that is different to Temple services in Jerusalem. She is the best lit of all: a dozen lamps carefully placed on hand-shaped ledges jutting out from the wall surround her. She is a naked woman, large breasts, broad hips, round belly, beads around her neck—is this worship nothing but sex? They pour the oil on the feet of the statue as if it could feel, they waft the incense around its head as if it could smell.
At a certain point, some of the worshippers surge forward and ecstatically plant kisses on the feet of the statue, grabbing her ankles, mumbling prayers, placing pieces of clay with messages scratched on them and small coins into the sacred pool in front of her. As if, he thinks scornfully, this object they had made themselves could grant their wishes. He is unimpressed. All these years he had thought something terrible, even monstrous, went on in these temples. Like most Jews, he had never set foot inside a place of wicked idolatry and had imagined something much worse than children playing with a doll, pretending it could grant favors.
And then there is something else. There is a screaming ululation from the front of the crowd, where the people are pushing close to the statue. Something changes in the mood, he can feel it around him, the way that one can feel the change in the dry air of the desert when a sudden rainstorm approaches. People around him are breathing more rapidly, pressing closer and closer. He feels a hand at his back and a woman's arm around his waist. He cannot see her properly—it is dark and her head is turned away—but he guesses she is about thirty, with pale skin and hair oiled and scented with pine resin. She is dressed like a respectable married woman and yet her fingers are clutching at his robe. He begins to wonder whether this will end with an orgy—he had heard rumors of something like this in Jerusalem. He finds he is both horrified and excited, half hard already at the thought.
But when the crowd parts momentarily, allowing him a clear view of the brightly lit area in front of the statue, he sees that it is something else. A woman with unbound hair, with eyes rolling back in her head, is dancing in front of the statue. Her skirts are hiked up past her thighs. She goes down into a crouch repeatedly and thrusts herself up. She is making guttural cries. She has pulled her robe off her shoulders and arms, it is slipping from her breasts, but what is happening is no love-dance.
She has a small silver knife and she is cutting herself, across her arms, across her chest. Other women are singing with her, clicking with their tongues, slapping their arms against their bodies in rhythm, and as he watches she presses the tip of the knife into her own breast by the nipple, cutting a bright blue vein. She leans forward and allows the blood to gush over the feet of the statue, like milk from the breast of a woman giving suck. She squats and thrusts her pudenda towards the statue. She slices at her own thigh, completing the impression that she is bleeding from her places of sex.
The woman next to Iehuda is still holding on to him, her fingers convulsively scrabbling at the fabric and the flesh of his side. He can smell her sweat. He is certain that some sexual rite is about to begin, or something more than that, something even more appalling than what he has already seen. He is afraid now of what may happen. But no one is moving. Only the bleeding woman at the front of the room continues to dance, to smear her blood onto the statue, to dip and sway until, suddenly, with a wild cry, she drops and falls across the idol's feet, quivering, spent.
The woman standing next to Iehuda lets her arm fall away from his body. He catches her eye. She looks dazed, her lips half parted. She reaches for him again, fumbling at his robes. Her hand finds the warm flesh of his back, under his clothing. It moves lower, grasping his buttock, squeezing. At the back of the room, through the curtains, a few people are stumbling out into the light, but he sees that two or three couples are already pushed up against the walls of the temple. The woman's skin is covered in a sheen of sweat. He can smell her; through the incense and the odor of two hundred bodies pressed tight against each other, he can smell the thick willing scent of her. He puts his arm around her waist and half lifts her from her feet, pushing men and women aside to gain the temple wall. She is already gasping as, between a pillar and rough stone, he lifts her up, presses her against the wall where her feet can find the pillar, swings her skirts aside and enters her. She is wet and hot and ready and she cries out and bares her teeth and her hands scrabble at his back as he thrusts. It does not take long. He has not even uncovered her breast before he is done and, shuddering, lowers her to the floor.
He wants to take her again. He feels already that it will not be long before he is ready to do so. He grabs at her waist. But she squeezes his hand, lets it go, and is now drifting towards the doorway. He follows as they exit, blinking, into the early-evening sun. He sees, with surprise, that her hair is red: it had looked dark, brown, in the dim light of the temple. He realizes in the same moment that she may be surprised to see his features, his own red-brown curls. He tries to speak to her.
"What is your name?" he says.
But she looks away, apparently faintly embarrassed, and says nothing.
He thinks: woman, I have felt the grip of your cunt.
But before he can find something else to say—something more uncomprehending, perhaps, or the thing he wants to say that she would not understand: did you know that you have just fucked a dead man?—she pulls her scarf over her head and hurries away.
At the top of the marble steps leading back into the street, a maiden is holding a wide flat dish. Her arms soon struggle with the heavy heaping of coins that worshippers place there as they leave. Iehuda finds a small coin for her and steps back down into the street.
Two older women pass him as they leave.
"She was Assyrian," mutters one to the other, "the one who cut herself. I've heard about their rites."
The other woman, dressed neatly and with the hairstyle of a respectable matron, sniffs and frowns. "A lot of fuss," she says. "What's wrong with a pigeon?"
He smells the banquet before he sees it: the sweet sticky smell of spilled wine. The smell of pomades, too, of the fragrant oils with which Calidorus and his friends anoint themselves before a feast. It is the smell of money, copiously spent.
He is late for the party. This is a mistake. He had not realized how long the temple service had gone on, he had stumbled back home dazed and would be grateful for a bath and a sleep. But although no one chides him, the anxiety of the slaves shows that he has made a bad error. One of the men hurriedly washes him with a wet cloth, another dresses him in a fresh robe and tries to touch his hair with the perfume. He grabs the man's wrist as he approaches with the stone vial.
"No," he says.
The slave, who has tended to him a hundred times, looks puzzled but places the perfume vial back on the table. "My master is waiting," he says.
"Waiting" is something of an exaggeration. The feast had begun without Iehuda. In the dining room, six men are reclining on upholstered couches arranged around a low table. The table is well furnished. The men have silver cups of wine mixed with honey. There are dates, olives, bread, white cheese with herbs, dishes of lentils with fruit and in the center a huge ocean-fish with sliced citrons, dill and parsley. The men are drunk already and the meal is not even halfway over.
"Ah, Judas"—Calidorus pronounces his name in the Greek fashion—"we were beginning to think you had forgotten about us entirely."
There is acid in his tone.
"Never," says Iehuda. "I was detained by some business in the market, that is all. My apologies, gentlemen."
Calidorus eyes him suspiciously.
"Business? I thought"—he puts on a laugh—"that all the business you would ever have is been and gone."
"My apologies," says Iehuda.
It is time for him to perform.
He is not exactly a guest at the banquet, just as he has not exactly been a guest in Calidorus's house these past months. Not a slave, no certainly not that, but neither precisely a friend. He has been treated well, allowed to roam as he please, fed and supplied generously with wine, given clothes and two rooms of his own and even writing instruments and certain books. But there have been these parties. His presence has been requested in a way which is slightly firmer than an invitation. He has begun to wonder what might happen if he refused one of these generous offers of "an evening with some friends."
He takes a stance in the center of the room. The other men hush each other loudly, one spitting into the fish with an excessively enthusiastic "shhhhh." In a dark corner of the room, Iehuda notices, two slaves are standing almost motionless.
Calidorus introduces him with the usual flourish.
"Behold the man before you," he says, "once a follower and close confidant of a man some called the King of the Jews, but now a guest in my house. Since the subject of debate tonight is the gods, whether they are wise or foolish, to be loved or to be feared"—Calidorus had produced a series of such topics for debate at his symposia since Iehuda came to stay—"his assistance will be invaluable!" He beckons a slave to fill his wineglass again. "Come, tell us, Judas of Cariot, tell us about the God of the Jews and how your master was very nearly mistaken for him!"
"We have heard," says one of the men, his face flushed with drunkenness, "that you Jews believe that your God lives in only one house in Jerusalem! Is he not as wealthy as our gods, then, who can afford to keep up many homes?"
The others find this hilarious. One laughs so long and loudly that he begins to choke, and the slave to his right has to help him to some wine.
Iehuda sighs inwardly. It is one of the things that every gentile has heard about the Jews. Like the lie that Jews worship the pig and that is why they do not eat it. Like the lie that at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the most sacred place, there is a donkey and its shit is piled up around it. Like the lie that Jews hate their bodies and their wives so much that they only make love through a hole in a sheet. How do these things begin? Which debased mind invented them? Who chose to pass them on, unthinking?
He has learned to play along with such tales rather than challenge them. Or to circumnavigate them, like a boatswain foreseeing choppy waters. He tries to tell the truth jokingly.
"Ah," he replies to the drunken fool, "perhaps it is that our God is more loyal to us. Like a loving husband, he stays close to home. While we all know how Jupiter spreads his... favors." He mimes the thrusting motion of the body, the bunching of his thighs reminding him suddenly, overwhelmingly, of the musk scent of the red-haired woman in the temple.
But the trick works. The other men laugh. One punches the drunken questioner gently on the arm.
"You'd do well to learn from them, hey, Pomponius? Stay a little closer to home and maybe your wife wouldn't stray so much!"
The others laugh and Pomponius, a jowly man in his fifties, though still with a fine head of thick black hair, reddens and scowls and drinks more wine.
Calidorus, Iehuda notes, looks nervous. Rein it in, Iehuda says to himself, don't embarrass important guests.
"Ah"—he fakes a little laugh—"perhaps it is just that our God, like a wise husband, knows he cannot trust us, as no man can trust a woman! If he left us for a moment, we would start rutting with some other god."
He does a comical little mime of a woman peering through the curtain of her house, seeing her husband leave, and immediately grabbing the nearest slave and mounting him. The men laugh uproariously, toasting each other with wine, spilling more than they manage to get in their mouths. He has them now.
"Yes," rumbles Pomponius, relaxing a little, "you can't trust women."
Calidorus gives Iehuda a small smile.
"But now," says Iehuda, "to my own small role in the downfall of a god. It is hard now even to recall how different I was back then. If you can believe it, I had a full beard." He cups his two hands upwards at his waist, to indicate a beard so long that these clean-shaven Romans grimace.
"Not only that, I was a virtuous and honorable man. I prayed every day, I observed the festivals and the Sabbath, I kept to the old ways of cleanliness in foods and in washing my body and in making sure I fucked only my own wife, and not anyone else's."
He winks broadly, as if to say that he is exaggerating slightly here. The men chuckle. Iehuda has read Ovid, with the stories of gods fucking women, women fucking animals, animals turned into human beings so that they can rut and grunt and screw. He understands what these people are like. They would not really believe that any healthy young man could have been a virgin at twenty-eight when he took a wife, that it would never have occurred to him to be unfaithful to her. Perhaps they would not even believe that he had never eaten the flesh of a pig.
So he tells them the story they want to hear. It is a jesting version of tale, he has rehearsed it many times at many such dinners. He knows exactly where to pause, where to emphasize a joke, where to undercut a tragic moment, turning it to ridicule. In the version he tells, he is the impudent puck, the fool who dares to challenge the king. In this story, Yehoshuah—his friend, the man he loved best in all the world—becomes a puffed-up little prince who waved his needlelike sword at Roman rule. Iehuda becomes the naïve innocent who says, "If you irritate their skin, they will swat at us all." He paints himself as foolish, giving his friend up and believing that Pilate would do no more than scold him. The men laugh. They drink more wine. Calidorus is pleased.
And while he tells this liar's tale, Iehuda reminds himself of how it really was. He does this every time, although it pains him, because he must know it, if only in his heart.
He had been so holy and abstemious that no Roman would believe it. His father had died when he was a boy. He had worked the farm, and attended the Temple on holy days, and cared for his mother and his two younger sisters, and only when they were fed, and wed, did he think of himself. He was a boy who loved the Lord too much, if such there is. Loved Him too much and thought of Him too much, and wanted only to do His will and know His words. The days in Jerusalem for the three festivals were his only respite from work, and they were joyous indeed, for then he was close to the place where God lived. And when he married—yes, at twenty-eight, and yes, a virgin, and yes, this had not seemed a special hardship to him—a thoughtful and hardworking and quiet man, when he lay with his wife that first time he thought of the deed as much a joining with God as with the shrewd and lusty woman, Elkannah, who had consented to marry him.
She worked in the fields by his side and spun wool and wove cloth and baked bread, and he felt lucky past imagining—though he was too serious a man ever to be freely joyful. His beard was long and full, though Elkannah used to sit astride him on the bed and trim it with the knife when he let her. He still remembers the curve of her behind and how neatly it fitted into his two cupped palms, and how his cock would rise to meet her while she wriggled on his lap and laughed and told him to hold still or she would end by stabbing him with this knife and who then would provide for her and the children they would surely have, would he think about that?
But when he was twenty-nine a hard fever passed through the village of Qeriot. It had been a long hot spring when they were taken down and water was short in the mountain streams. Only the well gave a good supply and some days they were too weak to lift and turn the bucket. It was a blinding fever, putting black spots in front of the eyes and then making it too painful to look out in full sunlight. But it was his fault, he knew, even though he had been as sick as her. He should have found a way to get water.
On the third day, he managed to leave his bed to walk to the well. He tottered like a newborn lamb all the way there and all the way back, with the black spots hovering at the edges of his sight, but when he brought back the water Elkannah was dead. Quiet in the bed, as if she had slipped out between one breath and the next. As if she had simply forgotten to take that next breath and might remember in a moment, wipe her hands on her apron, chide herself for her foolishness. But she was gone.
And then something else was gone, suddenly and without his consent.
It was not the sweet soft scent of his wife in bed in the mornings that he missed the most—though he missed her beyond enduring. He missed most the God who he had always felt watching over him, who in quiet moments he would speak to and imagine that he heard a comforting response. Who he had wept to on long nights after his father had died and who had placed a hand upon his neck and said, "I am your Father in heaven, and I shall give you strength." He felt that the line joining him to heaven—like the cord that connects a baby to its mother—had been severed. Perhaps the Father was still there, but Iehuda's face was turned so far away that he could not tell any longer.
He thinks now that it may have been a crime to feel as he did. To mourn for a God more than for a wife? But it is so.
Some time passed, but he did not measure it. A handful of seasons, and he worked still just the same, because what else was there to do, and the people of the village—who had themselves lost parents and children, spouses and siblings—said to themselves, "Before long he will take another wife, he will have sons and daughters and forget this first one." They did not know that his heart was as cold as the earth and as empty as a dry wheat husk.
And then the man came to the village. Iehuda had heard nothing of him. The decision to go and listen to him speak was merely the choice between a long night alone in his home and sitting with the people to hear whatever foolishness they would hear. He had seen dozens of such preachers over the years, he and Elkannah had gone to listen to them sometimes and joked over their prattle or, occasionally, debated their wisdom.
This man had not been so much different, at first. Telling tales to illustrate his messages, talking about God's love. At a certain point, he fell silent. Sifted the earth with his hand. Rubbed his forehead. Looked up, as if searching through the crowd, and with his eyes found Iehuda, and he held the gaze, and held it, and Iehuda could not look away.
"You are looking for God," said the preacher, "but God is also looking for you. And He will find you. He has found you tonight."
And Iehuda felt tears starting in his eyes.
"You have lost much." The man spoke in a level tone, neither emphasizing nor attempting to persuade. He spoke as if he were hearing the simple truth from heaven.
"God has felt your loss," he said, "and He has not forgotten you, although you have turned your face away from Him. He speaks to you today as a Father. Tell me whom you have lost."
This was no secret. Any child in the street could have told him that Qeriot had been struck by the sickness. Every person had lost something.
Iehuda said, "My wife." It was defiant, the way he said it. Challenging the man to impress him.
"And your father?"
It was a lucky guess, Iehuda told himself, nothing more, a guess from a preacher. How many men of thirty have not lost their fathers? The man could not have known that he had lost him especially young, that he had taken it especially hard.
But still he said, "Yes."
And the man, whose name was Yehoshuah, unfolded his long limbs and stood up from the earth and walked over to Iehuda and gave him a hand to lift him up. He put his hands on Iehuda's shoulders and said, "You think that your Father in heaven has forgotten you. But your Father in heaven is here. Now. Guiding me to you today. Listen," he said, "this story is for you."
And he told a story to the crowd.
There was once a man who had two sons. And because he had business both near and far, he sent one of his sons to do all his commerce in the city and kept one by him to learn the ways of the farm. That son who was sent away burned with rage, for he was kept from those he loved, and from his father. He sent angry letters back to his father, begging him to let him return, but the father left him there for ten long years, while his brother raised a family, and lived at home, and tended the fields. At last, after many years, the father brought the son home from the city.
"Father," said the son, "why did you keep me away so long?"
And the father said, "My beloved son, you were always on my business, every moment you were away. And now that you have come to understand all my doings, this farm and all that is in it is yours."
"So it is," said Yehoshuah, "with men. It is those who suffer who will inherit the kingdom of heaven, and our Father in heaven has already picked out a golden seat for you, my friend. He loves you best of all."
The man moved on with his talking and preaching. But it was as though Iehuda had been struck by lightning through the top of his head and into the ground, because he wanted it so much to be true. Not like Job's suffering, a test. But as this man had said, a gift.
That night the man made camp near to the brook, with a small fire and some gifts of food for his trouble and three of his friends, for few men followed him then. Iehuda, with about eight or nine others from the village, sat with them in their camp and listened to them talk.
There were things the man said that filled Iehuda with fire, as if his blood had turned to flame.
There was a beggar among the group, and when the rest of them opened up their packs and ate their barley cakes and olives or dried fish, he had no food to eat. They each gave him a little of their own to make up a meal and he ate ravenously, gratefully.
Yehoshuah sifted the dirt under his hands and said, "Why do we give charity?"
Iehuda replied quickly, "It's written in the Torah: 'When your brother becomes poor, extend your hand to him, and strengthen him—even the convert and the settler.' God commanded it."
Yehoshuah nodded slowly. "Now answer me this. Why is it written in the Torah? Why did God command it?"
Iehuda blinked. This is not a question a man can hope to answer. To ask, "Why did God do so?" is as much as to say, "I can understand the infinite mind of God."
"For our highest good," piped up one of the others. "All God's commandments are for our good."
"But why?" pressed Yehoshuah. "Why is it good for us? Why did God lay this down for us?"
There was silence around the fire. The three men who had arrived with Yehoshuah must already know the answer, or the special point he was making. The others were dumb, afraid that they would give the wrong response. Iehuda, suddenly tired of the game and of this man trying to make them feel stupid, replied.
"It's not given to us to know why God does anything," he said. "Our job is to listen to His commands and obey them."
The other men nodded. This is what it means to be a pious Jew: to learn the law and to obey it.
"Like the soldiers of Caesar?" said Yehoshuah, a smile on his lips. "Like a man bought for hire? To do without knowing the reason for what you do? Our God is not a tyrant. He would not have given us sharp minds if we were not meant to use them. Think. Why did God tell us to give charity?"
At this, two of the men quietly began to pack up their things to go. Yehoshuah did not try to detain them. He had compared their belief to the blind obedience of the soldiers; he must have known this would be intolerable to some.
Iehuda felt his mind stretch after the question, though. It was a good question. If he had to make a guess at the reasoning of God—and even the thought was faintly sickening, like looking down a long drop—if he had to guess, he might say...
"Perhaps God has commanded us to help the poor because He loves them."
Yehoshuah clapped him on the back: "This is a good answer, my friend! See, we have been reasoning for but a few moments and already we have puzzled out who God loves! And from His commandments, who else does He love?"
"The blind and the crippled..." Iehuda began, thinking of the commandment not to put a stumbling block before the blind. "The widow and the orphan? For it says in the Torah, 'Do not mistreat widows and orphans. If you mistreat them, I will hear their cries.'"
"Yes," said Yehoshuah, "God has a special love for women without husbands, sons without fathers. Think more. Why does God say, 'Love your neighbor'?"
Iehuda had it now. "Because God loves..." He paused. "He loves those who are near to us?"
"Has he not taught us all to love our neighbors? Is not every person the near neighbor of some other person? Even soldiers, are they not—"
"No," said Iehuda, extremely irritated, "soldiers are not neighbors. If you go on this way you will have us sharing our food with the men who come to burn our crops and marrying our daughters to the men who raped our wives." He paused.
Yehoshuah looked at him, interested.
Encouraged, Iehuda went on, "You cannot know what God had in mind for us. He told us to love our neighbors, that is enough. If we start adding to the law where will we be? Like the Romans, making little gods to tell us everything we want to do is right."
"How if I say this?" said Yehoshuah. "The Torah says, 'Love your neighbor.' But since everyone is someone's neighbor, I say, 'Love your enemy.'"
"That's nonsense. We could love them, but it would not make them love us."
"But imagine if everyone did so. Imagine if we spread that word. Love your enemy. From village to village and town to town. What would happen? Imagine it."
Trying to grasp it made Iehuda's mind stutter.
"I cannot imagine," he said at last. And then, because he yearned to understand, "Explain it to me, teacher."
Yehoshuah put his rough palm on the back of Iehuda's hand.
"If the world were filled with people who listened to these few words, only these words, we would build the kingdom of heaven on earth. That is why I travel from village to village. That is the work of my life. To teach people to look into the words of God until they see the heart of everything. Imagine it: the Romans and the Greeks and the Syrians and the Babylonians and the Persians, imagine if we all learned, together, to love one another."
Iehuda allowed his mind to follow, across the map of the wide world, across the empires and kingdoms that fought and tried to rule and subdue each other. And he imagined what might happen if these words traveled from mouth to mouth, from mind to mind, from one city to the next to the next, if this simple message—love your enemy—were the accepted creed of all the world. He did not see how it could happen.
"If one man went against it," he said at last, "the whole thing would be broken. In a world like that, a world of peace, a world of soft people with no knives, one man could destroy everything."
"Then we cannot rest until every man has heard it. Think," said Yehoshuah softly, "what shall we use up our lives for? More war, like our fathers and their fathers, more of that? Or shall we use ourselves for a better purpose? Is this not worth your life?"
And Iehuda saw it, just for a moment. In this instant, the whole world was new to him.
He could not stop thinking after that. His mind was rattling like a cart on a rock-strewn road, picking up speed, heading downhill helter-skelter, jerking and bouncing. He wondered if he were going mad.
When the other men went home, past midnight, he stayed and talked with Yehoshuah, asking each question as it came to him, sometimes sitting silently for a long time.
"What about people who come to harm you? What shall we do if they try to hurt us?"
Yehoshuah stretched out his long body on the bedding roll over the stones. He put his hands behind his head, leaned back and looked at the dark, coruscant sky.
"What do you think, Iehuda," he said, "what does your heart tell you?"
Yehoshuah had folded one leg over another. His simple brown traveling robe was stained with dust and sweat. The skin of his face and arms and legs was sun-worn and weathered. He was still so young, though. How had he come to know so much?
"I am trying..." he said, and came to a halt. He tried to think afresh, to imagine a world entirely new, with no certainties, but he could not make himself bend. "If we must love our enemies, and our enemy is the empire of Rome, would we not have to become their slaves?"
Again and again, all he could come back to was the single alternative he knew.
"Would we be like the priests in the Temple," he said at last, knowing it was a kind of capitulation, angry with himself for not being able to think further, "bowing and scraping to Rome? Trying to please them?"
Yehoshuah sat up a little. "Come and lie by me," he said.
He shifted position to make room for Iehuda.
Iehuda came and lay beside him.
"Look up at the heavens," said Yehoshuah, "look at the stars."
Iehuda looked. The sky was crammed with stars as a pomegranate is filled with honey-sweet seeds.
"We know that God is in the heavens," said Yehoshuah. "He looks down on us all from there as from the top of a mountain."
Iehuda felt it. God looking down on him. He had forgotten.
"God doesn't choose his dwelling place by accident," said Yehoshuah. "Look at the stars. Is any one of them raised a single cubit above his fellows? Has God placed a crown upon one of them? Do they rule one another?"
Iehuda shook his head.
"So, think."
"If we cannot fight Rome, we must become their slaves..." he began.
"Must we?"
Iehuda thought about it. His mind was so clear now, it was as if he had removed the top of his head and the starlit sky was pouring through him, into his heart.
"Could we somehow love them and continue to live as we always lived before they came...? But they would kill us."
"Do you think so? A whole country?"
Yehoshuah moved his arm slightly, so his fingers touched Iehuda's. Iehuda felt the touch as a burst of warmth starting in his hand and radiating up through his arm, across his chest, blooming in great sunbursts along his body.
Yehoshuah said, "It is possible to love with dignity. Listen. If a man hits you on the cheek, give him your other cheek to hit. That is what he wants—give it to him freely. If a soldier commands you to carry something for him for one mile, carry it two miles. That is love—to show you are giving it by choice as a free man, not because of a command. If they demand you give them your coat, give them your shirt too."
Iehuda imagined it. A rainstorm. A soldier demanding he give up his coat—such things happen. And him taking off his shirt too and standing bare-chested in the rain for this ideal of love.
"They will take us for madmen."
"Seeing such love will change them. This is how we will bring the message."
"You are talking about a new earth," he said, "and then what?"
Yehoshuah smiled.
"I do not know. But I believe my Father in heaven will find an answer for us."
"And what are we to do?"
"Now?" Yehoshuah's voice dropped very low. "God came to me in the desert and He told me to spread this word. It is my holy duty. And you, Iehuda, He has told me that you will come with me and help me and be my friend."
Yehoshuah patted Iehuda's flank, like a man thanking a loyal and obedient horse, pulled his robe around him and rolled over on the blanket to sleep.
Iehuda lay down but his whole body was vibrating like the plucked string of a harp. He knew he had to join them. When they walked on from Qeriot, over the dusty yellow hills north to Hevron, he would go with them. This man, he thought, this fervent, righteous man, would change the whole world.
There were more of them soon. And more, and more. They walked from town to town and in each place there would be some men—and once or twice a woman—to whom Yehoshuah was especially drawn, for whom he seemed to have a particular message, a new parable or saying. And they would sit talking until the fire died low and in the morning one or two or three men would walk on with them.
They became something, and it was not clear precisely how it had happened. In Iehuda's memory, one day they were walking dusty-footed into a town and the old women were spitting out their chewed-up leaves as they passed and people were only coming to hear Yehoshuah because at least he was a new thing, like a peddler or traveling musicians. And then suddenly, arriving at a new village, people came out to meet them. Young men and women, and children, tugging on their robes and saying, "Is that him, is that him?"
But when he thinks of it, it is not so strange. Because of course, there were also the cures.
He had not made any cures in Qeriot. He did not always do it. Only when there was a certain kind of person or, Iehuda noticed, an especially large crowd. He felt unkind and unworthy for noticing this, but he could not put it out of his mind once he had seen it.
In Remez, where there were five children gone blind with the same pox that had afflicted Iehuda's wife, Yehoshuah touched them on the head and whispered that God would comfort them and make them strong, but made no cure. In Chidyon, where a girl who had lost both legs and pulled herself on a little wheeled tray by her arms begged Yehoshuah to help her, he wept tears at her suffering, and prayed with her for courage and for the blessings of God, but no new limbs sprouted where the old ones had been.
But in Kfar Nachum there was a great crowd, about two hundred people, and several had brought members of their family who had been unwell for years. From among them, Yehoshuah picked out a man who was wailing and shouting and ripping at his own hair and garments. He was possessed by a demon, they could all see it, the kind who attacks the innocent and the guilty, who will jump into a child if they can.
Iehuda had seen demons like these rip a man slowly apart, cause him to dash his own head against a wall, or to attack his wife and children or to throw himself from a high place and make an end of his life. There had been a man in Qeriot like this, so tormented by the things the demons shouted to him in his own head that he bit chunks of flesh from his arms and the wounds began to stink and so he died.
This man in Kfar Nachum was snarling like a dog when they brought him to Yehoshuah, pulling off his cloak to show his bum to the women standing in a half circle beneath the tree. He snapped and howled and made to grab the women and tear at them with his teeth, and many ran from him and Iehuda was not surprised.
But Yehoshuah was not afraid. Two of the man's brothers held him steady. They offered to sit on his chest to keep him still, but Yehoshuah looked into the man's eyes and said, "You will be peaceful for me. For you know I am your master."
And the man stared at him like a frightened dog finally finding the leader of his pack. There was fear in his eyes but also relief and a quality of begging.
"Let his arms and legs go," said Yehoshuah.
"But master," said the brothers, "he will run wild and attack the women, he has done it before."
"Let him go," said Yehoshuah, in the same level tone, still looking into the man's eyes.
They let go and the man did not move.
"Tell me your name," said Yehoshuah. "Demon in this man's soul, tell me your name."
The man rolled his eyes back in his head, and whined and howled and gnashed his teeth, but he did not move.
"Tell me your name," said Yehoshuah again, "in the name of God our Father I command it."
And then the demon in the man spoke. Its voice was a growl like a wolf and a low hiss like a lizard and it said, "I am Ba'al Nakash, the Lord of Snakes, and this man is mine."
The people were amazed, because this demon had never told them its name before, and everyone knew that a demon can be commanded by its name.
So Yehoshuah put his hand on the man's forehead, and even though his eyes rolled and his teeth gnashed he remained still.
Yehoshuah said, "Ba'al Nakash, in the name of God our Father I command you to come out of this man!"
The man fell to the floor with a great gasp and a choking sound. His body began to shake and the people muttered to each other, "That is the demon, trying to hold on."
Yehoshuah knelt down and put his hands on the man's chest and shouted, "Ba'al Nakash, I command you to come out of this man!"
The man writhed and hissed and bit through his own tongue so that blood and spittle foamed from his mouth. He clawed at the ground until his fingernails broke and bled on the stones, and he writhed and threw himself against the rocks until great bruises began to show on his body. Yehoshuah took a deep breath, let it out slowly and then, with one hand on the man's chest, he gave his order.
"By the name of Yahaveh!" said Yehoshuah, and the people gasped, because this is the true name of God, which is never to be spoken aloud, except by the High Priest in the holiest place in the Temple in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, but Yehoshuah spoke it in this backwater village for the curing of one demon-infested man. "By the name of Yahaveh, come out of him!"
And hearing this forbidden name of power, the man's whole body stiffened, his back arched and he let out a wild scream. The people said afterwards that they had never been more sure they heard a demon in all their days. In neighboring villages, they said they had heard that scream, five miles distant.
It lasted for the time of ten breaths, and everyone heard that it was the sound of the demon leaving the man's body. Some said they saw black smoke rise up from his mouth, but Iehuda did not see it, only the clouds of dust he raised from his thrashing. But when the scream ended the man was still and it was obvious that the demon had left him.
A boy at the back of the crowd suddenly called out, "A snake!"
And they turned, terrified, expecting a giant snake, a demon the size of a man. But it was just a mottled viper, lazily coiled behind some rocks.
"The demon has gone into it!" shouted someone, and another boy picked up a stone and threw it at the snake. Then more and more pelted it, and though it arched its back and bared its fangs just like the demon-haunted man had done, it could not win against so many and soon enough it was dead.
They brought the limp, crushed snake to the man, dangling it by its tail. He was sitting up now and blinking, probing his bitten tongue with one finger as the bloody saliva spilled from his mouth. Though the demon was gone from him, he was not as a normal man—no one could expect it—he seemed dazed, and frowned and muttered, but he did not growl or hiss any longer. He blinked at the snake as they laid it beside him.
"That was your demon," said one of them. "Burn it and you will be free forever."
But Yehoshuah smiled and clasped the man's hand.
"Your faith in God and in His holy name has set you free," he said.
That night the village killed three yearling goats to feed them. And the next morning, when they walked on, more than ten men and women of the village came with them.
There had been others traveling with Yehoshuah before Iehuda arrived, but Iehuda knew that he was special to him. Yehoshuah could tell him things the others could not understand.
After Yehoshuah had taken the snake demon out of the man in Kfar Nachum, they sat up talking long after the others were sleeping the sleep of those whose bellies are filled with roasted goat.
"How does God tell you," said Iehuda, "which to cure?"
Yehoshuah thumbed the edge of his sleeping blanket.
"I can see," he said, "which demons will listen to me."
Iehuda lay back on his own blanket.
"I knew a man in Qeriot ran mad with a demon," he said. "He would dash his head against walls."
"Demons make men do such things," said Yehoshuah.
"But when his mother spoke to him," said Iehuda, "he became calm. For a while. It was only after she died that the demon would not let him be. He died of that demon, but while his mother was alive he could hearken to her voice and not the demon's."
Yehoshuah stirred the embers of the fire with a stick.
"Is it like that with you?" said Iehuda.
Yehoshuah shrugged. "I do not understand what you are asking me."
"If a demon listens to a man's mother," Iehuda said, "it is not because the mother has power over the demon. The mother has power over the man. The name you spoke today has power over all men. Not just demons, but men as well."
Yehoshuah threw back his head and laughed.
"This questioning is the wisdom I taught you," he said. "Use it always with me. You are right. I do not know how I do what I do. When I speak, the demons may listen, but what happens next is in God's hands."
They walked on and their host became bigger. Mighty. A multitude. There started to be another group too, among those who came to hear Yehoshuah speak, or watch him doing his cures and casting out demons. They were the other rabbis. They were only to be expected. They came to wrestle with him.
Some met him boldly. In Emek, Ezra the Teacher challenged him to debate and after they had finished calling one another fools Ezra held Yehoshuah close to his breast and brought them all in for supper. In Me'etz, they set up two great piles of stones and had Yehoshuah and their own teacher, Nechemiah, preach atop them. In Refek, the people asked Yehoshuah questions in turn until his patience was utterly exhausted and he cried out that no man could bear such an assault without a cask of wine.
They tried to trip him up, and find the flaw, and winkle out his hidden assumptions and specious reasoning. For Iehuda, these were the most glorious days. Everyone knew that the debates were the "arguments for the sake of heaven" of which the sages speak with praise.
The more a man argues with you, the more he respects you. The more he tries to pick holes in your argument, the gladder is the Holy One Who is in All Places. The great rabbis Hillel and Shammai argued with each other so fiercely that their followers attacked one another bodily—several of their students were killed in these fights. And though this is to be regretted, their ardor for debate is commendable. For how are we to hear the infinitely stranded voice of God except in the grappling voices of those who care about the Torah and seek out its never fully graspable truth?
Some rabbis were merely angry, of course. Lesser men and weak men. Every part of the world contains men who cannot bear to hear their words questioned. They are people who believe that only their purple robe or their silver chain gives them power over others. They forget that Moses had only a staff of wood and stuttered when he spoke. And there were such men in Yehoshuah's camp too—some of his followers could not bear to hear him questioned, just as some of the rabbis could not bear to hear his criticism.
But the best men on each side rejoiced in the fight, chewing on the muscle of it, crunching at the bones of it. And when the arguments were done, in the light of early dawn, more men and more women walked on with them to the next village, and the next.
It was about this time that there started to be twelve of them. The closest ones, the inner circle. Iehuda would not have imagined that the group could grow so large as to need an inner circle, but it had done so. They needed to exclude the provocateurs in their midst sowing dissent or spying for Rome. There were spies, of course. Yehoshuah needed trusted men.
He came to each of them separately, whispering that he had need of their counsel, their eyes and ears. It took Iehuda a little time to work out who the other trusted men were. He noticed that, although there had been many questioners in the outer circle, he was the only one in that inner group who had been known to argue back, to challenge in open meeting.
There had been a time when they made no distinctions. At Beit Saida, when everyone had shared a single meal, Yehoshuah had seemed to be saying that all distinctions would be swept away. But now Iehuda was the only speck of dissent left in the inner circle. He could not speak to the others.
"Do you know what they are saying of you?" he asked.
Yehoshuah frowned, but said nothing. They were alone, by the fire. It was late at night and the others were asleep. It was like it had been at the start. There were not enough such nights now.
"They are saying that you are the Messiah. The one we wait for. The true son of David. The one who will end all disease and suffering. The one whose arrival we will know because there will be no more war and all the dead will rise from the grave."
He wanted to carry on, to list all the different kinds of magic that the Messiah would do, to make Yehoshuah laugh. He wanted so much for him to laugh. If Yehoshuah laughed, then Iehuda could laugh too, and they could go back to talking about remaking the world through their work and struggle and not waiting for God to bless them with miracles when the true son of David was on the throne.
He did not laugh.
"Are you going to make a lion lie down with a lamb?" said Iehuda, and there was accusation in his voice. "Are you going to rebuild all the cities that have been destroyed?"
Yehoshuah spoke very low and quietly: "Who knows what may happen through God's will?"
There was no argument against this. But still Iehuda knew what he knew in his heart.
"I think some of them already believe it," he said. "You should tell them to stop saying it, even among themselves."
Yehoshuah stirred the embers of the fire.
"It is not for me to stop them. They must speak the truth as they find it."
And Iehuda wanted to shake him by the shoulders, to slap his face, to say: for God's sake, man, all that we have worked for, all that we have talked about. But he saw that it was too late for that.
"You have begun to believe it yourself, haven't you?" and his voice was angry and he could not stop it. "You've listened to what they've said about you. Like Herod, who could only hear the flattery of his sycophants, you have listened to it too much."
Yehoshuah became pale and still. His nostrils flared, his eyes reflecting the dying fire, and he said, "Do you think that you know the will of God better than I?"
And Iehuda remembered the man who had taught him to listen to the knowledge of his own heart, and to think out each precept like a Greek, testing it for the signs of truth and for what could be learned from it.
"I think," he said, very slowly, "that if God has chosen you, He will tell us in his own time, and until then we should not think of it."
Yehoshuah smiled at that. His old, easy smile.
"Is this my own wisdom you are handing back to me?"
"Yes." Iehuda smiled too. "If you cannot tell them 'I am not he,' then at least do not think of it until God makes it all very clear. Or," and he laughed, "until the hour of your death. For if you die without becoming the king, we will know you were not the Messiah."
"I shall have to repent of my folly on my deathbed, then," said Yehoshuah, and chuckled, and leaned back on the heels of his hands.
It was a little time after that that he sent them out across the land to spread his words and to heal the sick. It did not matter that they said, "I cannot heal as you heal, I do not have the power as you have it"; he touched them on the brow and murmured, "Do what you can." And they went to try to do what they could. They would meet again in three weeks and bring with them new followers or not as God willed it.
It was clever, also, to disband at this time. The group had grown too large. There had begun to be spies from the local authorities at the edges of the gatherings. A quiet cluster of them sometimes, listening to the words, watching the mood of the people. Any man who can lead a rabble is a threat to an empire. To love their enemies did not mean to submit to them. Rome was interested in anything that stirred people up. So they broke apart, for Rome would have broken them otherwise.
Iehuda set off in high excitement. Most of the other men had gone in pairs but he, and some others, had decided each to go alone. To see what God meant for him to do. And so he came to the place.
It was a village in the east. He does not remember the name now, and he will never go there again. A small place, perhaps eight or nine homes with fields all on hillsides, so that it was with effort that the seed was sown and with pain it was reaped. A place where the living was hard. He arrived in the evening, a preacher in the name of Yehoshuah, whom two or three of them had seen before in Galilee. They fed him soup of lentils and hard bread and he knew it was more than they could afford. When he was left alone in one of the shacks by the field he looked into an earthenware grain store. It was empty, save for two dead wasps at the bottom of the jar.
And there they brought him a boy. The child was perhaps ten years old and crippled. He had a misshapen leg: the bone of it was bent and the knee joint swollen and the skin sore and the whole leg crushed by the weight of his body, so that he had to support himself on a stick. His armpit was blistered from the place where the stick rested. His whole body was overturned by that leg.
Iehuda's heart leapt out of his body when he saw that boy, and his spirit flew over to him and touched the boy's heart. He felt it. This poor crippled child needed the love and mercy of God more than anyone he had ever seen. He felt the sore places as if they were on his own leg, and the crooked bone as if it were his bone, and the stiff, aching, oozing joint as if it were his own body crying out in pain.
He prayed to God as he had learned as a child, calling him "Father." Father, he said, heal this child, take his suffering from him, make him whole as I am whole. Do not refuse, as a father would never withhold water from his thirsty child if he had it. Father, you have the healing of this child in your hands. He felt the power in him, the tingling in his fingertips, the heat in the palm of his hand, and he knew that when he touched the boy the power would flow out of him, and as he lowered his hand he was already saying, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
He thought of the men and women he had seen Yehoshuah heal with his touch, how the demons of pain fled from their bodies, how their backs unbent and their flesh became whole. And the boy on his mother's knee, both of them looking at him with such trust because everyone had seen the power of God working through Yehoshuah to cure any affliction.
"Thank you," said Iehuda under his breath as he lowered his hands onto the twisted limb, "thank you, Father, for making me your conduit to do this holy work." And he grasped the leg with his hands so full of warmth, as if his arm were the outstretched arm of the Almighty, as if his fingers were the mighty hand of God.
Later, when they gathered again as Yehoshuah had told them, the disciples sat around the campfire and told their tales. Mattisyahu told how he had cured the boils of a man afflicted for ten years with this horrible skin disease. A good storyteller, he made them all imagine the suppurating wounds, the pus flowing out from every sore place, the stench of rot on the man's clothes and the contortion of his face every time he moved and the cloth rubbed against one of his agonizing pustules. Mattisyahu said that he had called upon the name of God, that he had prayed as he had been taught, and when one of the women bathed the man's legs they found that the sores came off as they washed and that the flesh underneath was new and whole and without pain. "Like the skin of a new-shorn lamb," said Mattisyahu.
There were other stories like this. Netan'el had cast out seven demons from a woman in Be'er Sheva who had previously spat like a camel and cursed and screeched at anyone who tried to approach her. He had seen the demons rise from her like smoke, he said, like white ash flying up from a fire made of very old dry wood. The demons rose into a tree and went into a flock of birds nesting there, who shat mightily upon the people gathered to watch. But the people were handy with their slingshots and stones and brought the birds down, so then the demons were no more.
Yehoshuah listened to these tales calmly, nodding when one of the disciples mentioned a prayer he had used, or a way he had found to bring greater faith to the people watching.
When it came to Iehuda's turn, he told his story quickly. He had none of Mattisyahu's gift with a yarn.
"There was a boy," he said, "he had a bandy leg, and I called on God by name as my father and the boy's leg was healed."
The others clapped him on the back and thanked God for the great miracle.
Yehoshuah looked at him shrewdly and said nothing.
Iehuda wondered how many of them had lied as he'd done. Was Mattisyahu's tale, full of incident and detail, just an elaborate deception? Was Philip's simple story of a blind woman given sight a sign that he, like Iehuda, was too embarrassed to say more than a few words?
Iehuda had laid his hands on the boy's leg. He felt the power in him, in his heart and his hands, a warm tingling rush inside his whole body, the spirit of God moving him, so that he understood why God is called a terror as well as a love. He felt the power go into the boy, and praised the name of God, the one who is and was and will be.
And the boy smiled, and shivered, a shudder going through him. And the leg twitched. And the boy said, "It is so warm!" And he moved his leg and said, "It moves more easily." But it was not healed. They could all see it. It was still bent, and the sore place in the skin was still raw and he could not put his weight on it.
The boy's mother looked at Iehuda.
"You may be a man of God," she said, "but there is no power in you."
The boy's father shushed her, and the boy protested that the pain was a little easier, that it would surely mend. But the mother, who knew her son's body better than her own, knew that nothing had changed.
They offered him a bed for the night still, a place by the fire and a meal for his trouble. And in the morning, when he woke by the ashes of the fire in the lean-to, he saw the boy limping across the yard, dragging his leg. When the boy saw Iehuda, he tried to straighten himself, to smile.
"It is easier already!" he cried, and Iehuda gave a sickened smile in return.
But the mother looked at them both from the door of the house with dark and angry eyes. And Iehuda left, not stopping to break his fast.
He thought, on the slow, dragging walk back, of what Yehoshuah would have done. Had he been there he would have said, "The cure is not in me but in God," or he would have said, "God has not chosen to bless you in this way, I am sorry for it," and he would have told them a tale that proved that those who suffered were the most beloved, that God had them close in his heart. Yehoshuah would have told him that the power was not for him to command.
And if Yehoshuah had said those things to him, he still would have known that his faith had been weak, and that was why the boy was not healed. He had seen Yehoshuah do it. The other disciples said they had done it. And the worm chewed at his heart, because he knew that God had not favored him.
He could not sit with the others that night as they shared bread and oil and talked of the great miracles that God surely had in store for them in the future. He wandered down to the camp of the foreigners, where the non-Jewish people interested in the teachings of Yehoshuah slept. It was an accident that he happened to speak to Calidorus. It could as well have been another as him. He did not even know what he was looking for. Maybe only someone to whom he would not have to lie.
Calidorus and some of his friends were playing a dice game by a low-burning fire. When they saw Iehuda approaching, they stood up and offered him the place of honor, but he refused it, preferring to sit and watch them play for a time. "Venus!" called one, when he had thrown a specially lucky set of numbers, and the others cursed him good-humoredly and poured more wine from a leather flask.
As the evening wore on, more of the friends took their bedrolls and made camp, until only Calidorus and Iehuda were left by the last embers of the fire. And Calidorus spoke of his travels and the interesting people he had encountered. He was a scholar of the writings of the Greeks, spoke highly of the Roman Republic—this dream of government by the people had died when Julius Caesar took imperial power, and even to speak of it was to show a measure of trust. So Iehuda, in the end, told him his troubles.
"Ah," said Calidorus, "I have seen this trick performed. By a man in Shfat, who seemed to plunge his hand into the center of a boy's chest and pull out a piece of black sticky stuff which a demon had placed inside him. I paid him all the gold in my purse to show me how he did it and the coat on my back to sell me the mechanism."
He said it matter-of-factly, so that Iehuda showed no surprise on his face. They were men of the world, discussing something everyone knew.
"Would you like to see how it was done?" said Calidorus.
Iehuda nodded slowly.
Calidorus sent a slave to fetch something from a leather bag in the back of his tent and had Iehuda turn away while he prepared. When Iehuda turned back, he showed him the trick. Calidorus concealed a sheep's bladder in the sleeve of his robe, near the wrist. When he pressed it, a red liquid spurted across his arm and up to his hand.
"It is dyed water," said Calidorus. "It is better if you use fresh sheep's blood, though. And a piece of burnt wood resin—it goes sticky and black like this—concealed in the palm."
He showed Iehuda the piece of tacky material. It looked like the sort of evil a demon might place in a man.
Calidorus shrugged. "If you're willing to pay enough money, you will discover how a thing was done. I expect your friends did some trick like this, if they did anything at all."
Iehuda felt afraid, suddenly, in the center of his chest. How many times can a man lose his faith before he ceases to believe in faith itself?
"I saw a holy man once bring a swarm of frogs out of a girl who suffered from the palsy," he said.
Calidorus smiled.
"Did he lean very close into her?"
Iehuda thought on it. He had been only a child when that gray-bearded preacher came to Qeriot, but now he remembered it, yes, the man had embraced the girl, caught her up from her bed, and then when he let her fall the frogs had begun to swarm, seeming to come from every part of her.
"He had a bag of frogs concealed in his robe," said Calidorus. "When he pulled her close he emptied that bag into her clothes, so the frogs seemed to come from her when he released her." Calidorus looked at Iehuda's face and made a wry half smile. "I was young once too," he said, "don't be ashamed. Children believe the stories." He frowned. "Surely you must have thought this yourself already?"
Iehuda thought: I am entirely alone. Anyone like Calidorus who sought this knowledge out already disbelieved. Why else would one look to learn the truth, except to be proved right in unbelief?
"It hurts me," he said.
Calidorus's mouth twisted a little. He clapped a hand on Iehuda's shoulder, but the gesture was immediately awkward and he withdrew it.
"Ah well," Calidorus said, "he makes a fine spectacle, your friend." He laughed. "I am certainly enjoying his story. And some of the things he says are fascinating."
Iehuda felt a pain rising in the center of his chest. His heart was heavy and he thought: could I be like this man? Could I take it all as an entertainment, a pantomime? There were five hundred people in Yehoshuah's encampment, some of them talking as if he was the promised Messiah, some of them debating his teachings and some, like Calidorus, simply enjoying the performance. Calidorus's way seemed easiest—the man's presence was like a cool spring of fresh water in the fires of Iehuda's mind. He knew he could not be like Calidorus, but he also knew he could not now unknow the things he knew or unsee the things he had seen.
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
"What am I now?" he said.
And Calidorus seemed uncomfortable.
"Come and stay with me," he said, "when you grow tired of following your prophet through this wilderness, come and be my guest in Caesarea. Ask anyone there for my house and they will tell you. When all this is done, come to me."
He came back to the inner circle changed. He found that he listened differently. He watched differently. He noticed, again and again now, Rome. And how Yehoshuah's words, and the words of his friends, were a provocation to Rome.
There was an angry tone to him now. Had it always been there? Had Iehuda only just begun to notice it?
On the road to Shomron, men and women ran out of their homes and across the fields to see Yehoshuah. In one place—a rich and fertile land, where the soil was tilled in great soft waves and the barley was growing high and strong—a man was kneeling by the side of the road, waiting for them. He was a prosperous farmer, one could tell immediately by the quality of his boots and the thick wool coat around his shoulders. But he was kneeling at the roadside, tears falling from his cheeks, mumbling.
Yehoshuah bent down to talk to the man. And Iehuda saw that old Yehoshuah, the one whose very presence soothed the heart.
Yehoshuah shook his head softly.
"Do not weep my friend," he said. "God has told me that He has chosen you to walk with us. Come now."
This was a great deal to ask. The farm behind them was good. On the hills, a flock of brindled sheep grazed, guarded by a shepherd boy. The boy was probably the man's son, the sheep probably his flock.
"My father has died," said the man, the tears still falling silently. "He died this morning, just as you approached. Teacher, give me a blessing."
Yehoshuah placed his hands on the man's shoulders.
"You are already blessed," he said. "Our Father has blessed you with this call. Come and walk with me. We are traveling to Jerusalem. Come now and do not look back."
The man stared Yehoshuah full in the face. A man who has lost his father is like a man felled by a mighty blow. The death of a mother is the loss of love, but the death of a father is the loss of certainty. The tallest tree that will ever stand in the forest is fallen.
"I must bury my father," he said. He spoke, Iehuda thought, without hearing his own words. It was not an answer, it was a realization. He said it again. "I cannot walk with you now, for I must bury my father. Let me go and bury my father first."
Iehuda heard one of the other men—he thought it was Jeremiah—whisper to his fellow, "Is this how he speaks to the son of David?"
If he could, Iehuda would have hit that man in the face, but he realized suddenly that if he did that, it would be dangerous. How had he not known that they had come to this pass, where dissent was dangerous? If he hit the man, the others would say that he did not believe that Yehoshuah was the son of David—that is, the rightful heir to the throne in Jerusalem. And then... he did not know what might happen.
There had been a fight, a week earlier, between some of those different factions. A man had been stabbed with a knife and they had left him in Rafa'at for his wound to mend. Iehuda had not thought of it after that day. But he found himself thinking of it now. What would happen if he argued with this crowd of angry men? He felt afraid. And ashamed of his own fear.
Yehoshuah knelt down and clasped the farmer's hands.
"Are you dead?" he whispered softly.
The man, pulling one rough paw from Yehoshuah's grasp to wipe away the tears from his eyes, looked bemused.
"I say again," said Yehoshuah, "are you dead? For you say you must bury your father," and then he turned to the crowd behind him, all straining to catch his words, "but I say," and he raised his voice to a shout, "let the dead bury their dead. You must come with us to announce that the kingdom of God is here!"
The men standing behind Iehuda cheered, for they understood this to mean "nothing is important but our own work," and the people far back in the throng who could not see what was happening cheered. The tenderhearted women did not cheer, for their hearts went out to the farmer, from whose eyes tears were falling like ripe fruit. And Iehuda did not cheer.
Yehoshuah stood up and walked on. Iehuda looked back at the man in the mud and dust at the side of the road, who would have to bury his father that afternoon.
There grew to be an inner circle within the inner circle. Iehuda was not part of that group. It was Shimon, and Jeremiah, and Jona. They had not been the first to join the wandering rabble, but they were zealous. Jona saw signs and wonders in every speck of dust. Jeremiah muttered darkly about the days that are surely to come when the Lord will destroy all those who do not hearken to his holy name. Shimon was a steady man: he was not enraged by doubters but filled with sorrow and pity for them.
There was a day when Yehoshuah took those three alone up into the hills to pray. They were gone for a night and a day with no food or water. Something happened there, but Iehuda could never root out exactly what it was.
Shimon, the most solid of the three, said that he had fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed that Yehoshuah was standing with Moses and Elijah, and this dream had the marks of truth to it and he was convinced by it in his own breast. Jona said he had seen the gates of heaven open and the very voice of the Lord had spoken to him by name, but Jona had been known to hear the voice of the Lord in the honking of geese. Jeremiah would say nothing of what he'd seen, only that it had been vouchsafed to him that Rome would burn and the kingdom of heaven would come to earth, which was no more than he had always said.
The longer Iehuda asked, the less this tale became. And yet he heard in the camp that the three men had been taken up in a fiery chariot to the heavens, where the good Lord had spoken to them and told them Yehoshuah was His promised one. He found one man selling white pebbles which he said had been taken from the holy place where they ascended to heaven. Women were sewing them into the hem of their clothes to keep off the evil eye.
Iehuda wanted to discuss the matter with Calidorus, who continued to travel with them, waited on by his body-slave, even as it pleased him to walk like a pilgrim. But he felt somehow repulsed by the idea. He contented himself with imagining what Calidorus would say. Something Greek, he imagined, something from philosophy. Calidorus often quoted from the philosopher whose very name—Epikouros—was a byword for heresy among the rabbis.
He might say, "The gods, if there are gods, do not concern themselves with us. How can they, when we see the crippled and lame all around us? If it pleases your friends to think that they saw the gods, so be it. It pleases me to go to a play and imagine I have seen Helen of Troy or Agamemnon in his war cry."
This answer, from an imaginary Calidorus, pleased him. He welcomed the worm into his breast.
An insanity came upon them. They argued over who could sit closest to Yehoshuah, like children fighting over a toy. As if he were already dead and they were arguing over his clothes or the scraps of flesh adhering to his body. Iehuda felt it too. He had always felt it, the desire to be close to the man. The sense that it was impossible to be too close, that he would allow himself to be utterly consumed by Yehoshuah and consider it an honor. This had always been why he struggled so hard to remain separate, to find a place deep in his breast which did not belong to Yehoshuah.
But those weeks, the thing began to tip over into madness. There were more of them every day and at the edges of the group there were more soldiers watching. They all knew that with a rabble this large there would be spies from the Prefect, there would be those who would report his words and deeds and the size of the crowd for a coin or two. But Yehoshuah did not tell them to disperse. It was unwise. They looked now like the kind of rebellious multitude which the Romans dealt with so swiftly and so successfully. They looked like bodies waiting to be nailed up along the road to Jerusalem.
None of the others would say this to Yehoshuah, so it fell to Iehuda again and again to say, when they ate bread together in the evening, "We should be circumspect. We should disband now and re-form in a few weeks, like we did before."
Yehoshuah did not reply, except with a smile. The others hated Iehuda for saying it. He saw that they were enjoying the sense of danger, for it was also a feeling of power. He could not tell truth from lies anymore. He heard someone say that the priests at the Temple were plotting against them and this sounded like absolute insanity. He heard someone else say that King Herod Antipater in the north had paid for information on Yehoshuah and this also seemed madness. But there was such certainty in the group and he was embedded in it so completely that he could not see them from the outside any longer. Perhaps they really were the most important thing in Judea.
It was coming towards a hot, late Passover. The days and months had fallen out so that it was already full spring by the week before the festival. The air was ripe with the green scent of acacia trees and with the hum of hovering insects.
They came to the house of a friend—a merchant by the name of Shimon, whom people had called Shimon the leper because he was so unpopular. Shimon had been impressed with Yehoshuah's teachings on the value of riches. The man had given much of his wealth to the poor and every day now the beggars of Beit Ani came to the back door of his home to receive bread. They were to stay there one night, with Yehoshuah in the bed of honor, and then walk on closer to Jerusalem.
The house was heavy with the smell of a great crowd of the sick and the dirty and the poor. The smells all mingled together: body odor and dirty clothes and women's menstrual blood and a man with fetid sores on his leg and the animals and the tanned animal hides and the half-soured milk in the jars on the floor and the onions on the breath of the camel drivers.
People came for cures, but Yehoshuah performed none that day. His mood was merry and indulgent and he let visitors come with little gifts—a sheepskin, a basket of dried fruits, a silver charm—or to tell him, bowing and twisting their bodies in attitudes of worship, that his face was the face of a holy man, a true prophet of God. Every time they did this, Iehuda felt more uncomfortable.
Towards the end of the afternoon, a wealthy woman wound her way through the crowd. She was dressed in a fine silk robe, her hair elaborately turned in several plaits around her head, and she was mad. Either mad or drunk, as was clear from her unsteady movements, from the way her eyes darted around the room.
She was carrying a small alabaster jar of perfumed oil—the stone was thin, expertly worked, the jar much longer than it was wide, a cool narrow vial. The container alone would be worth a month's wages. She stopped in front of Yehoshuah's chair of honor, bowed low, ceremoniously but with a curious simpering smile on her face. She cracked the stem of the jar so that they could smell what she had brought. It was spikenard, a dense scent of mint and spices and a meaty richness. The smell traveled up and around the room, cutting through the sweat and garlic and sour milk with its scouring sharpness. This was a precious gift—people brought them valuable possessions now, she was not the first, but spikenard was one of the rarest components of Temple incense, brought from Kush in India.
The woman smiled lopsidedly. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Iehuda wondered where she'd got the perfume from, what she'd done to obtain this vial worth more than a year's work for a laboring man. She held the jar in her left hand, and reached out her right to touch a lock of Yehoshuah's hair. Yehoshuah smiled at the woman. She was breathing very quickly, her breasts rising and falling. A sheen of sweat coated her skin. Iehuda wondered if she was about to throw herself bodily onto Yehoshuah—this had happened before.
Instead, she spoke in a slow, slurred voice:
"May I anoint you?"
Iehuda waited for Yehoshuah's easy smile, his way of turning a refusal into an honor. He would say no, but he would show her by his kindness that her offer had been accepted in the spirit if not on earth.
This was not what happened.
Yehoshuah's glance met the woman's eerie, glazed eyes.
He bowed his head before her for the anointing.
She tipped the vial. The oil began to flow out over Yehoshuah's hair. It was enough, more than enough, plenty. Someone rushed to stop her—every drop that fell was a meal for twenty people, every thick glug was a pregnant goat, a pair of good shoes, a field golden with high waving wheat. She laughed and cracked the vial between her hands. The whole fortune of it poured out upon Yehoshuah, coating his head, his shoulders, filling the room with the thick, nauseating, choking scent.
There was no other smell now. The aromas of life—of bodies and animals and dirt and fermentation—all those smells were gone, as if the sounds of the world had been blotted out by the clanging of a terrible gong. This one, too-clean odor, the smell of new-cut pine wood, was all that remained. Beautiful, yes, in a way. But revolting, because it was too strong and because it had destroyed everything else.
The woman was giggling still, crushing the alabaster to smaller and smaller pieces in her oil-covered and now blood-streaked hands. One of the other women pulled out a rag to wipe those poor hands. It was not purely a charitable gesture. Even a rag soaked with spikenard would be worth something. The woman did not resist, even when they led her out to the well.
The house emptied quickly. No one could bear to be near the smell of too much goodness gone to waste. The floor was stained with the oil.
"The worms will enjoy their heaven-scented earth," said Shimon.
There were only three or four of them left around Yehoshuah. Those who never left.
Something was building in Iehuda now. Like vomit, it would not be denied.
Iehuda said, "Why did you let her do it? We could have sold that perfume and given the money to the poor people all around us. It's worth a year's wages to any of these men."
He kept his voice low and spoke quickly. There was nothing to be done now about the spikenard. The oil was dripping still from Yehoshuah's face and hair onto the floor, every drip a meal, a blanket, a handful of good seed. In the streets they would smell the intense foolishness which had been done in this house. Half the village would know it by walking past the door. The earth floor might smell of it for a year or more.
Yehoshuah looked at him, that bright burning look.
"Iehuda," he said, shaking his sorrowful, dripping head, "Iehuda, why do you insist on seeing only with your eyes?"
I don't, he wanted to say. I saw you with my heart, and you have led me here, to a place I do not understand.
Iehuda had heard it said: if the rabbis tell you that day is night and night is day, believe them. He thought perhaps he had once been capable of this. He did not know whether he was luckier then, when he could, or now, when he found he could not.
Iehuda tried to swallow it, like a Nile crocodile eating a new lamb. But he could not make it go down. Certain things cannot be right, no matter how you squint at them.
"We could have sold it," he said again, "to feed the poor."
"Do you think I will be with you for much longer?" said Yehoshuah. "When God himself lays waste to the whole world, do you think anyone will care that some oil was poured on the earth here?"
And Iehuda shook his head.
And Yehoshuah said, "If you cannot see, I cannot make you understand."
He trailed behind the group as they walked on from Bethany, pretending to be tired, but he was muttering to himself and the words in his mouth made his pulse quicken.
He said, out loud, to the broken yellow hillside and the scrubby bushes: "Everything can be justified this way."
He said it again. In different words:
"If the world is to come to an end, how can we know that one thing is right, another wrong?"
He thought of a dozen problems to ask his master. How if the woman had thrown chests of spices into the ocean for Yehoshuah's sake? How if she had cut herself with lancets, as the Moabites do? How if she had sacrificed her own child? How much waste of wealth, and self, and life, would have slaked him, made him cry, "Enough! Too much!"?
In his mind, he asked him, "How much do you think is due to you? Have you not yet honor enough?"
He could not find it in himself to speak aloud.
They camped that night and he was quiet.
Yehoshuah said, "We have come away from Bethany, but the stink of that perfume is still on your head, Iehuda."
And he thought: how dare you know me so well as this? How dare you use myself against me?
But he said nothing.
In those days, he saw Calidorus again. The man was getting ready to leave the camp, his slaves strapping boxes to the wagon and preparing a soft place for him to sit on the long journey.
"Well," said Calidorus, "how goes the quest to overturn heaven and earth?"
Iehuda said, "There are men casting bones by the side of the road who say Yehoshuah will be king before New Year."
Calidorus half smiled.
"Would he make a good king, do you think? Would he set appropriate taxes and negotiate successful trade agreements with Rome and array his forces to the north to keep off invaders?"
Iehuda shook his head.
"The man I first followed would never have wanted to be king."
"You know, I believe that is what Caesar said when he first took power. It seems to be a pattern with them. In this time of special emergency, they say, I must take more power than usual, but this shall be given back in time to the people. Somehow it is always a time of special emergency. It is quite surprising how seductive a crown can be."
Iehuda looked at him, frowning. Calidorus was a wealthy Roman citizen, in that sense more powerful than almost anyone Iehuda had ever met.
"Why are you here, Calidorus? Here in Judea, I mean. Why here?"
Calidorus shrugged. "I like the climate. The autumn rains in Rome would make you howl. Much of my trade is here. Interesting people pass through. And Rome is not..." He paused, thinned his lips. "I like to be able to speak my mind, Iehuda. That used to be the foundation stone of Rome, they tell me, but now anyone who opposes Caesar is swiftly found by spies to have been 'plotting treason' and apparently," he said, laughing, "we leave poets in exile for writing saucy verse. I can speak more freely here than I could in Rome. Here I am no threat to anyone."
Iehuda blinked.
"Even a Roman citizen? Even you have to calculate like this?"
"Even I, Iehuda, am subject to Tiberius Caesar, a man with all the power in the world and not much idea of what to spend it on."
"If you could plot against him," said Iehuda, suddenly bold, "would you do it?"
Calidorus looked at him very keenly.
"No man should be told he's a god while he still lives," he said at last. "It doesn't promote good thinking."
He knows now he had lost his mind. He thought himself above the others because he did not gather round, begging for a blessing, longing to sit at the right hand of the master. But he noted who sat where. His eyes did not cease from searching out who had received more favoring glances, who seemed momentarily to be the one most praised.
He tried again, in the evening, when the others were asleep. He had always slept lightly and not for long. Yehoshuah did not seem to sleep at all these days. He found him stirring the glowing embers of the fire, blowing on them to bring them back to life, lighting twig from twig and branch from branch.
He said, "Explain it to me."
Yehoshuah shrugged. "The vessel was already broken. What could I have done? Only shamed her."
"You could have stopped her."
"Perhaps."
"You could have spoken out against doing as she did. So that no one else will do it. Others will come with the same idea now."
"And if they do, what is the harm?"
Iehuda felt that snake rising up in his throat, making him gag and cough. He thought: it is a demon. There is a demon in me and my friend cannot see it or cast it out.
"The harm," he said. And stopped. And thought.
"We are not here for your glory," he said at last.
And Yehoshuah smiled.
And Iehuda said, "We are not here to glorify YOU. Not your name but God's name. Not your words but God's words. Not you, not any one of us. Something bigger than us. The poor, the crippled, the broken. To help them, not to make you into a little god. An idol."
It was the first time he had let himself think it. He had not known he thought it until he said the words. He was panting, his pulse beating very fast and loud in his ears, his chest aching.
"Are you jealous?" said Yehoshuah.
They had had this conversation before. And Iehuda had admitted his jealousy freely and felt cleansed of it. He wanted to say yes and to fall into his friend's arms, and to be free again of everything.
He shook his head slowly.
"This is not because I want what you have," he said, "but because you are using your possessions wrongly."
And Yehoshuah shrugged and said, "What I own it is my right to use, as a master orders his servants to perform one task and leave another."
"Like the love of those who follow you? Are we your possessions too?"
Yehoshuah looked at him, his eyes very brown and clear and fine.
"Only for as long as you wish it, my dear friend."
Was there a command in this? A wish? A suggestion? Or just a piece of understanding, as two old friends have of one another? The way out is always simple. All it takes is courage.
Losing one's faith is so very like gaining it. There is the same joy, the same terror, the same annihilation of self in the ecstasy of understanding. There is the same fear that it will not hold, the same wild hope that, this time, it will. One has to lose one's faith many times before one begins to lose faith in faith itself.
Iehuda left the camp before dawn. He felt elated. The sky expanded overhead. The moon big and low nearing the horizon, the stars rejoicing in their dark sea. They had turned the stones of the hills of Jerusalem to silver, to opal, to bone. The air was clear and cool as well water and the whole of the house of Israel was sleeping the sweet predawn sleep with soft breaths and gently curled hands. He felt the world move under his shoes as he picked his way across the rocky hillside down towards the city, a gentle tug because the very land was with him, urging him on. It was a blessed night. God, he knew, was watching and smiling upon him.
It was God who had kept the other followers soundly asleep when he left, and God who made the night unclouded and the moon bright so that he could find his way. God had touched his head with a cool calm hand and said softly in his ear, so that no one else could hear, "It is time, my son, time for this to be at an end."
He arrived at the Temple when the faintest hint of dawn was beginning to touch the sky. Like God had dipped his thumb in bright yellow pollen and run it around the edge of the vellum world. This would be a day like no other.
Men were sleeping in the courtyard, their heads on their full packs, or the sacrifice sellers under their tables, but the priests were already about their business. They were cleaning out the old ash from the last day's sacrificial fires, and washing the steps and the flagstones. Every morning and every evening, a lamb. They would make the first sacrifice shortly. As they always did. How had he imagined that anything they did would overturn any one of these unchangeable things?
He felt suddenly like a child who had been playing a game all this time. What had they thought they would do? Dismantle the great Temple stone by stone? Defeat the Roman army? Overturn the traditions handed down from Moses? Had they thought that they could take the place of God?
Like a child coming in from a game, like a penitent returning to grace, like a servant yielding to his master, Iehuda spoke softly to one of the priests. He was a man of maybe sixty years, with a good full gray beard like Iehuda's father.
Iehuda said, "I have come because I know you are looking for Yehoshuah of Natzaret."
The priest nodded gravely.
"I know where he is," said Iehuda. "I can take you to him."
The priest nodded again, three times, and said, "Come with me."
And as they walked towards the house of Caiaphas, the High Priest, Iehuda said to God,
"I have returned to you. I am sorry for my absence."
And God, who is a loving Father said, "You are welcome in my house, my beloved son."
Caiaphas was a bustling man, unexpectedly cheerful. Avuncular. He bobbed his little head and said, "I think we have enough influence with the Prefect that if your friend admits his crimes and declares that he has no claims to the throne, no more harm will come to him than a few lashes. You've all inconvenienced us a little, you know."
And Iehuda thought: is this what we were? While we imagined that we could change the world, these men of high office thought of us only as irritating children, throwing stones and firing blunted arrows? And he thought: really? Men had been put to death for far less than this.
Caiaphas busied himself with sending messengers to the soldiers and to the Prefect. There was little enough for Iehuda to do. He sat quietly on a stone bench in Caiaphas's study and felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from him. It was relief, at last, knowing that things would be put right now. Yehoshuah's claim to the throne was at an end. They could go back to spreading his message, instead of putting everything in the storehouse of one man.
The sun was high in the sky when Caiaphas said to him, "It is time for you to go back now, do you not think?"
Iehuda blinked. Yes. He had not thought as far as this, not further than doing God's holy work. But yes. Yehoshuah would miss him, would ask after him. No special alarm would be raised for him, but he might be in danger if his friends knew what he had done. He thought of the mad woman with the rolling eyes cracking the alabaster jar and bleeding and laughing. Followers like that would send a knife after him once the thing was done. Safer to go back now and pretend surprise with the others when the guards came.
"We will come tomorrow morning," said Caiaphas.
This was longer than the matter needed to take.
"What if we move on from our camp before morning? Yehoshuah sometimes..." The truth was that he sometimes told them that God had commanded him to move them on. "He sometimes moves us on unexpectedly."
"We will be watching you," said Caiaphas mildly. "Just stay close by him now. Do not leave his side. And we will come and find you."
He saw them on his way back across the hillside to the encampment. They did not even seem to be walking in the same direction as him. Sometimes they came directly towards him, sometimes they were far in the distance, watching him walk away. They were cunning and they were swift, and they watched where he went and what he did.
The encampment had not moved. Taddai greeted him with a kiss on both cheeks and a punch to the shoulder.
"Mattisyahu said you'd gone whoring," he said, and some of the others round about laughed because they could not believe it of Iehuda.
"I took myself off to pray," Iehuda said at last, and they all nodded.
Yehoshuah was speaking with some of the women under an open-walled canopied tent, and did not see Iehuda return and did not look at him with suspicious eyes or ask where he had been. And on the top of the ridge, behind Taddai's head, he saw the faint smudges of the men waiting for him, and for Yehoshuah.
They ate together that night, as they often did. This was the first night of Passover, though—they went to the Temple to purchase a lamb, sacrificed it, brought it back for the meal—it felt significant. So many people were in Jerusalem for the festival. The atmosphere was febrile, still, every man wanting to be the one who prompted Yehoshuah to say words which they would all remember as long as there was breath in their bodies. They were excited, like children.
Shimon wondered aloud whether the High Priest in his home was wishing he was here in this room among those who truly cleaved to God. Yehoshuah frowned at him and said nothing. Netan'el ate his share of the Paschal lamb and spoke of how the rich priests like Caiaphas and Annas, close bosom friends of Rome, could not understand the meaning of the sacrifice—that some men would only eat the meat of a lamb on this night, that many beggars would fill their bellies to the point of sickness. He hoped thereby to encourage Yehoshuah to speak again about how the poor are close to God, but Yehoshuah merely smiled. One of the hangers-on shouted that when the Messiah came, Rome itself would burn like the charred flesh of the lamb and some others laughed and cheered.
They walked in the fields after the meal, the ones close to Yehoshuah. They talked of the great miracles God would surely make, and of how many in Jerusalem already longed to follow them. They were anticipating the end of days which God would bring soon, so soon the day of judgment. And in the corner of his eye Iehuda saw his tails always, a few men melting into the shadows. Enough to keep watch and to send word.
"They will come at dawn," he said to himself. "When the world is quiet but they have light to see what they are doing."
At some point between dusk and dawn he dreamed. Or thinks he dreamed.
In his dream, Yehoshuah came to learn with him, as they had learned together two years before, at the very start. They studied in the great hall of scrolls that is heaven, the kingdom of God. They read the words of the Torah from the stone tablets which Moses himself had carved and Iehuda saw that the letters were fire.
And in his dream he said to Yehoshuah, "Why me? Why did God send you to me, knowing that I could not accept you?"
And Yehoshuah kissed him on his forehead and on his cheeks and said, "God knew His business. Now we will see what that business was."
And in the dream Iehuda knew that Yehoshuah had forgiven him. But when he woke, with the dew settling on him in a quiet orchard with his friends, he knew that the matter had not concluded yet and the serpent in him was a great sickness and he wished he could vomit it out. But the clatter of arms and shields was at the crest of the hill and it was too late.
They had not sent enough soldiers for a quiet surrender. There were thirty or forty of them, no more. Yehoshuah's camp was five hundred men—although they were mostly still asleep and a little distant. The soldiers had their swords but the men had wooden staffs as cudgels, slings and stones, cooking and hunting knives.
"You shall not take him!" shouted out Shimon, and stood between Yehoshuah and the guards.
Yehoshuah's closest men were awake and with him in the orchard. There were probably as many of them as of the soldiers. Several of the other men hefted their staffs meaningfully, shifting their stances to legs apart, knees slightly bent. The soldiers drew their swords.
"Give him to us," said the leading soldier in heavily accented Aramaic. "He is accused of treason. He must be taken for trial."
He nodded to two of his deputies, who came forward. One of them took Yehoshuah by the arm. And then it began.
One of Yehoshuah's friends raised his cudgel and struck the soldier a glancing blow on the side of the face. Iehuda, hanging back, remembered Yehoshuah saying, "If a man strikes you on one cheek, give him the other to hit," and thought: why, then, are they fighting? But they did fight.
The soldier fell to the ground. Shimon thrust Yehoshuah far behind him as the leader of the soldiers barked three words at his men and they advanced in formation, holding small shields before them, a forest of blades. Two of the soldiers lashed out with their weapons and two of Yehoshuah's men fell—one with a gaping wound to his neck pumping rich red blood, the other clutching his side.
Yehoshuah's men looked less certain now, but their anger was up and some ran forward, flailing and yelling. In a lucky strike Jeremiah pulled one of the shields forward and leapt over it, hacking at the face beneath the helmet with his knife, and suddenly blood was spurting from the soldier's face, and Jeremiah was shrieking because he had cut off the man's ear. It flopped limply in his hand. A piece of gristle cut from an undercooked joint. He brandished it, grinning. Another soldier hit him hard in the stomach with a shield and he fell to the ground.
They were outmatched, Yehoshuah's men. They were dealing the odd blow to the soldiers, but more of them, five, six, had been felled already. There were awkward wrestling matches, soldiers attempting, as far as Iehuda could tell, not to kill if they could avoid it. Several men were knocked out by a heavy shield blow. One of them, a young man Iehuda did not know, was attempting to fight although he was wearing only a wrapped linen sheet. Two soldiers grabbed the garment, trying to throw him to the ground, but he wriggled out of it altogether and ran away naked.
Angry, the soldiers returned to using their swords, and more men would have been cut down if Iehuda had not raised his voice above the din and shouted, "No! More soldiers will come! They have told me! All of us will die if we do not give Yehoshuah to them."
It was then that they realized.
"You," said Mattisyahu, "it was you who brought the soldiers."
The shock of it made them stare.
Ah, thought Iehuda, so there is no going back for me now. No returning to the person I was. Now they know.
He had to walk with the soldiers as they took Yehoshuah away. What else was he going to do? He could not stay with the other disciples. They would have torn him to pieces.
They walked as far as the Temple. There was a form to these things. First a hearing in the civil court of Israel, then justice at the hands of Rome.
Yehoshuah was quiet as they walked. They did not have to bind him or carry him or prod him with the points of their swords.
At the gate of the Temple, he clasped Iehuda's shoulder and said, very softly,
"Now we will see."
And as much as Iehuda has thought of that since, as much as he understands the world of dreams that spoke in those words, he cannot experience it as anything but courage.
They led his friend away through the dark doors. He tried to follow but Caiaphas, standing at the doorpost, shook his head. Thus far and no further. His job was done.
As he left the Temple, the head of the Levite administrators, kinder than the rest, pressed a purse into his hand. He shook his head, but the Levite frowned and said, "You cannot go back to your friends now. Use this to go home. Buy a piece of land and begin again. Forget everything that happened here. You have done a good service to keep the peace, remember only that."
He had thought about it, what he would do if he were free. And suddenly he was more free than he had ever been or ever thought to be. What is freedom, in the end, but that no one cares any longer to try to restrain us?
In the marketplace, he bought a sharp blade of the kind the Romans use to shave themselves, a jar of good sheep's fat and a pail. And he walked out of the city to the north, until he came to a place he knew, under the shade of three fig trees, with a fast-flowing brook of icy water.
At first, he pulled great tufts of the hair of his beard out and cut them with the blade—remembering Elkannah wriggling on his lap and feeling that sorrow which would never now leave him. When the bulk of the beard was gone he filled the pail and let the water go still, so he could look at his own face in the reflecting surface. He looked different already. Not a pious man, not a good Jew. A madman, with sprouting clumps of hair on his face. No longer a person who believed in anything.
He rubbed the sheep's fat onto his face. It smelled half delicious, like a good meal, but with a rancid edge. He massaged the fat into the coarse beard hairs with the heel of his hand, feeling the bristles and tufts scratch his skin. And then he began to scrape the blade slowly, carefully, down his cheek.
He had never done this to himself before, but he had watched with interest as some of the Greek and Roman hangers-on at Yehoshuah's camp had made their toilet in the morning, so he had a rough idea of how the thing was accomplished. When he had scraped half a cheek of hair off and rubbed the bristle–sheep fat mixture on the dry grass, he looked at the smooth patch in the mirror of still water. It was like the skin of a woman's face. Soft and pink, though a little raw in places from the blade. Suddenly, he desperately wanted a woman.
He shaved the rest of his face more quickly. He had the knack of the blade now, keeping close to the skin but not piercing it. He cut himself once or twice, but they were only small nicks. His face felt cold and the skin was stinging. And when he was done he stared at himself again in the water and saw a different man. He had not seen his own face thus since he was fifteen years old and his beard came in. But the face that looked back was not that of a boy. It was a Roman man. An idol worshipper. The man he had been was as dead as if he had cut his own throat with that razor. Good.
This new face did the work for him when he returned to the market. He had passed through the invisible veil separating Jew and Roman. The Jewish men scurried away from his gaze, the Romans met his eye approvingly. The whores by the market wall called to him as they had never addressed a word to him all those years when he was pious.
He paid one of the whores—a woman about his own age, with dark eyes and gray hairs streaked through the black—he gave her a small coin and had her in a small tented enclosure at the edge of the wall. She did not undress, just bent over the straw bales and flipped up the back of her skirts to show herself to him. The power of it was overwhelmingly arousing, the absolute lack of consequence, her lack of interest in him. As he fucked her, he remembered his wife and knew that what he had grieved for all along, when he thought he grieved for her and his God, what he had grieved for all along was the young man he had been who would never now return. The whore didn't even see his circumcised cock, that young man's last trace. He could be a Roman now, if he wanted.
He waited by the gates for news of Yehoshuah, and when he heard what had happened he went to the crosses. He wore a wrapped scarf like the tent-dwellers, shielding his face, and one of their cloaks bought for two small coins, more than its value. But he need not have bothered. Few of Yehoshuah's friends were there, and those who were could not see him. Their eyes glided over his face as if he were just another Roman, or Jew-turned-Roman.
Even Yehoshuah gave no sign of knowing him. He was near death—the day was hot and several of the men around him had already died. Iehuda wondered whether, if he had come hours before, Yehoshuah would have berated him, or screamed at him. But by this point his eyes were glazed and the flies were settling at the corners of his mouth. He would not have recognized his own mother if she had come then.
Iehuda waited there until he saw the light go out of his eyes. Even till then, though it took until the sun was low in the sky. He squatted on his haunches and watched it out. And even till that moment he had thought that perhaps God would make some miracle. But he saw his friend die. And at the moment that the limbs went limp and the head slumped forward and the chest became still, he thought: well, then, now we know. The Messiah becomes king, he does not die as a traitor. So now we know.
He should have known the moment he saw the nails through the wrists. Or when he had arrived at the Temple. Or when the snake first began to twist inside him, he should have known that nothing was keeping his friend alive but the faith of those around him. And he went and slept in an apple orchard near the walls of Jerusalem.
He stayed in Jerusalem a few days after that. He went to his friend's grave, hoping to take the body and bury it on that ridge where they had talked, but one of the boys playing with a spinning top at the side of the road told him that the body had been stolen. There was a trade in such things for magical purposes—the dried heart of a man who had died by violence, the fingers or toes, all these things could be used to cast spells. Or, he thought, to fool the gullible and line the pockets of one of Calidorus's fakers.
He wept a little, thinking of his friend's long bones and brown skin going to such a purpose. With the weeping, he touched the corner of his sadness inside his heart. It was like dipping his hand in the ocean, allowing the waves to run through his fingers, thinking for a moment that he had caught the whole sea in his palm, understanding at last that it was a sadness deep enough to drown in. He closed the box in his heart on that sorrow. It is the only way to continue.
He waited for the last possible day to leave Jerusalem safely, when the final pilgrims were returning home after the festival. And he struck west with a band of travelers—Syrians and Egyptians and Jews and Greeks mixed—heading for Caesarea. It was not hard to find Calidorus's house. The man, to do him credit, welcomed him and sent a slave to wash his feet.
Nothing ever happens except that God wills it. This was the teaching of Yehoshuah which Iehuda remembers every day. It is the truth. Everything that happens has been willed by God.
This is not how he ends the story he tells to Calidorus's guests. For them, he is witty and clever enough to make them feel vaguely flattered by the way he tells the story. He brings up Greek myth, tells them that he would have gone down into Hades to find his friend except—he winks—the Hebrew god frowns on such love between two men. The guests roar with laughter. They are in their cups now.
He jokes that perhaps, like the Emperor Augustus, his friend is already transformed into a god by his death. The men grow a little quiet at this—even to suggest that a criminal is on a par with Augustus is faintly seditious.
"But of course," says Iehuda, "just as Augustus, who died in majesty, now reigns in majesty on high, I'm afraid my friend Yehoshuah will still be dragging his cross around with him in the heavens!"
This is the best joke of all. One of the men falls on the floor he laughs so hard and pulls himself up still wheezing. Pomponius chokes on his own laughter and has to take more wine, which sets him off in another fit of giggles.
When the men leave, they agree that it has been an excellent party. Calidorus smiles. Iehuda wonders how long it will be until he has told this story to all of Calidorus's friends and business associates, and what his use will be then.
It is not long after this that the thing is broken forever.
Iehuda sees the woman again in the marketplace. Her red hair flames under the modest veil which covers the length of it. She is looking at some glass lamps—very pretty but impractical. He stands beside her, close enough to sense her body through her clothes and his. She does not notice him until he speaks.
"You could never light it," he says, his voice low, pointing at the lamp. "The heat would shatter the glass."
She looks up. Her eyes are green. She shows no surprise that it is him. A wry smile is on her lips and he remembers his wife, suddenly and with a sharp pain.
"Perhaps," she says, "I do not intend to light it. Aren't those the most beautiful things of all? The things that cannot be used without breaking them?"
She is poised. She holds her shoulders just so.
"Like a woman's maidenhead," he says, without thinking. It is a very forward remark to make to a woman in a public place.
She blushes a little, but her expression does not change.
"Like a man's unwarranted faith," she says. And pauses. And then. "I know who you are. My husband is a friend of Calidorus. Any man who has a fortune or wants one in Caesarea is a friend of Calidorus, you know."
"Ah," he says. "And who is your husband?"
"Pomponius," she says. "He knows you and your funny little story."
The thought of the arrogant self-satisfied prick of Pomponius thrusting inside this woman makes him hot and angry and, again, aroused. And the little smile playing on the mouth of the woman when she says "funny little story," this stirs him too.
"Did you know it was me in the temple that day?" he whispers low in her ear. "Was it my funny little story that made you so wet?"
He grabs her arm, his fingers digging into her soft flesh so that she gasps, and this he finds even more exciting.
Her eyes flick to the stallholder, who is watching them curiously. They are in a busy marketplace. She has only to call out and a dozen men would be on him, for she is a respectable Roman matron and he, if they cared to examine him, would be found to be only a Jew.
She does not call out. She looks at his hand around her upper arm, at the place where the skin is white because his grip is so strong.
She says, "Yes."
He fucks her in a disused stable not far from the market, where the musty smell of horseflesh is in the damp straw, and as she reaches her height she bites him on the shoulder so hard that her mouth comes away red with his blood.
She does not leave immediately this time. They sit together, leaning against the wall of the stable, listening to the sounds of the busy street outside: the vendors calling their wares, hooves striking stone, children playing and shouting, the mad-eyed preacher who stands at the corner of the market telling out the end of days.
She sits across his knees and fumbles with the garments at his waist until she has uncovered his exhausted cock. She cups it in her hand, thumbing the rim of the head where he is circumcised. She smiles.
"I heard that some Jews hang weights from it, to try to grow the foreskin back."
He shrugs. "Some men plunge their hands into a nest of bees hoping thereby to gain honey." His hand finds her, under her skirts. His thumb begins to work. She gasps. "Most men are not so foolish."
"And what do you think Calidorus's house is?" she whispers in his ear, leaning close to him.
After a little while he fucks her again: frantically, insatiably.
There is an evening when he sits drinking and talking with Calidorus. Everything now reminds him of something else, distorted and confused. Calidorus is a parody of Yehoshuah. Pomponius's wife is a stirabout of his own wife. This evening with Calidorus is a broken tessellation of another evening, long ago. Once a man has lived long enough, every moment is a reflection of some other moment.
Calidorus says, "My father was a freed slave. He was over fifty when I was born, and his first forty-five years he was owned."
Iehuda had heard something of this sort about Calidorus. It is not exactly a mark of disgrace, but neither is it a thing to boast about. Calidorus has drunk a little wine. So has Iehuda. The slaves have withdrawn. They are alone in a private chamber with a good fire and Calidorus's little house gods lined up on a side table.
"The master freed him because he saved his life. From a fire. He ran into the burning building to save his master. He had scars on his face and his body all his life, because his clothes caught fire as he ran and he did not stop to put them out until his master was safe. A long tight patch of red raw skin from here"—Calidorus motions to his waist—"to here"—he touches his right temple. "The hair never grew back on the right-hand side. That is how he won his freedom. That is why he was permitted to take a wife and why I was born. But until the day he died, although he was free, he still called that man 'Master.'"
Iehuda nods.
"And now I am a wealthy man," says Calidorus. "If I were so minded, I could become interested in politics, take a seat in the Senate. An able man can rise and rise in Rome, with no one telling him he has not the right father to be a High Priest, or the right lineage to be considered for king. That is what makes us strong. You are still waiting for your 'rightful king,' the son of David. We take for a king any man who has the will and strength to govern. There is no law to say that a freed slave may not become emperor; it may happen one day."
Calidorus clears his throat.
"I have heard from friends in Rome," he says, "that the Emperor Tiberius has run mad. He spends all his days on the island of Capri, fucking children." Calidorus raises an eyebrow, stretching the skin across his bony forehead. "If I uttered this in Rome, you know, someone would inform on me for a few copper coins and I would be taken and killed."
"It is because every man needs a father," says Iehuda slowly. Calidorus narrows his eyes. "Or a master," Iehuda continues, "it is all one. Without a father we look for another master: a teacher to follow or a patron to please or an emperor to fear. A man like your Tiberius has his head open to the sky, with no master to obey. That is why he has run mad."
"And what of you?" says Calidorus. "You have killed your master."
Iehuda shrugs. "God alone is my leader and my master."
Calidorus barks out a laugh.
"The gods will not keep you from madness. They have not helped the old goat of Capri."
And Iehuda could not say what was in his heart: that his God was the true God, and those little statues of squabbling deities were just pieces of stone.
"Do you know what I have heard, Iehuda?" Calidorus leans forward, mock earnest. "I had it in a letter from a business associate in Egypt. There one of your old friends is preaching that Yehoshuah yet lives."
"I saw him die," says Iehuda.
"Oh," says Calidorus, "certainly he died. But, as you say, every man needs a master."
"The governors and prefects will kill them for saying it."
Calidorus nods. "Most men would rather die, you know, than give up a master. In some kingdoms, the ruler's slaves and wives die with him, entombed in his grave. Most men have not the flexible heart you have. They cannot turn from one to the next. They must remain steadfast, even unto death."
"It is a little noble," Iehuda says slowly.
"It is idiocy. Do you think I still call my father's master's family my betters? I could buy them a hundred times over. We cannot cleave to the same thing forever. In this life, eventually, one is either a traitor or a fool."
It is easy to leave, once you are used to leaving. Easy to feel the moment of it approaching, to sense the loosening of the ropes that bound you to the earth. One becomes adept in noticing the absolute apex of love or belief from which it will inevitably decline. There comes a point when one can even begin to love leaving, the only constant we carry with us. The man who wanders forever is not cursed, he is blessed.
He leaves before dawn. He takes food for a long journey, and three rings Calidorus gave him freely when he had told a particularly good tale, which will pay his way or be stolen by bandits, only the road will tell him in time. A few other necessary things, including two good knives. A man with two fine knives, good shoes and strong arms is wealthy, or never far from wealth. He will thrive as he has always, somehow, thrived.
He says to God, "Are you there?"
And God says, as God always says, "Yes, my son, I am with you."
The pious would like to believe that God does not speak to the sinners, that one has to earn the right to hear His voice. The pious are wrong. God speaks to Judas of Qeriot just as he spoke to Yehoshuah of Natzaret, just as he would speak to the Emperor Tiberius of Rome if the twisted king had the wit to listen.
"What shall I do?" he says to God.
"Go west," says the Lord. "You are in a port. Take passage on a ship and sail away."
And he thinks he will. Here, this story is the only story of his life, the only thing he has ever done or will ever do. But there is this to be said for Rome: a man can become something new. He is not tied to his birth or his ancestral lands. There are great kingdoms yet to be seen. In the west the debauched Emperor Tiberius sits on his golden throne. In the west the Greeks ply their trade in wisdom. In the west, he has heard, there are demons and witches and uncircumcised barbarians with beards down to their navels and patterns on their skins. He is ready for them. And let them think in Israel that he is dead.
# Caiaphas
THEY TIE A rope around his ankle so that, if he dies, they will be able to haul him out.
People say that, a thousand years ago, under the rule of King David or King Solomon, such a precaution was not necessary. The High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies alone on Yom Kippur, perform the sacred rituals, burn the incense, sprinkle the blood, and the Holy Breath would descend and the people would be forgiven.
Even five hundred years ago, after they had had to rebuild the Temple following the exile in Babylon, there was not so much danger. Even then, under the fabled High Priest Shimon the Righteous, the thread on the horns of the goat would turn from red to white and the people would know that they were forgiven.
But not now. Now, when they send a High Priest into the Holy of Holies, they know he may not come out alive. It happens not infrequently.
The Holy of Holies, the chamber at the center of the Temple, is built on the navel of the world. It was the first piece of land created when God said, "Let the land be divided from the sea." It is from the earth of this spot that God scooped up the dust to make Adam and Eve, the first man and woman. It is the place where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac, and where God stopped him and gave him a ram instead, which is how we know that the sacrifice of human life is not pleasing to Him, and that He instead desires the sweet savors of animal flesh. In the end of days, it is from this spot that the word of the Lord will radiate out like the sound of golden trumpets, so that all the nations will bow down before Him. It is the holiest place in all the world.
The whole world is arranged in concentric circles around this spot. There is the world outside the land of Israel, and within that there is the land of Israel. And within that the holy city of Jerusalem. And within that the Temple. And within the Temple the courtyard of non-Jews, and inside that the courtyard of Jewish women, and inside that, closer yet to the holiest place, the courtyard of Jewish men, and inside that the courtyard of the priests. And within that courtyard of the priests, at the heart of the Temple, the reason for the whole edifice of marble colonnades, for the city, for the country, for the world. At the heart of the Temple is this holiest place in all of creation.
The chamber of the Holy of Holies is a small perfect cube, ten cubits, by ten cubits, by ten cubits. Its walls are marble. Its entrance is covered by two curtains. A raised marble platform shows where the Ark of the Covenant used to stand before it was lost—or hidden and its hiding place forgotten—during the Exile. Other than that, the room is empty. Apart from God. This is the place where God is.
And on Yom Kippur, when God brings his face very close to the earth, when he listens and observes His people most intently, on that day the High Priest—the Cohen Gadol—walks into the chamber alone. Alone he burns the incense on the glowing coals, and scatters the blood, and falls upon the stone dumbfounded in the presence of the Lord. Alone he mumbles his prayers into the cold smooth floor and squeezes his eyes tightly shut and finds his whole body shaking. And his head is filled with the smell of the incense and the speech of God, which is so far beyond words that when God Himself describes it in the Torah He can only say that the people hear the sights and see the words, so inadequate is our language to describe the Almighty.
And often these days, the High Priest does not survive the experience.
And because the square chamber is so holy, because they themselves would die if they dared to enter it, for it is certainly forbidden to them, they pull on the rope tied to his ankle to remove the body. This is always a terrible thing. If the man dies, by this token the people know that they have not been forgiven.
It is since the Romans, of course. Since Pompey with his iron boots strode about the holy chamber. Since the wall was breached and the treasures were examined by a Roman note-taker, wiping his nose on the back of his hand as he counted the golden vessels that once were made for the hand of Moses.
And yes, it is because of the men themselves. The High Priests, who once were chosen by their fellow priests for their wisdom and holiness and the force of the spirit in them, are now servants of Caesar, picked by Pilate the Prefect for other, more practical qualities. There are men who have bought their way to becoming High Priest by gifts to Pilate.
They do not always survive.
It is this which Caiaphas carries with him every morning when he rises and scratches, and kisses the head of his sleeping wife and goes to wash and put on the robes of his office and begin the services every day. Today is ordinary, and tomorrow will be ordinary and the next day in all likelihood. But once a year he will stand in the full presence of the Almighty and see if he is worthy to survive.
He has a suspicion regarding his wife.
He has seen her in the courtyard, her hair oiled with perfume but neatly covered like any modest woman, and a jar of water under her bent arm. He has watched as she asks one of the Temple Levites, a man called Darfon, to pull down the branch of the tree so she can pluck some of the sun-warmed dates. No, she smiles, not those ones, they are not quite soft yet. She does not like the crunchy dates. She wants them from that branch, where they are dark and sweet.
The Levite, Darfon, jumps up and grabs the branch with both arms. His sleeves flap down, revealing muscular brown arms, the hair wiry and strong like a young lamb's. She smiles, and he can see her watching the man's arms, and his sturdy legs kicking against the ground, so she can reach her hand up bending only at the elbow and pluck a soft warm date. She plucks two. She presses one to her lips, licking the brown skin with her small pink tongue. She gives the other to Darfon. He takes it coyly, smiling at her under his eyelashes, biting into it with a small, careful, hungry bite.
Caiaphas, watching, finds himself imagining a wolf, down out of the mountains, lean and ravenous from the famine in the land. Imagines the wolf stalking his wife, bringing her to bay in a grove strewn with rocks and broken pottery. Imagines the wolf growling and leaping to rip out her throat.
Or he imagines bruises slowly spreading across her face, turning her eyes bloodshot and her neck scarlet and blue. Imagines, and his hands feel how good it would be, throwing her to the ground, because it is not that he does not love her and desire her, but a thing like this must be paid hurt for hurt.
He is not a violent man; he has sacrificed enough young bulls and yearling lambs to understand the precious delicacy of life. He is startled by the strength of his feelings, how they leap up in him like a wolf he had not known was stalking by his side, or within him, all his life.
It is high summer. Passover is long gone. The sun bakes down on the cool marble plazas of the Temple, and on the north gate, where the drovers bring in their hot and reeking sheep for the slaughter. It heats the marketplace, where the fruit sellers lazily beat palm fans to keep the flies off their wares and the donkeys' tails twitch, raising clouds of gnats. It cooks the houses of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor, it turns the swimming ponds into warm pools of bubbling algae and frogs. In the minds of King, Governor, Prefect, soldiers, priests and farmers it raises the specter of famine, for what if the rains do not come? They always come if God wills it and why would he not will it—yet there have been years when they did not come. Jerusalem is languorous in the heat, unable to move, slow-witted but fretful. But just because Jerusalem does not move, one cannot believe she is asleep.
The Prefect, Pilate, wears a ring with a wolf's head. The wolf is the animal of Rome, of course: in another room Pilate has his little shrine to the God-Emperor Tiberius, and above it a picture of Romulus and Remus suckling at the teat of their wolf-mother. Like the wolf, Rome hunts with a great pack. Like the wolf, she protects her own but to those outside her circle she is nothing but teeth. Pilate's ring, on the third finger of his long bony right hand, is a great disc of amber with the wolf's head carved into it, snarling, showing fangs. When Pilate slams his hand onto the table, the bright summer light glints off the sharp bevels and lines of the carving, making the teeth sparkle and the eye blink.
"Three months!" he shouts, and then, appearing to calm himself, although this is all for show and Caiaphas has seen it before, he repeats again more softly, "Three months."
Caiaphas stares at a point just behind Pilate's head, to the niche where the man has his little statue of Mars, bearing a sword. There would be a riot in the city if they knew he had brought this idol so near to the holy sanctuary. There had been a riot four years earlier when he brought a new garrison of soldiers into the city bearing their banners showing Caesar's head. It is forbidden to bring a graven image or an idol or an image of any kind this close to the Temple.
"Are you so stupid, Caiaphas?" Pilate asks slowly. "Is it that you are stupid? Is it that you have not understood what I have asked these three months? Do I need to ask you more slowly so you can follow my request? I. Want. The. Money."
Caiaphas licks his upper lip.
"I have tried to explain..." he begins, and he hears his own voice wheedling like a child's and the wolf in his own throat growls at him and before he can stop himself he says, "It is forbidden. It is utterly forbidden. What you are asking is impossible."
Pilate stares at him, and his nostrils flare and his mouth works.
He brings his hand down on the table again, so hard that the ink pot jumps and spatters.
"It is not impossible if I command it! The city of Jerusalem," says Pilate, "is dying of thirst. There is fresh water in the mountains, there are men ready to begin construction, there is stone in the quarries. Look!" Pilate opens his hands magnanimously. "Look at your city." Out of the window, Jerusalem bakes and shimmers. "Give me the money from the Temple so I can build the aqueduct and bring the water from the hills."
Caiaphas wonders whether, if he angered the man enough, Pilate would pull down one of those swords from the wall and run him through. Remember, he says to himself, how vulnerable you are. Remember how swiftly the life would run out of you, like the life of a young lamb under your blade. And yet the wolf in him will not hear it.
"The money that is given to the Temple is for its use alone," he says. "It is a sacred trust, given to us by God."
He remembers the widows and the orphans who bring their tiny offerings to the Temple, because they know God will be pleased with their sacrifice, however small it is. They bring it freely. It is money they meant for the Temple. It is not his to give away.
"Fuck on your God!" shouts Pilate. "That Temple is piled up with gold and decorated with marble, while not a single aqueduct brings water to the south of the city."
"They have their wells. No one suffers from thirst in Jerusalem."
Pilate bangs his hand on the table again.
"Five hundred talents of gold! You will hardly miss it from your coffers. We could begin to quarry the stone this week!"
It is a power game, of course. Pilate could request the money from Rome, but his standing is not good enough to have any expectation of receiving it. This Caiaphas has from various spies in the orbit of the Governor of Syria, Pilate's superior. But he wants to leave Jerusalem more like Rome than he found it. No Roman can see a city without wanting to drop an aqueduct on it, for all that the well water is clean and plentiful. And if he persuades the Temple to pay for the project, he will report in one of those dry military dispatches that the people are "beginning to understand the benefits of Roman rule."
Caiaphas shrugs. It is a gesture calculated to irritate Pilate and he knows it.
"If you were to send the soldiers in," he says, "I could not prevent them. My priests are not warriors."
"Oh no," says Pilate, "I know how this will go. You will force me to send soldiers into the Temple. And we will desecrate some sacred urn or tread in the wrong way on a holy pavement, or distress the spirit of the blessed sheep or breathe improperly in the presence of the consecrated midden heap. And then there will be another riot and I will have to call in troops from Syria to quash it and that would make them say..." He blinks and stops himself. "That would be very inconvenient. These fucking people!" He wipes the sweat beading on his brow with the sleeve of his robe. "One cannot walk from one end of the square to the other without insulting an ancient tradition of some tribe or other."
Pilate pokes his finger at Caiaphas. "You will give me the money and tell them that your God has commanded it. Tell them you had a dream."
Caiaphas inclines his head as if to say "an excellent idea," or possibly, "I will try but I cannot promise," or possibly, "You are a fool and hold on to this city by a tiny thread." He has been ending conversations this way for months now. Appearing to concede, never quite consummating his promises.
Every morning and every evening, a lamb is sacrificed. But this is only the beginning. Every morning and every evening, incense is burned on the altar in the Holy of Holies. Every day, there is the seven-branched candelabrum to be filled with pure-pressed oil. On the Sabbath, a meal offering of flour and oil and wine. And at the new moon, two yearling bulls, a ram, seven lambs. To say nothing of the particular sacrifices during the three yearly festivals of pilgrimage, and at New Year in the autumn and Yom Kippur ten days after that. And the sin offerings brought to seek God's forgiveness by penitents around the year. And the peace offerings. And the thanksgiving offerings, for recovery from illness or escape from danger.
"And do you think this is easy?" Annas had said to him when he was a young man. It was when Caiaphas first began to be taken notice of in the Temple and by his fellow priests. Annas was High Priest then; he had these conversations with many young men who had been taken notice of. "Let us take the incense, for example. Do you think that when the servant from the house of Avtinas comes to bring the incense that it has come from nowhere?"
Caiaphas, attempting to impress the older man, had spouted the lines he had learned.
"There are eleven spices in the incense," he said, "frankincense and myrrh and cassia and spikenard and saffron and—"
"Listen to yourself. Stop. Understand how much is necessary for that list you spool out. Where does the saffron come from?"
Caiaphas shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "From flowers?"
"From only one flower, which grows most plentifully only in Persia. We use a sack of it every month. A good handful of saffron is the product of ten thousand flowers. A hundred handfuls in a sack. A hundred men laboring crouched over their flowers are needed to supply us with saffron alone."
Caiaphas looked out over the Temple courtyard, where he could count easily a hundred priests hurrying about their duty. He nodded slowly.
"You are not impressed, I see. You think that a hundred men laboring in the hills of Persia are not so very much for the glory of God. Then consider. They dry those tiny threads in the sun. They bundle them into sacks—and where do the sacks come from? Someone must weave them, someone must stamp them with our seal. They put the sacks into the back of a closed wagon—and who made that wagon? Who bred those mules? The wagon is driven by a strong man, with five other men guarding it. They pass through mountains and valleys. A dried-up riverbed. A pasture of waving grass and biting gnats. They fight off bandits who attempt to steal the precious treasure. At night they take turns to sleep. Perhaps in the crossing one of their usual waterholes is empty. Perhaps one of the animals dies. They must change the route regularly or the bandits will ambush them. They must check the sacks for weevil and mold—if it rains too heavily and the saffron becomes wet, their journey is in vain. At last they arrive in Jerusalem, if we are lucky. And of all these things, do you know what is the most needful?"
"The cunning of men," said Caiaphas wonderingly, "all the craft and skill given to them by God, to elude the bandits and to keep their cargo safe."
Annas shook his head.
"A thousand dangers threaten. And to make the incense, we need not only the saffron threads but also those other ten fragrant ingredients: frankincense and myrrh, spikenard and fennel resin, cinnamon and ginger, cassia and balsam, distillation of rock roses and wine from Cyprus. And we need salt from Sodom, amber from Jordan, lye from Carshina. Think of the many wagons bringing them from around the world. And consider that all these go to make just the incense, and not any of the other sacred matters of the Temple. And you are correct that cunning and skill are needed to make them and bring them to us.
"But most important of all, none of this can happen if at any point along the way a war is being waged. If an army is laying siege to a city, the saffron wagon will be requisitioned. If angry defeated soldiers are wasting enemy land, the saffron will be burned. If the men who tap the trees and pluck the stems and brew the wine and mine the salt have been taken for an army, their work will go undone. To bring us all these things, that which is most needful is peace."
Annas drew himself to his full height. He was an exceptionally tall man, over six feet. "That is the role of the Cohen Gadol. To maintain the Temple services. To maintain the peace. Nothing is more important."
Two people come to him with a disputation. Natan the Levite shrugs apologetically as he brings them in and whispers, "I've tried to sort this one out myself, but the two stubborn goats insist on seeing the High Priest. If you order them both flogged I won't blame you."
He has a mock-rueful smile on his face as he bows his head low and leaves the room, muttering, "The Cohen Gadol, if his judgment is sufficient for you and you do not require a voice from heaven."
They are traders in the outer courtyard of the Temple. They both sell the pure white doves that are used for the thanksgiving sacrifice brought by a woman after she has given birth and recovered safely from those many dangers.
It is holy work to sell the birds. There are three or four families who have done so for generations. They breed the birds in dovecotes just outside the city, catch them by hand—for no bone can be broken before they are sacrificed—keep them docile with a special mixture of seeds which each family guards closely.
And now this. A tall gaunt man of about fifty with a close-cropped beard and a loose skullcap stands before him. Next to him, a short woman in her sixties with sun-cured skin and a heavy gait. Caiaphas would ask each of them what the matter is, but neither of them will let him speak.
"I am but an old woman," she says. "I have no strength left in my bones. The place nearest the entrance is fitting for me, for I cannot carry my wares across the great courtyard."
"Pah," he says, "pah. I suppose you have not four strong sons whom I have seen carrying your wares and your stall for you! I suppose those four strong sons did not threaten my Jossya with cudgels unless she moved her stall to the far end of the courtyard."
"My sons would never threaten," the woman snaps, "unless they were provoked. Isn't it true that your daughter Jossya crept behind their stall and released the birds intended"—and here the woman sheds an impressive tear—"for the Lord's holy table, so bringing shame on the whole house of Israel?"
"If she did it is because she knew that your family have stooped so low as to catch the birds with nets! I have seen birds dragging a broken wing on your stall, sold at a low price to farmers who know no better. I have seen them try to make their sacrifice and be turned away by the priests and come in shame to buy a good bird from me or my daughter. It is you who should be ashamed."
"You spread these lies about my family so that people will pay your inflated prices! Everyone knows you have grown rich off the piety of the poor!"
"You have grown rich yourself, bringing shame on the holy house of the Lord!" he says.
"You have tried to steal from an old woman in her last years on the earth!" The woman has brought herself to the point of real half-hysterical tears now.
"You are a liar and a thief!" The man is so angry his face has turned pale, his nostrils flaring, the skin of his neck beginning to redden.
"Do you see how he speaks to me? In the chambers of your holy presence!"
Caiaphas continues to be silent. He watches. He waits. They are in a chamber of his house next to the Temple. Through the small half-shuttered window which looks on to the inner courtyard, he can see the sacrifices being performed. A meal cake and oil are utterly consumed. The Lord forgives the sin which prompted the sacrifice. The man and woman burn themselves out after a few more angry expostulations and before they come to physical blows.
He smiles his diplomatic smile, the guileless face he puts on to deal with common men and with the Prefect. He is all sympathy, all respect. He is sometimes amazed by the way his mouth carries on speaking and his face composes itself into such a usefully sympathetic arrangement while inside his mind he is thinking only of, for example, his wife leaning in to take the ripe date from the sticky fingers of Darfon, son of Yoav.
They reach an agreement after a time: the woman will have her stall near to the front all days of the week but Friday—a day when many people come to buy offerings—and they will both submit to stock checks by one of the Levite treasurers under Natan's command. Outside, the sacrifices continue.
Annas comes to see him at the end of the day, as he is relaxing in his city home. He has two homes: the official residence at the Temple, which he uses during the day for his business, and this, his own house in the city, the place he had built for himself and which would still be his if he were no longer High Priest. Here he is a private man, insofar as he can be.
His daughters have put out fresh goat's milk and bread with soft white cheese mingled with thyme leaves and good black olives from the north. They have poured the cold clear well water into an earthenware jug and flavored it with citron. The courtyard of his house is cool and still when Annas comes to visit.
Annas arrives unannounced, as he so often does, but he is welcome. He is a powerful man still, both physically and politically. He is wide in the shoulder and his arms are well muscled—when he was High Priest, it is said he could bring a fretful ox to its knees by the force of his grip. And his personality, Caiaphas thinks sometimes. Annas is a clever man with a strong will.
He became High Priest just when the old King Herod died, when his various heirs, mostly also named Herod, were squabbling and pleading with the Emperor for pieces of the kingdom. Many said that Annas bought his way into the office with bribes to the Prefect and the captains of the army, but he stayed there because he was able to broker deals between the Temple and the Prefect, between the King and the people, between heaven, it sometimes seemed, and earth. He had spies—"Not spies," he would say, "friends"—in the courts of the Governors of Syria and Egypt, and even some said as far as Rome itself. He is no longer High Priest now—an earlier governor took that position away from him when he tried to execute a man for murder, because Rome does not allow its occupied states the privilege of executing their own criminals—but he still has as much influence as ever. He gives good counsel, and Caiaphas embraces him as a welcome guest when he arrives.
"I hear the sellers of doves have come to blows," says Annas, chewing on an olive and spitting the pit into the bushes of the courtyard.
Caiaphas shrugs. "They have been ready to kill over the bird of peace for the past five years."
"I also hear that you dealt with them extremely well. Both families seem to feel they have come out best from the bargain."
Caiaphas smiles in spite of himself.
"It was no judgment of Solomon."
"Even Solomon is remembered for only one case. Your day may yet come. Besides, it is a good training ground for you. I will not live forever and someone will have to do my work when I'm gone."
Caiaphas is well aware that Annas says this frequently, to various men, including several of his sons. Caiaphas is some way down the list of successors. And yet it is true: it is hard to imagine who will stop the various factions in Judea from shattering apart and breaking themselves on the wheel of Rome after Annas is gone.
"You have many good years left," says Caiaphas.
"Mmm," says Annas. Then, staring up through the vine-laden trellis above them to the cool night sky, "Have you heard that there will be war between King Herod Antipas and the Nabateans? There's no way to prevent it. King Aretas of Nabatea is still fuming on his throne in Petra that Herod dared to divorce his daughter. He'll use these border scuffles as an excuse to invade the south."
"A war? Over a dishonored daughter?"
"Men love their daughters, Caiaphas." Annas grins, showing his teeth, and bites off a piece of bread.
Caiaphas's wife serves them boiled whole Galilee-fish wrapped in herbs and freshly cooked flatbread, with two sauces, one of yoghurt and one spicy with cumin and hot pepper. There are aubergines stewed in olive oil and doused in hyssop and dried parsley, and roasted onions seared from the fire.
She bends this way and that as she lays out the food and gives them their plates. She is beautiful and he cannot help but watch her still, the way her robe outlines her buttocks when she stoops and the sky-blue square covering her hair slips a little as she moves. She is past forty and has given him two sons and three daughters and still he desires her. And he wishes his suspicion were not true. And he hopes that it is not. But he thinks of her eyes darting to Darfon and a fire burns in his veins.
When she has finished with the food, she comes and wraps her arms around Annas's shoulders, leaning in close, and he kisses her on the cheek.
"Is he treating you well, my darling?" Annas says, laughing.
"Oh, father," she says, "he's terribly cruel and beats me every night." She winks and smiles and they all laugh, because it is so very far from anything that could ever be true.
Caiaphas would not be High Priest if it weren't for his wife. He knows it, the whole city of Jerusalem knows it. There is no shame in it, not really. This is how a man becomes powerful: by becoming precious to men who are already powerful, by impressing an older and wiser man with his skill and his cunning, and by marrying his daughter.
Annas was High Priest for ten years before the Prefect demanded he resign the office. But Annas's power has not waned. He has been succeeded as High Priest by his sons, one after another, none of them for quite long enough to secure a power base for themselves. And now it is the turn of Caiaphas, his son-in-law, who has been gently shepherded through the twists and turns of office, spoken of highly to the Prefect and the other priests and to Herod Antipas, the king in the north. And by dint of diplomacy, and through Annas's support, he has somehow clung on longer than all the others. Annas has given him special favor. Men love their daughters.
The next day, after he has finished with the morning sacrifices, there are various pieces of business to attend to. Natan the Levite arrives carrying a jar of wine from Tyre under his arm.
"From that Asher family in the north," he says, "the people who had the trouble with bandits. They've offered fifteen casks in place of their tribute."
"Is wine less likely to be stolen than grain?"
Natan shrugs, scratches his grizzled beard.
"Fewer wagons for the same value. They can protect it with a smaller number of men."
"And keep more men to work their farm, and send fewer of their sons to make the offering at the Temple?"
Natan pours the wine into Caiaphas's two earthenware cups, rough red pottery on the outside, smooth blue glaze inside the bowl. The wine smells good as it gushes into the cups.
They taste together. The wine is exceptional, scented with walnut, figs, and spring grass. Caiaphas rolls the good red richness around his mouth. It is the hills of the north and the deep peace of childhood.
He meets Natan's eyes.
"Yes, then," says Natan.
"Ask them for this in the future instead of the grain they owe."
Natan nods. Pauses.
"And then there is the other matter."
He looks at Natan, a little confused. Natan shifts uneasily in his chair.
"You'll have to remind me, my friend."
"Livan's daughter gets married next week."
"Ah," says Caiaphas. "Yes."
There is a pause. Caiaphas contemplates Livan's daughter in his mind as he last saw her. A dark-skinned girl of fourteen, sweet small breasts under her shift, her hair caught back with a garland of flowers. She kept her eyes modestly lowered when she met him. And he thought: yes, as well this one as another, if God wills it.
"How old is she now?"
"Seventeen."
"Yes, then she has waited for me long enough. Very well. Good. Do you have a new girl for me to meet?"
"I have her waiting in the outer room."
"You should have told me she was there. We could have dealt with her first."
Natan chuckles.
"It is good for her to become accustomed to waiting."
Caiaphas laughs.
"I believe you kept her outside just for your joke."
Natan shrugs.
"Whose daughter is she?" asks Caiaphas.
"Hodia."
Caiaphas nods slowly, impressed. Hodia is a wealthy man, whose generous gifts to the Temple have already secured him a certain amount of political power.
"He has three sons, Hodia, yes?"
Natan smiles. "And he is a Cohen." Hodia is a member of the priestly class. His sons would be candidates for high priestly office, perhaps even High Priest. "I'm sure he would be delighted to be so close to you."
"Well, bring the girl in."
This girl is different to the last. Hodia's daughter is round-cheeked, with skin burnished like bronze, black hair and bright black, searching eyes. She does not keep her gaze modestly cast down. Her body is already that of a woman, with broad hips and full breasts. She is sixteen.
Typically these girls remain silent unless he speaks to them, but she speaks before he has a chance to address her.
"Sir," she says, a small smile at the corners of her mouth, "is your wife in good health?"
He laughs, without intending to.
"Very good health. Should I apologize?"
"Are you that much of a prize?"
And he and Natan are both laughing.
"I see you've had the thing fully explained to you."
"Perfectly."
It is not a complex matter. The High Priest—the Cohen Gadol—must be married. It is not optional. He alone goes into the holy sanctuary on Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the year. The entire people wait for his sign that they have been forgiven by God. And to atone for the sins of the whole house of Israel, he must be a whole man: he must not be crippled, he must not be unusually ugly, he must not be deaf or blind, he must not be unmarried. To expect an unmarried man to carry that burden of sin would be as foolish as expecting it of a child, or a woman.
This raises a problem, of course. For what if the wife of the Cohen Gadol should chance to die on the eve of Yom Kippur? Then there would be no High Priest able to intercede with God on behalf of the people. So there must be another girl waiting, just in case. She may never be needed. But it is as well to have chosen her in advance. There is, of course, another Cohen waiting to take his place if he himself dies. The needs of the people go on, though men die and other men rise to take their place.
This girl is attractive, with her sauce and her talk. He thinks it would be good to lie with her, to make her gasp and teach her how to please and be pleased. The wife of a Cohen Gadol must, of course, be a virgin. It is not that his own wife is displeasing to him physically or that he longs for another woman, but one must consider the thing properly. If it happened, there would be no time for doubts, and it would seem ill for him to divorce her very quickly.
"You understand that you must be beyond suspicion? For this next year?"
She wriggles her shoulders in a way which reminds him how very young she is—as young as his wife was when he married her. Her shoulders say that she is uncomfortable with the question, but her smile is bold. Her mother or grandmother must have told her all she needs to know.
"I understand," she says, and her pink tongue licks her dark upper lip. "I shall remain precisely as I am now, and consort only with old women, and discuss only housework with them. For this next year."
And there is something about the way she speaks that makes him wonder. It is interesting. They would not have brought her to him if there were a shred of doubt about her chastity—to do so would risk the whole of the house of Israel. And yet.
Natan leads her out of the room, closing the door behind her and waiting for her steps to recede before he grins and says, "Well? Don't tell me I haven't found a good one for you."
"Yes, she'll do very well. Only..."
Natan raises an eyebrow. Waits.
"Only are you certain of her innocence? She had a way about her which—"
"No young man has ever even held her hand. Hodia has another priest waiting for her when your year is up. She knows she has to keep herself pure. Don't mistake what your cock knows for what her cunt knows."
Caiaphas laughs, in spite of himself.
"She'll do very well," he says.
"And may your wife remain in perfect health until she reaches one hundred and twenty," says Natan, grinning.
"Amen."
He tries to reason it out to himself. He is not a stupid man or an uneducated one. His father, a Cohen as well of course, for the thing passes from father to son, had owned a string of vineyards and olive presses in the east, enough to pay for the best possible education for his son. His father had an idea that the boy might be material for a Cohen Gadol, so he had him learn Latin and Greek as fluently as his own Hebrew and Aramaic, and brought a tutor from Antioch. So he's read Greek philosophy and Roman military history, as well as the texts of his own people. He knows the value of reason.
He says to himself: why would his wife do such a thing? He says to himself: it would be death to her. And yet he cannot reason it himself. One needs a friend for such conversations. He waits until an evening a little later, when he and Natan have finished their business, when the lamb of the evening has been slaughtered, when the day cools and the night blows gently across the hills of Jerusalem.
"Did you ever..." He looks at Natan. He had been intending to ask the question in one way but finds now that he cannot. Natan's wife is buxom, loving, several years older than him; the man can never have suspected her. "Did you ever know a man who had a suspicion about his wife?"
Natan's usual merriness instantly sobers.
"Kef," he says, "your wife? Do you think your wife..."
Caiaphas finds that his practiced High Priest smile, the liar's smile, comes quickly and naturally to his lips.
"By the enemies of God, no," he says. "No, no. I heard a story from one of the other priests," and he can tell that Natan is already trying to calculate which of the other priests it could be and whether he is lying and what this might mean for the smooth running of the Temple, but he must talk to someone and if Natan guesses, so be it. "I heard a story that one of them suspected his wife of adultery. Did you ever know a man who thought so?"
Natan leans back in his chair. He scratches at his beard.
"All women look at other men," he says at last, "it's natural. Means that there's still juice in them. The day a woman says she never notices another man is the day you know she doesn't want to fuck you anymore."
Caiaphas breathes out through his nose.
"Looking is one thing," he says, "I'm talking about something else."
Natan puts his cup down, leans forward, hands on his knees.
"What are you talking about?" he says. "Your wife is the most sensible woman alive." He reaches his hand forward and clasps Caiaphas's knee briefly. "Even if she did pick you for a husband."
Caiaphas finds he is laughing. It is the politician's laugh, the one he is surprised to find seems so convincing when it does not touch him at all on the inside.
"Tell me about Darfon, son of Yoav," he says quickly.
"Oh," says Natan, "is that all this is? The man's a flirt, Kef, an unconscionable, foolish flirt and you're not the first one to notice. I've been thinking for a long time I should send him north, to work at one of the record-keeping houses and get him out of our business here. Let him show off his muscles to the girls of the house of Zebulun and find himself a wife."
"But I—"
"He will be away from here within two weeks."
He watches her the next day, privately, quietly, while she dresses in a simple night-blue shift and arranges her hair with two gold pins. His mind vacillates between suspicion and finding himself ridiculous. She would not be so foolish. She would not be so cruel. The simple fact that he fears it means it must be impossible.
It is entirely forbidden for any man to lie with a wife who has been unfaithful to him. For any man, but especially for the High Priest. It is not only undesirable. It is not only that he may divorce her if he wishes. It is forbidden. If she has been unfaithful, he must know it and he must divorce her.
Every part of him will go into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. No part of him may have touched an impure vessel.
He must know. So he arranges things. He waits for a time when he knows that Natan the Levite, the man he trusts, will be busy with the tribute from the tribe of Gad. He calls another Levite, a man who does not know him.
He says, with his liar's smoothness, "My wife asked me to send one of these casks of wine home." He motions to two of the barrels from Asher in the corner of his chamber. "Will you have one of your men do it?" A pause, just long enough so that it will seem as if the idea has only just occurred to him. "Oh," he says, "why not send that man Darfon? He is strong, and my wife wanted someone to cut a low-trailing branch from the cherry tree in our garden."
Caiaphas is a wolf, cunning and perpetually hungry.
He gives them a little time. He does not follow Darfon closely in the street. He hangs back and tarries at a market stall, examining jars of oil while he counts the moments in his mind. This would be the time when Darfon arrives at Caiaphas's home unexpectedly. This would be how long it would take his wife to send the servants out on errands. This would be the moment they are alone. Now. It is now. His hands shake as he places a small jar of oil back on the stall and his feet begin to walk.
He pauses before his own front door, thinking suddenly whether he would not rather go back to the Temple. It is the memory of the Holy of Holies that urges him on, the memory that soon he will be summoned back to that tiny chamber at the heart of everything and called on to answer for the whole of the people.
The house is very quiet. The small fountain in the courtyard trickles into the pool beneath. His daughters' bedrooms have already been neatly swept by the maidservants. His own bedroom, the large one that looks out onto the courtyard, is still and silent. Some of his wife's hair is caught in the silver-backed hairbrush on her table. In the bronze mirror, his reflection walks past, creeping like a thief.
It is so quiet here, away from the bustling street, that he can hear the birdsong.
He ascends the wooden stairs at the side of the house leading to the upper floor where the servants sleep. Although it is his home, months can go past without his needing to visit these rooms. Some furniture is stored here, a few pieces he inherited from his grandfather. There are four tiny rooms with small windows and sleeping benches for the slaves, and two larger ones with better beds for the housekeeper and the cook.
He fingers the blankets on one of the beds. Remembers how, when his children were young, he would often find them up here, playing in the dust. The slaves and the servants were kind to them. There is an ointment in an earthenware pot by one bed. He smells it and wrinkles his nose. Some foul-smelling cure for rheumatism or spottiness no doubt.
In a box under one of the beds, he finds a letter in Greek—he had no idea that his cook could read Greek—it is a love letter from a man in Crete, promising to come soon and take her away, calling her his duck, his sweet fruit, his fresh pomegranate. As he reads, his emotions are mixed: irritation that some Cretan will take his cook away, anxiety that he might somehow be discovered reading this letter, even though the house is empty, and a kind of wonder at the secret chamber at the center of every human heart whose contents are unguessable from the outside.
Even the slaves have their tiny arrangements of possessions. A talisman against coughing. A bone comb. A half-completed carving of a tree on a piece of olive wood. When they are released—and a Hebrew slave must be freed after seven years of service—he supposes they will take these things with them, back into whatever life they came from.
He is so involved in the examination of these artifacts that he half forgets why he came to the house in the middle of the afternoon at all. Until he hears his wife laughing.
It is a short laugh, a breathless one. It is coming from outside. Peering through the tiny window above the housekeeper's bed, he looks without seeing for a while: only the fountain, the vines growing up the trellises, the bushes and the fruit trees already beginning to drop their harvest on the red stone tiles. And then, craning, he sees them.
They are in the gardener's enclosure, screened off behind the main garden so that it can only be seen from above. He never goes in there: it is where the gardener stores his tools in a wooden box, where the plants which are not ready to come out are grown and tended. He does not even know how to get in: he thinks he has seen the latched gate in the fence at the back of the house but is not sure.
There, in that screened-off place, his wife is sitting in Darfon's lap. She is wriggling, pretending to try to escape. Another bubble of laughter rises from her lips. Darfon plucks a ripe plum from the tree whose branches bend low over the garden and puts it to her lips. She bites it. The juice dribbles down her chin. Darfon meets her eyes, questioningly. She becomes very still. He puts his tongue to her neck and laps at the juice on her chin, her throat, lower. Her eyes are closed. She leans back into his arms.
Caiaphas turns away from the window then. His heart is sick and his body is angry and the wolf inside him stalks and prowls and says to him: go down now and strip her clothes from her body and parade her through the street like the harlot she is. And the lamb inside him says: speak to her, be merciful, warn her, for you have seen nothing yet that damns her absolutely. The little room full of the center of another person's presence says: every person must have their secret place.
And the wolf says: look again. And he says: no. And the wolf says: look again. You know what you will see. It will make your blood hot and then there will be none of this skulking in shadows. Look again, it says, and find all the courage you need.
But when he turns back to the window, his wife is smoothing off her dress and arranging her hair with the two gold pins. And Darfon is in another part of the garden, lopping down the low branch with a saw.
A man may have more than one wife, but a wife may have only one husband. And this means that if a man should chance to desire or know a woman other than his wife, he may simply take her as a new wife and all will be well. But a woman must cleave only to her husband; this is the law of God. Therefore it is right for a man to keep watch over his wife, to ensure that she is not allowed to stray. He has, after all, purchased her from her father by a deed of contract, and he must be free of all doubt concerning the purity of his possession.
There is a thing a man can do, if he has a suspicion regarding his wife. It is scrupulously fair. It is written in the Torah and so we know that it is good and just. A man who suspects that his wife has lain with another man must go to the priests—or to another priest—and declare that the breath of jealousy has entered him. And then they bring the wife and make a little offering to God: some barley flour. This is to begin, to ask God to enter into the thing they will do next.
They take holy water from the sacred well in the Temple and mix into it a tiny pinch of dust from the floor of the holiest enclosure in the Temple. And finally they write the curse against adultery, containing the holy four-letter name of God on a piece of paper. And they put the paper in the water until the ink dissolves. And this holiest of holy water, this water which contains the unspeakable name of God, this they make her drink.
And then two things may happen. If she is guilty, if she has lain with another man, then the waters will be bitter waters. They will cause her belly to swell, and her ripe thighs to wither, and in the fullness of many days she will die.
But if she is innocent she will conceive a child.
It can be observed how merciful and humane a law this is, for when the breath of jealousy enters a man he may be tempted to beat his wife, or even kill her. But in this way it can be ensured that no sin taints him, even though his wife may be mired in her sin.
Caiaphas could call his wife to be scrutinized by this ceremony. But it would not be a simple matter. If she died of it, he would have killed Annas's daughter, and Annas is a powerful man. And if she lived, he would have disgraced Annas's daughter. And Annas is a powerful man. And men love their daughters.
There is another interview with Pilate the following day. The wolf's head amber ring glints and the man foams and expostulates and makes it very clear that if he does not have his money for the aqueduct he will have to look for a new High Priest, one who is more accommodating to his needs.
Annas has another son waiting to take the office. And would not that be in some ways easier? Caiaphas is willing to give up over this. Temple money cannot be used to build a civic amenity. What next? Send the priests to work the land? Melt down the golden cups and silver trumpets as Roman coins? They could give all the money for the sacred incense to the poor, but before long there would be no Temple at all this way. Not to mention that he would not be able to remain Cohen Gadol anyway if he allowed Pilate the money. He will have to enter the Holy of Holies again this year, as every year. God will see what he has done.
Annas does not agree.
They drink wine in the evening while the house is sleeping and the wild creatures are calling on the hills of Jerusalem. Caiaphas has not spoken to his wife this day, they have not lain together. He is trying to decide what to do. This conversation must be had in any case: it is more serious than matters of the family.
Annas says, "Give him the money."
Caiaphas sloshes the wine in his cup. Annas is playing some long and difficult game. Caiaphas cannot see to the end of it. And he is afraid. Playing a game with Rome is like teasing a wolf, tickling its jowls and expecting not to lose a hand.
"Should I lie to the other priests? Have it done in the dead of night? There is that mute slave, Umman. I could send him to do it."
"No," says Annas, "do it in broad daylight. Have ten priests take the money to him through the Temple at noon. Use that... what's his name, Egozi, the one who can never keep his mouth shut, to lead them."
"But," he says, "the honor of the Temple. Once it is known, the people will revile me for a traitor."
"Not as much," says Annas, "as they'll revile Pilate."
Annas looks to the left, out through the pillars of the courtyard, towards the Temple Mount and the star-filled sky above it.
"His standing with the Governor of Syria grows daily worse and worse," says Annas. "And we need to be rid of him. He'll find a way to get his money. But if we do it this way..."
"The people will be angry," says Caiaphas.
"He will not be able to stand against them," says Annas.
He drains his cup to the dregs. From the thin line of trees marking the start of the mountains comes a single howl, then another, and another.
There is a matter of which Caiaphas never thinks. Not that he has decided not to think of it, but it simply does not cross his mind, as a thousand thousand small matters connected to the business of the Temple never occur to him again once they are concluded.
However, his memory is good. If one were to ask him, he would be able to recall how they sourced new bulls that year when the fourteen sacred bulls destined for the altar all died of a cattle plague only hours before the festival. If Annas requested the information, Caiaphas would be able to explain why, six years ago, the tribute from the tribe of Re'uven had been especially high. And if anyone inquired—but why would anyone inquire?—he would remember a madman they handed to the Prefect for Roman justice.
He saw him only three times, and each time the man seemed less impressive than the previous occasion.
The first time he saw the man, he was a genuine inconvenience. Caiaphas had been studying an ancient text on one of the papyri he had bought from an Egyptian trader. It was a Greek text, a fascinating account of the workings of the human body. His eyes became tired with the close work, and he looked up, through the window of his reading chamber, at the bustling outer courtyard, alive with the people who make the holy necessities for the Temple and those who buy them. There was a madman in the courtyard, with a gang of thugs.
The man was whirling his arms wildly, shouting without cease, and there was white spittle in his beard and his mouth was red and sore like the mouth of a man who is lost in the desert and dried up with thirst.
Caiaphas could not make out the matter of his shouts, only certain phrases reached him: "my father's house!," "a holy house!," "evildoers!"
His rants were screams, his voice cracked as he bellowed. He was a pantomime of pain, an ill man surrounded by a phalanx of serious, stone-faced men with broad shoulders and thick walking staffs.
The ranting was not unusual. The temple brought out such people, particularly now, close to a festival. Only the previous week a woman had attempted to strip naked in the courtyard, declaring that she was the daughter of Caesar and that all the men must fuck her in turn to make the new king of Rome and Jerusalem. Caiaphas had had to send for his wife's maidservants to subdue her.
There would be priests already in the courtyard to lead this man out as kindly as they could. If necessary he would send his personal servants to help them. He stood up, leaned against the window, the soft grainy plaster damp under his fingertips.
The man was overturning tables. Raging like a child. He put both his arms under the planks-on-blocks of the man selling holy oil and hurled them wildly. A hundred tiny ceramic jars shattered on the marble flags. Oil pressed from olives in the mountains to the north and brought here by mule cart over five days' perilous journeying dribbled into the cracks between the stones. The owner of the stall, a straggle-haired fellow of fifty, was struggling to reach the man, fighting against the flint-eyed followers who held him back. All around the courtyard they were holding men back while their leader went from stall to stall pulling down carefully pinned curtains and throwing over piles of clay pots and soft flour cakes, like a Roman soldier bent on destruction.
Caiaphas was shouting for his manservant even as he watched the unholy ruin the man was making of all the sacred appurtenances. The slave came swiftly, watched for only a moment before muttering, "I will tell the priests," and hurrying away.
A wave of tremendous irritation broke over Caiaphas like a fine sweat as he watched the man. It was this that he struggled against day after day—wanton demolition. As if they had built the holy Temple of the Lord out of mud and straw and every day the rains came and he had to renew its walls. So many hands were trying to pull it down, so few holding it up. It was against this that he made his daily visits and spoke to his spies and counselors, to hold the place solid against the rain. And this?
The man was overturning the tables full of coins which the poor people had brought to pay for their sacrifices. Hard enough to come by coin outside the cities. Any piece with the head of any king would be taken, that was the pride of the Temple. No one would be turned away for lack of a particular currency. And because the marketplace was here, the priests could oversee the prices to ensure that the peasants were charged fairly, that everyone, rich and poor, men and women, could offer a sacrifice. One might have to wait, but everyone would be seen. It was organized and sensible, and these are the highest and best forms of kindness.
The metal showered like hail and rang like hooves on the flagstones as the stallholders wailed and the children ran eagerly, stuffing their fists with coins. And Caiaphas thought: this? Is it possible that any sane man would prefer this to peace and quiet conversation and each man conducting his business with good humor? Only a man who had never feared for his own life or the lives of his children.
They chased him out of the courtyard in the end, and the young priests set the tables to rights. Caiaphas heard a few complaints that afternoon, and announced at nightfall that the Temple would make good the stallholders' losses out of its own coffers, for it was not right that men should go hungry because of one madman's actions. And this meant of course that several men who had lost nothing claimed to be ruined, and he set a trusted Levite treasurer to sorting the true claims from the false.
And then many days passed. There was a rising in the east and a spate of murders of soldiers and Roman citizens by bandits in the west. From the north came murmurs of a bad harvest, and from the south they heard there was another plague in Egypt. The eldest son of the house of Avtinas, the incense-makers, came to tell him that the wine they had received from Cyprus was of inferior quality—it had been delayed coming from the coast by the bandits and had spoiled in the casks. This lawlessness must cease. The young man was wealthy, his whole family one of the richest in Jerusalem; he spoke disdainfully, and the silk robe slung casually over his shoulders, its hem trailing in the dust, could have bought a dozen barrels of good wine, or a dozen men to guard the wagons. But he was right.
He discussed the matter with Annas, who had spoken to the Prefect. Rome was unhappy. It was time, again, to round up the troublemakers and rabble leaders and make an example of them. The Romans had captured a man called only Bar-Avo—a typically insolent pseudonym meaning "the son of his father"—who, with his band of men, had been torching Roman houses and disrupting their convoys for months.
It would look well if they could also produce a dissenter or two. They would find some of those twitching, raving men who proclaimed themselves the scourge of Rome, flog them in the public square, and be able to tell Pilate that they, too, were defending the honor of the Emperor. As if the Emperor were a fearful woman. The conversation was uncomfortable, as these conversations always were.
Annas placed a hand on his shoulder and said, "To keep the peace."
And Caiaphas grunted in assent.
It was a lucky thing that, among the crazed preachers and the careless plotters, a man Iehuda came to them saying that he knew where they could find Yehoshuah, who he said was the one who had tipped over the stalls in the courtyard that day.
When they brought him, Caiaphas assembled an informal court in one of the rooms of his Temple house. It was only days before Passover. He managed to gather eight men: enough to try a simple case like this. There were a few witnesses willing to speak against the man. This was normal. Any trial would bring a group of people eager to gain favor with the Temple. Everyone in Jerusalem knew about the waste of money and goods and the disruption to the sacred services on the day that this Yehoshuah had thrown over the tables.
"He said he would destroy the Temple and rebuild it in three days," said the man with lumps on his face.
"He said that the end of days is coming," said another, and none of these things seemed hard to believe to Caiaphas. He had seen the man raving. He was another of those, and whether he fomented rebellion against Rome or not, a man who spoke against the peace, who whipped people up, who destroyed property, was not likely to be let alone.
The witnesses began to shout over one another. Ugly, angry calls. Yehoshuah had spoken against the Temple. They had heard him call himself the Messiah, the rightful king—this was a very serious charge. Under Rome, there is no king but the Emperor and those whom it pleases the Emperor to set on little thrones for a time.
Caiaphas, seated at a long wooden table with four men to his left and four to his right, had the witnesses ushered back, then called one of the Levites to bring Yehoshuah forward. The man had been held at the back of the room while the testimonies were heard. Now he stood before them, seemingly calm, his face sunburnt. They sat him in a chair before the judges. Caiaphas stood up. The hubbub from the back subsided a little. He made his voice loud but low, a trick he had mastered during the endless prayers and services to give his words gravitas without exhausting his throat.
"Yehoshuah of Natzaret," he said, "we need an answer from you. You've heard what the witnesses have said. If it's not true, if they're lying, just tell us."
There was general nodding from the men around the table, an encouragement to behave reasonably. It was surprising how often even a raver, when faced with the calm interrogation of a court, found his wits long enough to deny the most serious charges, which gave them the necessary leeway. For blasphemy, the sentence is generally only a few lashes. There are ways to make an offense less severe in the eyes of the law. That is the purpose of the court—not to condemn but to make the most peaceful accommodation between the person before them and the community which surrounds them.
The sages tell us that a Sanhedrin which kills only one man every seventy years has wrought enough harm to be scorned with the name "a Bloody Court."
But this madman said nothing. A small smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. And he said nothing in his own defense and he did nothing to show that he understood the charges, and the only movement was his foot twitching under his robe, and Caiaphas thought: this man is entirely mad, but it may still be possible to save him.
He said, "You know what the most serious charge is. Do you say that you are the Messiah, the expected rightful king of Israel?"
And if he had only remained silent, they could have said: he is a madman struck dumb. They would have assigned him lashes in the marketplace, because one cannot condemn a man to death on hearsay alone if the evidence is contradictory in the least particular, and these witnesses' stories contradicted each other wildly. If he had only remained silent, the case would have fallen.
Instead, with that eerie smile and his eyes affixed on Caiaphas, Yehoshuah said, "I am the expected king. And very soon you will see me sitting at the right hand of Yahaveh. We are going to descend to earth on the glowing clouds from heaven."
He spoke the sacred name of God, the name which is spoken only by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies on the most sacred day of the year. He spoke it as if it were the name of some casual friend.
At this Annas let out a short involuntary breath. And Jonathan, one of the oldest and wisest men on the council, threw up his hands, and Micah, younger and less circumspect, muttered too loudly, "Now he speaks?" The men on the court exchanged glances. Caiaphas looked at Yehoshuah. He had gone back to that strange unsettling silence. He was rocking back and forth very slightly on his chair.
Caiaphas had the feeling that the man had been waiting for many years for this day, for this hour, when he would say this ridiculous thing to the court and force their hands.
He stood up again. He took a knife from the table, where it stood next to the bread and cheese and wine his wife had laid out for them. He pierced the bottom of his robe and pulled the knife through to the hem. Then he took both sides of the cut cloth and pulled them apart. With a shredding sound and a scatter of fibers in the air, he ripped the garment halfway to the waist. The others around the table nodded, knowing that ripping one's clothes, the sign of deepest mourning, is the only proper response to hearing the true name of God spoken in the wrong place and at the wrong time. The power of the name is strong enough to kill, though it grieves the hearers beyond measure.
He said, and he found his voice hoarse despite himself, "If this is what you say, then we have no need for witnesses."
And the verdict was made. And they tried another two men that evening and found them guilty of more minor blasphemy, and sentenced them to the usual punishment—forty lashes, the final lash withheld in case they had miscounted. And he heard that Rome had taken a couple of thieves and intended to execute them too, because Rome never served up her mercy in portions more generous than a thin dribble.
They might have found a way to save the man even yet. To take a son from his mother and a man from his friends is an evil thing. They could have left him in that locked stable by the Temple for a week or two, until their own memories had faded a little, until if they had asked each other, "What exactly did he say?" they might have contradicted one another and so proved false witnesses. There are ways to save a man from judgment. But it was the festival of Passover and the streets were thronged with people and the Romans feared that another rebellion might be rising in the city.
And so Pilate summoned Caiaphas in the morning. He stood by a table covered in scrolls of messages and vellum maps, and a soldier standing quietly to one side, with his sword hanging at his belt. Pilate always greeted him in some similar way, so that he should never forget the power the Prefect represented.
"I hear," he said, "that you have a man found guilty of blasphemy."
Who had told him? Some spy among the witnesses, no doubt. One must never lie to Rome.
"Yes," he said.
"This is a sin against Rome, you know. Against the sacred cult of Tiberius the Emperor. And it is a crime punishable by death according to your laws, is it not?"
Again Rome, whose currency is death, can never hear equivocation. Others are weak for not dealing death, weak for seeking to avoid it. Rome's daily business is death, her nightly amusement is the death match. Death is cheap and easy among them.
"Usually, yes."
"But of course you cannot enact this sentence."
Death is the gift Rome reserves for itself. The people it occupies cannot pass their own sentences of execution.
"No, we cannot," said Caiaphas.
"Give him to me," said Pilate.
This was not a request, and to refuse it would have meant death as surely as God smote the Egyptians at the Red Sea. If Rome wants something, Rome will have it.
And he surrendered, as if the waters of the sea were closing over his head.
"Yes," he said.
He had the man brought up to him first of all, to tell him that they were handing him over to Rome. Yehoshuah did not respond, though he must have known what it meant. His head wobbled a little on his neck. His eyes almost closed and then jerked open. There was a bruise on his face: very probably someone had kicked him or hit him while he was imprisoned in the stable. It is impossible to root out this kind of mindless cruelty; with so many people coming and going in the Temple, it could have been anyone. He swayed. The man was ill, it was obvious. Caiaphas felt ashamed. Before they came into the iron embrace of Rome, they would have found a way to save his life. When the soldiers escorted Yehoshuah away, Caiaphas found himself staring at a door that had closed on him for a long time.
Annas told him later that they had crucified the man along with a few others, and in some piece of public theater, had released the rebel Bar-Avo—a mistake on Pilate's part probably, but Bar-Avo was the more popular man. Perhaps Pilate knew he could recapture Bar-Avo, or thought that he could trust the man to keep the peace out of gratitude. Perhaps he was genuinely offended by this Yehoshuah's claim to be a god: Pilate has always thought that Rome would be pleased if he pressed the cult of Tiberius upon the people. In this as in so much else, he is mistaken: Annas has it on good authority that Tiberius is a little embarrassed by the whole business of worship, and refuses to allow many temples to be built to him.
Caiaphas, thinking guiltily of the man's cracked lips and wild rolling eyes—and fearing, after Annas had set him thinking on it, that his tomb might become a meeting place for rebels—sent two slaves to bury the body honestly in an unmarked Jewish grave. But by the time they arrived, the corpse had already been stolen, they said, probably by his friends or family, for who else would have taken the trouble? A pity. The whole thing had been a foolish waste of life.
And if anyone were to suggest to Caiaphas that this little episode, this regrettable but unavoidable matter, were the Holy of Holies of his life, the tiny chamber at the center of his heart which is somehow larger than the whole edifice which surrounds it, he would frown, and half smile, and attempt to be polite, and think afterwards that he had not understood the joke. If this is a secret chamber, it is entirely empty.
It does not come from nowhere. A city does not catch fire in an instant. It has been months and years. It has been the taxes and the tribute. It has been the way the Romans look at the Jews, the little taunts, the kicked-over fruit stalls and shoulder bumps as they pass. It has been the sons and daughters who look at Rome and say to their family and to themselves, "Why can't we live like that?" And the girls paint their faces and show too much of their thighs. And the boys shave off their bristles and go to the gymnasium to exercise naked. It has been the friends of these boys and girls, seeing them become strangers and collaborators.
It was Pilate bringing the legions with their idolatrous banners into the city when his predecessor knew well enough not to do that. It was Pilate's way of administering justice: swift, merciless, unpredictable. It was the fear that grew in the city so that no mother could see her son leave in the evening without fearing where he was going and whether he would return.
These things rise and rise and no one stops them. And the city is full of angry men.
And the city bakes in the sun. And the city is dried up by the sun. And the city is as dry as a tinderbox.
Pilate sends word again that he will have the Temple money. Caiaphas has ten priests go down into the storerooms to bring up the gold. He picks them at random, but this is all it needs. They walk through the burning-hot marble plaza at noon with their boxes of gold, saying, "Make way, make way, these chests are bound for Prefect Pilate."
And the curled cedar shavings are smoking in the sun. And the flint is struck. And the spark flies off.
They wait until dark. Through the roasting day, people go about their business with stiff bodies and dark waiting eyes. By the fifth hour of the afternoon the shops close up their shutters and the mothers bring their children in, and somewhere the young men are waiting but no one can see them, not yet.
In the evening, the second daily sacrifice. Every morning and every evening, a new lamb. To remind us that we must die. Caiaphas can see it in the men who come to the offering.
One of them mutters as they leave, "Stay home tonight, Cohen."
The others look and nod, to see that he has understood.
They wait until dark, and past dark. Into the night, they wait, standing on street corners, their cloaks pulled up around their faces. And the soldiers know something is wrong, but the garrison at Jerusalem is small and they are just standing, and they cannot arrest people for standing, and besides where would they put so many men?
One of them begins to shout. It is the old call.
"David!" he shouts. "For David, King of the Jews!"
They take it up and throw it between them. "For David!" "For David!"
Like a wolf pack taking up a howl.
Their pockets are full of stones. One of them throws a stone at the shield of the small tangle of Roman men standing at the gates of their storehouse. It bounces off the shield with a dull thwack of stone on wood and tumbles clattering to the ground.
And then the sky begins to rain stones.
And the tiny smoldering spark on the cedar shaving bursts all at once into huge and beautiful and all-engulfing flames.
The riot goes on through the night. They set the grain store on fire, the one the Romans keep as supplies for their garrison. A thousand days' worth of wheat for a hundred men burns with the sweet smell of roasting and then the black scent of wasted wood and the death of summers past. The flames leap to the stable and the horses begin to scream in terror, kicking at the doors of their stalls, but the doors are built to withstand precisely this. Someone gets one of the stable doors open and the animals stampede through the streets, rolling their eyes and rearing and foaming, but not all of them are saved and their screams grow louder and soon there is the smell of blackened flesh, and death is always the same, whatever set the events in motion that led to it. Death and destruction are always just the same.
There is a glory in it, for the young men whose blood is up and whose limbs ache for battle and for the sweet exhaustion of the hunt. Most of them are young indeed, twelve or thirteen, or fourteen or fifteen, and they yearn for a fight. There is a delight in it, because these Romans have taken their land and laid their people low and desecrated their holy places and it is good to see them suffer.
But in the morning the streets are full of broken pots and the smell of burning in the air and the market traders are afraid to set up their little stalls and the people look at each other with downcast eyes. And Caiaphas thinks: this?
They begin to gather in the afternoon, at the Prefect's palace. They are spent now, tired now, but there are so many of them and they keep coming. All the people of Jerusalem are here, shouting out that the Temple money is holy, that the Prefect must not use it for this watercourse, that he must abandon his plans. It is not that they object to having an aqueduct, but this way of trampling down the things that are most sacred to them is abhorrent. He has not tried to understand them. They must make him understand.
The crowd grows a little ugly, in their chanting and their jeers.
"Pila-ate. Your mother was an ass and your father was a donkey."
"No one wants you in Syria, and they hate you back in Rome, just leave us alone and crawl back home."
The crowd is thick, full of men and women who have brought bread and water and intend to spend the day protesting. Men seem to have come from outside the city, for many of those standing quietly in the crowd, faces shaded from the sun by the hoods of their light robes, are newcomers. There are no soldiers.
A wise man, perhaps, would have let them shout themselves out, encircled them with quiet armed men and, at dusk, had them escorted from the plaza. But Pilate has too much pride for peace, that is his disaster. He leaves it until the late afternoon to address the crowd, when they are hot and thirsty after many hours, at their most irritable. He shouts down from the balcony words that are, perhaps, meant to recall Cicero, addressing an angry mob with enough vivid clarity to calm and soothe them.
But of course Pilate is no Cicero; his words are not those of the great orator, and his delivery is weedy and thin. And the language is a problem: he begins to speak in Greek and is immediately shouted down. He has Aramaic enough to try it again, but this is perhaps a mistake.
"People of Jerusalem!" he shouts, and his accent is wrong, and he puts the stress on the second syllable—ru—and not at the end, where it belongs. "I have heard your voices!" And this is wrong too, because it sounds like a mockery of God's words telling the Children of Israel in Egypt that he has heard their cries. But nothing that Pilate says in this tongue can work. His accent proves he is not one of them and can never understand.
"Let me be clear. I seek only"—he hesitates, searching for words—"to make your lives better, to bring you comfort and relief."
"Fuck off home, then!" shouts one wag in the crowd, and a laugh ripples through the square.
Pilate flushes, the pink coursing up his face across his bald skull. His hand grips the marble balustrade in front of him. If the crowd were not buoyed up by their sense of invincible oneness, they would understand that they should be afraid.
"People of Jerusalem, Rome bears great love for you!"
"Shame, 'cos we fucking hate her!"
Another ripple of laughter. Can any man bear to be laughed at? Pilate's knuckles are white against the marble. If it were possible, his fingers would have crushed it to powder.
"It is time for you to disperse. Rome simply wants"—he coughs, as if he is being strangled—"Rome simply wants to improve the streets of your beautiful city."
"The streets belong to us!" someone shouts, and the crowd take it up as a chant. "The streets belong to us! The streets belong to us!"
And Pilate's face has gone from red to white, and his nostrils flare and his eyes widen and his whole posture stiffens.
"You are common criminals," he says, though he does not speak loudly enough for his words to reach across the crowd, "and you deserve all that is coming to you. If you are old enough to riot, you are old enough to face the consequences." And Pontius Pilate, who has never suffered, who has never lived under occupation, who has never been trapped by soldiers or known what it is to see those things in which you believe trampled by an overwhelming force, raises his right arm high and brings it down on the balustrade three times.
The signal is understood.
All over the square, quiet men mingling with the crowd throw back the hoods of their simple traveling cloaks and uncover their faces. And pull out their daggers.
The crowd is unarmed. It is angry and it has hurled insults, but it is not violent. They do not even have stones to throw.
The first people die before anyone has even understood what is happening. While Pilate watches grim-faced from the balustrade, five hundred plainclothes soldiers among the crowd of ten thousand unsheathe their knives. Pull the nearest man to them by the shoulder. Lean in close. Cut through his neck so that he dies without a sound. All around the square men fall to their knees gasping, clutching at mortal wounds. Or crumple to the floor. Or try to cry out and are silenced by a swift swipe to the throat.
And then there begins to be screaming. There are men in this crowd who burned the grain store, who killed the horses, who threw the stones, this is true. But the soldiers do not differentiate between the innocent and the guilty. There are women who fall to the ground with bleeding wounds to the stomach. A young man who had stood quietly at the front of the crowd, calling for peace and dignity, is set upon by two of the soldiers, who plunge their daggers into his chest in unison and withdraw them bloody as the young man's heart struggles and ceases.
The people try to run, but those quiet men with their blades... well, they are human too and have suffered daily abuse from the people whose land they occupy and they are angry. Many of them are not even Roman: they are auxiliary troops brought in from the local population in Caesarea, or Samaritans brought in from north of Jerusalem. They bear Rome no more special loyalty than do the Jews. If Pilate thought he could control this once it began he was wrong. He does not have the common touch and has never sought to understand the people he governs, either the Jews or his own soldiers. He makes some other signal, a hand waving in the air, but no one is looking.
The soldiers block the exits to the square and begin to advance, forming a net around the unarmed protesters. Some people escape through the buildings and up onto the roofs. Some manage to barge through the guards at the exits, using the bodies of the dead as shields. Some soldiers have died now—only a handful compared to the three hundred, four hundred Jews dead or bleeding out under the Prefect's balcony, but enough that some of the Jews have managed to arm themselves with daggers from the corpses. They make a desperate run at the soldiers at the southern end of the square, where the line is weakest. At first the charge seems to succeed. Five soldiers fall, blood fountaining off them like water pouring from a broken aqueduct.
The people run screaming still in all directions, but when they see the gap in the line they begin to stream through it, making for home or for safety, carrying their injured and their children away from the place of carnage. But the line closes up again and it takes two more attempts and another fifty people dead on the blood-slick stinking floor before the soldiers give in and let them run weeping from the place.
When it is done, there are four hundred or so soldiers in the long brown robes that made them indistinguishable from the Jews panting in the sun. And six hundred bodies on the floor around them, so that the place is heaped with corpses. And the sun beats down, drying out the blood to a sticky film. And the flies settle on the bodies. And the soldiers go to wash and congratulate each other, because what else can they do now? The deed has been done and so it must have been mighty. And Pilate stands alone on his balcony and looks at the field of conquest and perhaps he wonders if this is how great Caesar feels after a battle and why it does not feel more glorious. He had read _The Gallic Wars_ at school and had expected something different.
In the evening the women come weeping to take back their dead, and wash the bodies and bury them according to their custom. Great Pilate sits alone before his little statue of the God-Emperor Tiberius and utters a prayer of thanksgiving, for he is a pious man in this way and believes what he has been taught, that the mightiest man in Rome becomes its god. And in the courtyard outside Caiaphas's house, Annas and Caiaphas sit together in silence, drinking wine and listening to the wailing ululations from every part of the city.
"No one said he could possibly plan this," says Annas after a long time.
"Did you expect he would lie down like a yearling lamb? He is a wolf, son of wolves."
"I thought..." and Annas is broken. He has rarely miscalculated. "I thought there would be a riot. And he would burn down some houses and crucify some of the rebels, but the riot would show that he had not the love of the city and Rome would take him back."
There is a woman screaming and screaming in the night, she will not cease. The screams never waver from complete shock, as if she were discovering an insupportable tragedy over and over again.
"And what now? Will Rome summon him back for this?"
Annas shakes his head and his eyes are great and wide and staring. Caiaphas sees the tears begin, but says nothing.
"I do not know," says Annas. "I have sent swift messengers to Syria and to Egypt and surely they cannot leave him here now, but I do not know. No one in his own house told him not to do this. Perhaps he even took advice from Rome. I don't know what it will take to get rid of him. I do not know..." He pauses. "I do not know whether God meant me to do what I have done."
And the screams go up again, through the night that smells of blood.
Days pass and no word comes from Rome or from the Syrian Governor, and Pilate sits in the Prefect's seat yet. The people bury their dead and Pilate decides that, all said and done, perhaps he will not have that aqueduct after all. Most of the money is returned to the Temple: most, but not all. And even though this is done with the greatest ceremony and loud announcements, no one seems to take particular notice of it.
Six of the priests died in the riots and Caiaphas speaks with their families. He doesn't have to do it. Natan the Levite tells him that he can arrange it himself, but still Caiaphas has those conversations. When they realize, after two days, that Elikan, a young priest of eighteen, is the one whose hacked-up body some of the Temple men dragged from the plaza because it was dressed in priestly robes, Caiaphas himself walks down the hill to visit Elikan's older brother and tell him.
It is a sorry job. When they see him coming across the orchard, the brother's wife starts to wail in a thin, reedy tone. Nonetheless, the brother, a stern man in his forties, does not believe it until Caiaphas has said the words.
The brother holds his breath, when Caiaphas says, "I have come with bad news for you," and pauses, and says, "You will have heard that there was fighting in the square in front of the Prefect's house. Some priests were caught up in it, we do not know how," and the brother is still holding his breath when Caiaphas says, "Elikan is dead. We knew him by the scar on his leg from the dog bite when he was a boy."
And the brother lets his breath out in a single violent puff, as if someone has punched him, and says, "I told him not to go near that dog, but he swore he could tame it."
Caiaphas stays with them from the ninth hour of the morning until the third hour of the afternoon, and when he goes they beg him to take a little food with him for the walk and a skin of water, but he refuses.
"It was not your fault," says the brother's wife, who seems, when she has finished weeping, quite reasonable and kind. "No one could keep Elikan from excitement, not even the discipline of the priests."
But as he walks back up the hill towards the gleaming white marble Temple he thinks: it was my fault, who else's fault could it be?
He does not lie with his wife at all for several weeks. And this, suddenly, is not abnormal or to be remarked on. Some people are drawn together at such times, driven to press their bodies against one another to remind themselves that their blood still courses and their loins still flame. But many find they do not have enough of themselves to spare, for a while. That the piling up of corpses has turned them inward, and no one can say that one response is natural and right and the other is not.
But nonetheless, the other matter does not leave his mind. They cannot send Darfon away for a time now, there is too much turmoil in the streets and in the land of Israel. He has Natan the Levite give the man constant duties, forbid him ever to leave the Temple enclosure.
And one afternoon Hodia's daughter comes to see him. She who, if some terrible illness or accident were to kill his wife, would become his wife. She who is therefore, in some sense, already his.
She looks shaken, as all the people in Jerusalem look shaken now. He finds these days that when he passes a man in the marketplace he has only to hear a snippet of conversation—"Liata has not seen her son since...," "They say he brought them in from Egypt so that...," "I heard that Bar-Avo's men plan to..."—to know exactly what subject they are talking about. There is only one topic on the lips of Jerusalem. Only one thought, refracted through thousands of minds and hearts. There is a look on the faces of the people, a look of quiet uncomprehending shock, like the face of a man who has lost his father. Such a look is on the face of Hodia's daughter.
She says, and her voice is very calm and measured and low, "Tell me how this happened."
He shrugs and he says, "All Jerusalem knows as much as I know."
She shakes her head, her gentle curls stirring, the scent of her perfumes rising.
"There are a hundred different rumors. I've heard that the priests let Pilate take the money because he bribed them with the Temple gold. And I've heard that Rome sanctioned it. And I've heard that it wasn't really about the money at all but revenge for an assassination plot. Which of those things are true?"
It is unusual for a woman to ask a question like this. Of a man who is not her husband, of someone she scarcely knows. But they stand in an unusual relationship to one another. He supposes she has as much right to know what kind of husband he might be as he has to ask himself and others what kind of wife she would make. And times like this change things. People meet each other's eyes differently in the streets. Strangers swap remarks or theories about the terrible events. Something has broken down in Jerusalem. And she is right in thinking that he might know more than the gossips on the street.
"No," he says, "it was nothing so complex. Pilate demanded his money and we gave it to him. And word got out"—he leaves a hole here, a lacuna unfilled, hoping she will not notice it—"and we thought it would pass with a little disturbance." She is looking at him with such shining eyes of trust. "But Pilate is not a good man," he says.
"He is a Roman."
"There are better Romans and worse," he says, "don't listen to anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. There have been prefects we've been able to come to an arrangement with, who've tried to learn how things are here, to bend with us as we bend to them. Pilate is not like that."
She nods. "He put Caesar's head on the coins. My brothers said that was an offense against God."
He runs a hand across his hair. She moves fractionally closer to him. He notices it. They are sitting in chairs next to each other. The door is slightly open, though. She moves her chair closer to his.
"People are too swift to find offense against God," he says, "and too slow to recognize the truth of our situation. Look."
He stands up and walks to the window. She follows and stands close to him. A little closer than he had expected.
He points out of the window, past the Temple courtyards. She leans in close to see where his finger is pointing. It is the red-roofed Roman building facing towards the Temple, its eyes always open, its lookout always manned.
"The garrison," she says. "I know. I see it every day."
"But do you know what it means?" he says.
"It means that soldiers walk among us. That strangers tread our sacred streets."
"It means," he says, and his hand is touching her arm, because he suddenly wants to make her really understand what he is saying, "it means that none of us is free. Each of us is shackled, I as much as you. If we destroyed the garrison they would send a legion, and if we destroyed them they would send four, and if we fight it can only end with the sacking of Jerusalem. Rome couldn't ever lose that fight, you know, never." He finds his wheedling politician's smile creeping across his mouth and he stops it, pursing his lips, making his face stop lying for him. "We are trapped. All of us. No matter how high or how low, we must make accommodation with what they demand of us. I am as trapped as you."
Her fingers find the back of his hand. She is very warm, and he realizes how cold he is.
"Is there nothing but duty?" she says. "Nothing at all but that?"
He glances behind him. The door of the room is closed now. When did that happen? He does not take his hand away.
He shakes his head. "Not for me. Not if we are to keep Rome from our door."
"Nothing at all?" she asks again, and her voice is very low, and her face very sad and serious as she looks up at him from behind her lashes.
Is it possible she is a virgin? With the way she looks at him and the way she is dressed? It is possible, he knows it is. Some girls bloom like this at even twelve or thirteen: knowing, without understanding what it is they know. Watching for an effect.
Making himself examine it, he realizes she is dressed so modestly, it is impossible to fault her. A pair of loose white trousers, showing nothing of her legs. Apart from that slice of bare foot slipped into her leather shoes, visible when the trousers move just so. The brown, bare, warm skin. The tunic is loose also, seemly, white with a pale blue woven belt at the waist.
And yet when she stands, the daughter of Hodia, her black hair around her shoulders and her dark skin next to her white clothes, he can detect, somehow, the shape of her breasts under this modest garment. When she stretches her shoulders, pulling her arms back, he can see the nipples outlined for a moment against the fabric, as hard as dried beans and ringed by the raised zone of bumps he could read with his fingertips like words carved into stone.
And then he cannot help himself any longer. He pulls her towards him by her arm and she utters a little squeak but does not struggle, acquiesces softly and warmly, and he places his hand between her legs, cupping her where she is so hot, she is a furnace and he had forgotten what young girls are like, giving off so much heat.
She begins to move against his hand. This is overwhelming.
He pulls at her tunic, releasing a breast, and the excitement of feeling that warm softness and seeing the dark bruise-colored nipple makes him hold his breath before he descends on her with his mouth.
She is soft and she is warm and she is wet and she is hard. She smells of cloves and rain.
If he fucked her and did not marry her, she would be forbidden to any other priest of the Temple. This would be a terrible disgrace. She is the daughter of a wealthy man of the priestly class. She is expected to marry a priest. And he cannot marry her while he and his wife are yet married, for the Cohen Gadol, the High Priest above all, may truly have only one wife.
He stops short of entering her, and is astonished at himself, at his own maturity and composure, at the way that he almost, almost, straining towards her, almost does so but then remembers and pulls back. He finds that what he wanted after all was to consume that body, not to be consumed by it. That his desire had been to feel out every part of her, to see the gentle undulations of her soft belly and the way her breasts fall back when she lies down, and to hear her pant and cry out, and it would not have been right to go further, he knew that before he began. They may still have a wedding night. It is not entirely impossible.
He lies with her in the stillness of the hot afternoon on the floor of his chamber.
He says, "You were really never with any man before?"
She shakes her head gently, the sweat glistening on her cheek.
"Never a man," she says.
Hmm, he thinks. Then: oh.
"Oh," he says. It is the secret dream of the priests when they see the women's enclosure and the curtained-off places where the women go. He allows this thought to grow in his mind, relishing the way it almost overwhelms his control. Almost, but not quite. If he wanted, if he were willing to relinquish certain other things, he could have this woman, she could be his wife. It is not impossible for a High Priest to divorce, just, in his case, unwise.
A thought occurs to him.
"Tell me," he says, "I do not know your name."
Her smile is mocking.
"You have never thought to ask one of your many servants and advisers?"
He shakes his head.
"What would you have called me on our wedding night? 'Hodia's daughter'?"
He reaches a hand to her soft breast again.
"Beloved," he says, "I would have called you beloved, as in the Song of Solomon. And kissed you with kisses of the mouth, for you are sweeter than wine."
She does not seem displeased by this, but there is a thinking mind behind those dark eyes.
"Did you ever love a woman without noticing whose daughter she was?"
He looks at her, while his hand kneads at her breast and the desire rises in him again, pleasingly.
"No," he says. "Did you ever love a man without noticing his power?"
"Never a man," she says. And try as he might, he never gets more of the story than that from her.
She leaves before it is time for the evening service. Though he is sad to see her put away her dark and comely body, he knows that it must be so.
At the door, she pauses and says, "Batsheni."
He frowns.
"My name," she says.
"Ah." It is not a respectful name for a woman like this. "I think I would rather call you 'beloved.'"
"Nonetheless," she says, "Batsheni is my name. 'Second daughter.' In case my father ever forgot which order we came in, I suppose. The boys are called 'God will make me strong,' 'God will enrich me,' 'God approves my right hand' and so on."
She closes the door softly as she leaves and the scent of her oils still hangs sweet in the room.
And that evening, when he visits the sanctuary, the chamber next to the Holy of Holies, for solitary prayer, he bends down and picks up a pinch of dust from the floor. He folds it into a scrap of linen and tucks it into his waistband. He keeps it safe.
Every morning and every evening, a yearling lamb makes sweet savors for the Lord—the perpetual daily sacrifice. And after that, between the many sacrifices brought by the people for sins and to make peace, to give thanks to the Lord for saving their life, in between all that at some point, every day, Caiaphas makes the offering on behalf of Rome. Every day, he sacrifices a pure white-fleeced lamb for the glory of the Emperor far beyond the Great Sea.
It is a compromise. For Rome has found it cannot operate in Judea in the same way that it franchises out its business to all its many other conquered states. There is an accepted routine which has worked well in these many other nations.
"Congratulations," says Rome, after its armies have torn down the defending walls and set alight the pointed fences and killed the fathers and husbands and sons and brothers who had gone out that morning painted with war paint and screaming battle cries, "hearty congratulations to you, for you are now part of the Roman Empire. We will defend you against barbarians and bring you roads and aqueducts and various other civic amenities. In exchange you will give us tribute and we will take some of your people as slaves and exhibit your king and your precious objects in a triumph in Rome."
"Yes," say the conquered people, barely able to draw their eyes away from the smoldering heaps of men and animals and timber and stone, "that seems... yes."
"Very good. And one other thing," says Rome, "tell me, what is your local god here?"
"Why," mumble the people, "we worship the Great Bull of the Mountain," or it might be the Heron King, or Almighty Ba'al along with the Sea God Yam, or Mother Isis and her son, who dies and is born again each year.
"How charming," says Rome, "we worship our current Emperor, Tiberius, and various members of his family, both those living and those forever alive, for they have conquered death. Here are their statues. Place them in your Temple and worship them as you do your Great Bull. That will be all."
"Yes," say the conquered people, as the stench of burning enters their nostrils and their eyes begin to water.
This approach, so helpful in tying conquered peoples into Rome in all other places, was surprisingly ineffective in Judea. It was because of the particular laws of the people: not to make an image of their one God, not to accept that His powers could be divided into separate entities, not to create any statue even of their most revered prophets or to allow any such emblem to be placed within their Temple. No man, say the Jews, can become a god and that is an end of it.
They attempted it, early on. Just a little statue of, let us say, the Blessed Augustus. Just one, here in an outer courtyard. The battles were so long and so bloody that even the Romans became sickened by the slaughter necessary to keep that little figure in its place. These people would rather die, each one of them, even the children, than give up the sanctity of their holy places. It is an unusual and puzzling level of dedication to a god who cannot be seen or touched or felt.
But Rome is nothing if not flexible. Within limits. Annas, who was High Priest at the time, suggested a way around so many difficulties.
"We cannot worship your God-Emperor," he explained sadly to the Prefect, "the people will not tolerate it. But we can dedicate some of our worship to him."
And Rome sighed and said, "Very well."
So, instead of the forbidden statue in a courtyard, there is this. Caiaphas slaughters a lamb every day, just one sacrifice among many, but this one dedicated to the health and well-being of the Emperor Tiberius, whose reach stretches even to this distant province.
And there are those who call him a traitor for this. In general, the young priests are so eager to perform Temple services that they race to compete for them, or draw lotteries to see who will get the honor. But not for this sacrifice. They go to it grudgingly, having to be summoned repeatedly. Even the lambs do not behave, bucking and bleating and kicking out.
But what can one do? One lamb among so many, to keep Rome happy. But, say the mutterers, nothing can keep her happy. But we must try to keep her happy. This is my task, he says to himself as he brings the knife towards the lamb, this is my duty, this is how we keep the Temple standing and the services being offered. This, this, only this.
In the private predawn light when the household is sleeping, Caiaphas takes a horn of ink and a quill and a strip of vellum cut from the end of a letter he had written to save it for another occasion. He dips the sharpened feather into the rich black ink. Holds it so that the bead of excess liquid drips back into the horn. Tamps it against the silver-rimmed edge so that his first stroke on the vellum will be clean and clear.
He holds the parchment still with his left hand and begins to write with his right. It is the words of the curse against adultery. "If you are defiled by a man who is not your husband, the Lord shall make you a curse and a watchword among your people. And the bitter waters of the curse shall go into your bowel and make your belly swell and your thighs wither."
He takes particular care over one of the words. The short horizontal line of the _yud_ with its tiny tail at the right, like a tadpole. Then the house-like structure of the letter _hei:_ a solid horizontal line held up by a long vertical coming down on the right, and a small vertical line inside, as if it were sheltering from the rain. Then a _vav,_ proud and tall, like a _yud_ grown to manhood. Then the final _hei._ The pen scratches on the parchment. The black ink runs minutely into imperfections in the vellum. It is done. There is the name of God.
He waits and watches for the ink to dry. It seems wrong to leave the paper. He has turned it into one of the holiest things on earth. So he just waits, as the ink soaks in and changes color slightly. He blows on it a little. It does not take very long. The sun is just peeping over the horizon when it is done. The ink is dry. He holds the vellum in his hand. This thing is so holy now that, if it were to become worn or tattered, it must be buried in a grave, like the body of one whose soul is departed.
He places the ink horn and the quill back on their appointed shelf. He goes to the well in the courtyard of his house. He fills a small slender-necked jug with water. He sits beneath the vines and fruit trees as the birds begin to call out with joy for the start of a new day.
He looks at the parchment for a long time, taking in the letters. The curse which cannot harm unless harm has already been done. The name of God. An impossible tense of the verb "to be," which suggests somehow at the same time something which is and was, something which has been and will be. It is entirely forbidden to destroy this name once it is written. Except for one sacred purpose.
Without thinking too hard, at last, he plunges the paper into the water. Waves it to and fro. Watches as the letters dissolve until there is nothing on the paper at all. The name of God is now in the water. The curse is in the water. They are bitter waters. He takes from his belt the folded-over piece of linen he keeps with him always. He retrieves from it the pinch of dust he took from the outer sanctuary. Drops it into the water. Shakes the jug to dissolve it.
He brings an empty wineskin from the kitchen—the servants are just beginning to rise, he can hear them moving slowly upstairs. He pours the holy water into the skin. Holds it close to his beating heart, as if he can feel the name of God inside it. It is done.
A week goes past with no disturbance. Then two, then three. Shops and market stalls begin to reopen. The barber in the road next to Caiaphas's city house sings one morning in the late summer as he used to do. The maker of pots produces a new design of interlocking wheat sheaves, very pretty. No one fulminates in the market square or passes seditious notes from one hand to another. It is like the silence after a thunderclap.
It has been a little while since Annas came to visit. He comes now cheerfully, as if that moment of self-doubt is entirely expunged from his mind. He bears scrolls of parchment with some good news. The harvest in the north is successful. And Pilate has received a sharp note from Syria about the massacre in the square.
"They have warned him that if this continues he will be recalled," says Annas, as his daughter pours for them the wine of the evening.
And the daughter, Caiaphas's wife, looks up suddenly and says, "If this continues? So you are saying we will have to have another massacre before he can be sent home?"
If she were another man's daughter, or merely Caiaphas's wife, Annas would have raged at her. Caiaphas has seen his rages: terrifying and cold when they arrive, and sudden. Caiaphas prepares himself for the onslaught, feels the muscles of his shoulders tensing and his thighs bunching and his heart beginning to race.
But there is no rage. She has taken the fire out of him with a few words. As a man's daughter can, sometimes, if she knows him well.
Annas stares off into the distance. His face crumples. He looks older suddenly than he did. He is becoming elderly, he is nearing sixty.
"Yes," he says, his voice deep and rumbling. "Yes, I think we will have to have another massacre before they recall him. I think that is what will happen." He looks at her. "Is that what you wanted to hear?"
She raises her eyebrows. "I wanted to know that you knew it."
She brings another wooden chair from the covered part of the garden and sits with them. She sits closer to Caiaphas than to her father. She covers Caiaphas's hand with hers and squeezes it. There is a reason that he married her. Not just because of who her father is, but also because of who she is for being his daughter. He did see her, when he agreed to marry her. He could not see through her skin, but he did see something.
"You've put Caiaphas in a hideous position," she says, "I suppose you know that."
"Is it my fault?" starts Annas, and then, "No, you are right. In the southern kingdom they've already sent word that they want you removed, Caiaphas. They have their own man for the job." He shrugs and chuckles. "He wouldn't be any improvement, let me tell you."
"Removing you solves nothing," she says to Caiaphas, "I think Pilate will trust you a little more after all this. Because it ended so badly, because he lost control of his own men. He thinks you're in it together now. Despised by your own side. Neither of you wanting to admit how it happened."
Annas nods slowly. "He thinks you miscalculated. Good."
Caipahas wants to point out the obvious thing, but cannot. For fear.
His wife says it instead. "He doesn't know it was you, father, who miscalculated."
Annas shrugs his shoulders. "Let him think he has a friend. You can play that part, can't you, Caiaphas?"
Caiaphas, whose special gift is to lie so well he does not even notice himself doing it, says, "Everyone thinks I am their friend."
The next day, he takes his wife on a long walk in the hills.
"Come," he says, "while the countryside is safe and the bandits are quiet. Let us walk in the quiet of the hills and today another priest will perform the daily sacrifices."
She looks at him oddly. For he is speaking oddly. And it is an odd request. But they used to do so when they were newly married. He brings wine with them, and a little dry bread and hard cheese. And skins of water, including one which he is very particular to keep separate from the rest.
The hills are stepped and dotted with cypress and twisted olive trees. The earth is red and yellow, and the path is dry. Lizards sit basking on rocks, blinking as they approach, too lazy to move. Their feet become dirty from the dust, but it is good to walk and walk, as if their bodies could outpace their minds. They talk of the children and the family.
He finds a shady place for them to sit. His wife is smiling now, puzzled, as if she did not know him. He does not know himself.
He passes her some of the bread and the cheese. They eat. They drink the wine. They are softened by the sun.
He says, and he had not known he would begin like this, "I have seen you with Darfon the Levite."
Her whole body stiffens. Like the turning of the crowd when Pilate raised his hand and gave his signal and the soldiers showed themselves. He has revealed the traitor in her midst.
"I do not know who that is," she says slowly and at last.
"I could take you to the Temple," he says, "and bare your breasts in front of the high altar and accuse you of adultery. I could put that shame on you."
She says, "You would not dare to do it."
He shrugs. "I have never known you at all, I think," he says. "You were only ever Annas's daughter to me, and perhaps I was only ever a man suitable to be High Priest to you."
She looks at him, her eyes dark and angry.
"If I were a man," she says, "I would be High Priest and make a better job of it than my brothers."
He gives a little nod to show that he agrees. This is not the matter at hand, though.
"I could divorce you," he says, "but it would bring shame to the children and we want Ayelet to be married next year."
"I did not lie with him," she says.
And he shows her the wineskin of bitter waters. And tells her what it is. She starts to laugh.
"At your foresight," she says when he asks. "At the plans you have made when Jerusalem was burning around you and men were slain in the streets."
"It is the same thing," he says. "It is all part of the same thing. All the different lies, and the plans, and the men we give them."
"Yes, I know," she says, shaking her head. "Do you think I have not heard all this before from my father? I know how it is. To keep the Temple standing, we do this and this and this, and—" She breaks off. Stretches her arms behind her so that he is reminded for a moment of Hodia's daughter.
She snatches the wineskin from his hands. Looks into his eyes.
She says, "My father told me about applying this curse to women suspected of adultery. He said that often they never had to drink the water at all. That women who were guilty would start to weep and shake when they saw the bitter waters and confess. And those who were innocent would drink it down without fear."
She says, "I swear I am no adulteress and may all the curses of heaven fall on me if I am."
She meets his gaze as she drinks and drinks, gulping it down, some water spilling over her chin, drinking it all until the wineskin is empty and she takes it from her mouth and her mouth is full of water. She does not look away from him as she takes the last gulp. She wipes her mouth and chin with her forearm. She throws the wineskin at his feet.
They walk back to Jerusalem together, not talking. She does not help him when he stumbles. He does not give her an arm over the high stone wall of a farm. The silence between them is as thick as woolen fleece. But still they walk together. For there is a presence howling and prowling on these hills and, if they separated, they would become prey for the wolves.
Nothing is settled forever. Every peace is temporary.
The dove sellers come before him again, this time one with a blackened eye and another with a tooth missing.
It is a man in his forties who brandishes the tooth like a nugget of gold.
"Do you see what they've done to me? Do you see? Those mongrels, those monsters, that pack of dogs!"
This time he bans several of the men from the Temple courtyards altogether, and tells them to make reparations for the disturbances amounting to more than a talent of gold in total. It cannot go on like this, and yet there is no other way for it to go on.
The brother of Eliken—the eighteen-year-old priest who died in the riot in the plaza—comes to visit him. His name is Shlomo, the brother, he had not thought to ask that before, or perhaps he had forgotten the name. Shlomo's wife has given him four living sons, thank God, and the eldest is now approaching thirteen, when it will be time to begin his Temple service. The son belongs to the Temple, as do all male children in the family of the priests.
"Perhaps," says Shlomo, "you would be prepared to meet the boy? To offer him some guidance? He remembers his uncle Elikan with great fondness."
And Caiaphas knows what Shlomo is asking.
"Is he with you?"
Shlomo brings the boy in. He is gangly and nervous, with a voice on the edge of breaking which wavers from high to low pitch within a single sentence. He does not speak much.
"What is your name?" says Caiaphas, trying to be kind.
"Ovadya-Elikan," says the boy.
"He took on the name himself, after his uncle died," says Shlomo proudly.
"Come to see me Ovadya-Elikan," says Caiaphas, "when you begin your service. And we'll make sure you get to know everyone in the Temple."
Shlomo is grateful. He himself serves his turns at the Temple offices but has never had a friend in such a high position before. Much good may it do him, thinks Caiaphas.
Natan the Levite tells him that Darfon, son of Yoav, will set out this very afternoon for the north, where his strong arms will be of the greatest use in loading barrels of wine and oil onto carts and his cunning brain will be most welcome in figuring the accounts. Caiaphas feels a certain relief at that, but then at once his mind starts to seek out whom his wife might turn to now, in Darfon's absence. He cannot send every man in Jerusalem to the north.
"And Pilate wants to see you," says Natan. "No," he continues, before Caiaphas can ask the question, "he didn't say why and I didn't ask."
They look at each other. Every peace is temporary.
Pilate is full of himself. The rebellion has been quashed; Rome surely sent disapproving words merely to placate their own guilty consciences. But he has acted strongly and rightly. This is how a Roman man behaves.
He greets Caiaphas warmly. There is no soldier standing guard today.
"Can you sense the mood in the city, Caiaphas?" he asks. "They have felt the touch of my power. They know who is their master now, and they have given up all resistance like obedient slaves."
Or like clever slaves, who will heal their wounds and gather their resources before beginning to plan the next rebellion.
"Yes," says Caiaphas, "you have shown them what you are willing to do."
"They cannot help but respect it, Caiaphas! Like a woman, they long to be governed."
Like a woman. Yes, exactly like a woman. Who has labored and survived, who has raised a child. Similarly fearless of pain, careless of self in protection of something greater than herself.
"I think I will bring the golden images of Tiberius back from Caesarea. He is their lord and high master, he is their god and rightful king. They should kneel before his statue and kiss his feet."
"Exactly as you say, Prefect."
"This is not a bad country, you know. A few rotten apples in the barrel, but mostly decent hardworking families. They will be grateful to me for rooting out those bad elements. I will turn around the lives of those families. With this rioting on the streets, your society has become morally degenerate, but I will repair it!"
A memory skitters across Caiaphas's mind, as if he has heard a speech before delivered with the same shining eyes, the same absolute self-assurance. But the memory is gone before he can recall the dingy robes and the glowing clouds of heaven.
"Certainly you are right, Prefect," he says, "but I do not know if the people of Jerusalem deserve your love. Look at how they rebelled: not only against you but against me! Lavish your praise rather on Caesarea, on the Decapolis, on the loyal regions."
"Come, come," says Pilate, "you're letting your injured pride get the better of you. And yet you are right... perhaps this city is not yet worthy of the statues of Tiberius, their God-Emperor."
The conversation continues. This, here, is the work of Caiaphas's life. This.
There are only two outcomes to the ritual for a man who has a suspicion about his wife. She must drink the bitter waters. And if she is guilty the curse will fall upon her and she will die. And if she is innocent she will conceive a child. And if neither of these things happens?
Caiaphas's wife does not die. She does not talk to him any longer except about matters connected to the family and the running of the house. She sits and comments on his conversations with Annas and gives her opinion. Her belly does not swell and her thighs do not wither.
But nor does she conceive a child. How could she, indeed, since he does not lie with her for several months? He waits, and no sickness falls upon her and no child grows in her womb. In the end, without conversation, he begins to lie with her again in the nights. If she conceives a child, then at least he will know, he thinks, as he plows her again and again. She does not resist him. It is fierce between them now, as it never was when they lied and pretended to love one another.
There is another option. The rabbis tell us that if a woman has studied Torah in great detail, the merit of her learning may delay the enactment of the curse on her body. Her knowledge is a shield, keeping her husband's will from blighting her. If a woman is learned enough, the curse against adultery may never kill her. This is why it is vitally important never to teach a woman Torah.
Caiaphas doubts whether Annas bore these strictures in mind when deciding upon his daughter's education. She does not conceive a child. She does not die. He reminds himself that he did not perform the ritual entirely properly: that she should have made a meal offering at the Temple first, that it should have been done in front of several priests. Nonetheless. She drank the bitter waters willingly, having accepted the curse on herself. Perhaps Annas taught her a great deal of Torah. But perhaps there is another reason.
Something has gone now. The presence of God that howled like a whirlwind, that spat blood and fire upon the Egyptians, that stalked by the side of the Children of Israel through the desert, protecting and terrifying in equal measure, that is gone. There was a time when every man saw God face-to-face at Mount Sinai, there was a time when His wonders were as clear as the edicts of Rome and when His might toppled mountains and destroyed nations. There was a time when He raged for us and nothing could stand before Him.
But not now. Not since that first stone tumbled from the wall and Jerusalem was breached. We must have done something wrong, for that almighty righteous power to have withdrawn itself, to have become so small that it sits, alone, in the Holy of Holies inside the Temple, and does not bestir itself to protect us even from faceless men following their leader's orders. The only explanation is that we did something terribly wrong.
Natan the Levite comes to inform him that, all being well, Hodia's daughter will be betrothed after Yom Kippur is over. She is older than the previous girl, it is not right to make her wait much longer. They have found a good man for her—he names a man over twenty years her senior who is thought much of in the Temple. Caiaphas holds the man in his mind, trying to recall him exactly.
"Itamar? That dried-up husk?"
The man is nearing forty and has never married, nor ever shown much interest in women. Caiaphas cannot imagine that Hodia's daughter will take much delight in the marriage, though it will cement a solid bond of loyalty for her father, for Itamar is the brother and cousin of important men.
Natan nods his head slowly with a rueful smile. "I know. A girl like that. So..." Natan moves his hands unconsciously, as if imagining squeezing her breasts.
"Ah, well. It will happen only if my wife should chance not to die," he says, with that practiced smile.
Natan the Levite laughs. "Yes, only if the faint possibility comes to pass that your young and healthy wife does not die."
She will not die. Someone has done something terribly wrong, but he does not know who.
Later, in the autumn, it is Yom Kippur again. He is sequestered for seven days. He fasts and prays. On the day of Yom Kippur itself he, like all the Jews, does not eat or drink even water from sunset to sunset, so that they may pray for forgiveness of their sins. He dons his golden robes for part of the ceremony. He sacrifices the bull. And then he wears the pure white linen garments, for it is time for him to go into the Holy of Holies, to risk death in order to secure the Lord's forgiveness for His people.
He balances the shovel with the glowing coals on its blade in his armpit and on the crook of his elbow. He plunges both his hands into the basin of incense, bringing out two thick, sticky handfuls. He walks slowly—the body moves more slowly when it has taken no food or water—towards the Holy of Holies, the place where he will meet God. Two of his priests, with eyes averted, draw back the curtain.
He enters the room. The curtains close behind him. The only light is the dull red glow of the coals. He relaxes the grip of his shoulder muscles, placing the shovel on the raised platform where the Ark of the Covenant once stood.
Perhaps it was different when those holy items were here: not only the Ark, but also the stone tablets on which the Lord had written the laws in letters of fire, the jeweled breastplate whose stones illuminated to give messages from the Lord, a jar of the manna which fell in the wilderness, still miraculously fresh and delicious after so many centuries. We know that these things were here because our tradition is clear on the matter. It was so, but somehow the things were lost when the Babylonians invaded the country and burned the Temple and took our people into slavery more than five hundred years ago. This generation—obsessed with wealth and status—does not, perhaps, merit the miracles vouchsafed to our ancestors. So perhaps it was different then. It must be that it was different.
He drops the incense onto the shovel. The room becomes full of the scent of the burning resins and gums and spices at once, a thick choking heady multilayered aroma. He breathes through his nose. He kneels. He prays, using the words he has learned by heart, words of the psalms of David, who found favor in the eyes of the Lord. He begs the Lord for His forgiveness for His people, he gives his service faithfully and holds the love of the Lord in his heart. This is the moment for which the whole edifice was constructed: not just the holiest place but the priests and their courtyard, the men and their sacrifices, the women and their prayers, the Temple herself. And not just the Temple, but the whole holy city of Jerusalem. And not just Jerusalem but the whole of the land of Israel. For this moment here, when he will speak to God face-to-face.
And it is true that other men have died in this place, that their fellow priests have had to pull them out by the rope that is even now tied around his own ankle. But he does not know what has killed them. He prays here until the incense smoke has filled the whole chamber. And his heart yearns to the Lord, as it does when he prays to Him every day, and his mind is full of the love of the Lord. But there is no crackling light, no sounds that are also shapes and colors, no miracle and no mystery. No force pushes him to the floor, no voice rebounds in his head. He prays, and that is all.
And when the room has filled with the thickly scented smoke, he pulls back the curtain and leaves the empty chamber. And the people rejoice, for he has returned from death to life and so they know that God has forgiven their sins. And his own experience of the moments is entirely irrelevant.
# Bar-Avo
THERE IS A Roman sport. It is called "one of two will die, and the crowd will decide which."
They love this sport. It is their most glorious entertainment. They play it with slaves and captured enemies, they roar and cheer at the spectacle of it. They set up two men—perhaps one with a sword and shield, the other with a net and trident—in a round patch of burnt sand with the smell of other men's sweat and blood still in the air. And they say: fight. And if the men say: we will not fight, they say: then we will kill you both. If you want to have a chance to live, you must fight.
And when one man is beaten and bloodied and breathing in ragged gasps on the floor, the first man raises his sword and looks to the Governor or the Prefect or the Emperor, who listens to the shouts of the crowd. Mostly, the people like to see a death, but if the crowd shout loudly enough for some beloved gladiator, the man may be spared to fight another day.
In this way, the Governor or the Prefect or the Emperor seems to have the gift of life in his hands. In this way, he appears to be rescuing one man from death. Rather than the truth. Which is that he has condemned both men to die someday, in some place if not in this, for no better reason than that the sport and the sight of it please him and the crowd. It is a good trick, to kill a man while still appearing to be the one who saves a life.
When the time comes for Bar-Avo to look into the face of the Prefect, he knows that he sees a man who, like him, has killed so many men that he can no longer remember their names or count the number or think of how each death felt as it escaped between his fingertips. Men like these recognize each other, and Bar-Avo sees the same sense in Pilate of looking back and thinking: so many and still not done yet? So many dead and still the business is not finished?
But Bar-Avo rarely looks back, if truth be told. For a man like Bar-Avo, everything is a constant present. Like a fight, where each blow must be landed or dodged now, and now, and now. The life that he lives is like that. He is always looking into the face of the Prefect, and he is always listening to the crowd calling out, "Barabbas! Barabbas!" and he is always, always feeling the knife in his hand and advancing on the old man and attempting—he knows not exactly why—to comfort his shuddering as he brings the blade towards his throat and bleeds him in less time than it takes to draw one in-breath.
There is Giora to his left, and Ya'ir to his right, and they are roaring at the soldiers. Ya'ir is shorter, stocky, already sprouting hair across his chest although they are only fifteen. Giora is tall, athletic, nimble. He, in the center, is neither particularly strong nor particularly fast, but he is brave and clever.
"Come on!" he shouts to the soldiers, and it's easy because he knows Giora and Ya'ir will back him up. "Come and get us if you're not too fucking scared!"
It was like those dare games they'd played as children. Dare you to climb that tree. Dare you to walk into the dark cave alone. Dare you to dive from that rock.
"Did you leave your balls back home, Samaritan scum?"
That one's his too. It makes Ya'ir and Giora crease up laughing.
He starts a chant: "No balls! No balls! No balls!"
"I dare you to throw a pebble at those soldiers' shields. Just a pebble. I dare you," he says to Ya'ir.
A boy, dared to do something, can he refuse? Would he even want to refuse? When the pebble is so shiny and smooth in his hand, and the sea of shields is so gleamingly tempting. Ya'ir stares at the pebble, feeling it with his fingertips. For a moment they think he won't do it. Then he throws it. It bounces off the metal and pings on the ground. And nothing happens. Behind their helmets the soldiers are impassive.
A few other boys are watching them now. Standing behind them on the street. Maybe backing them up, maybe ready to run if something kicks off.
"Come on," says one of them, "something bigger. Come on."
Come on. That pottery jar, the small one. Giora, greatly daring, spins around, noticing the dark-eyed girls watching them from a rooftop. He hurls the jar, it shatters and still the soldiers do nothing. The boys are getting bigger by the moment now, strutting and squaring their shoulders. They smell of boy sweat and bottled-up anger. They're remembering how the soldiers treat them, how they get pushed to the back of the line in the market, how the soldiers laugh at them, how they accuse them of thieving when they were just looking, how they search them for weapons in the street like criminals. All of them are suspect just because of who they are. They're remembering how one of these soldiers took out that girl they like. Because isn't this always how it is, over and over again?
Come on. It's his turn now, Bar-Avo's. He hefts half a brick, feeling the weight of it, then hurls it in a wide arc. It bangs against a shield. It leaves a dent, and the boys laugh and shout, "Look what you've done!" just like their mums would. They surge forward towards the soldiers but then lose their nerve before they reach the line of bronze men. They jeer at each other, fall back.
Someone throws a cobblestone. It gets a man on his head, he falls down. He's all right, he's moving, but the boys are shocked for a moment. Bar-Avo can see him holding his head, moaning. It's a nasty sight but at the same time exciting. Something's going to happen, his whole body knows it. The soldiers start shouting: angry barked commands. The boys don't understand, the soldiers' accents are thick, the words they're using aren't Aramaic or Hebrew.
Bar-Avo feels himself becoming strong, the blood coming to all the right places as if his heart knew that this is what a man is made for. Now he'll be a man, right here, father or no. The soldiers start to advance, orderly in their phalanx, and now it's on. Giora runs towards the soldiers, roaring and throwing cobblestones with both hands, and he gets another one, knocks him down, and then the line breaks, because one of the other men decides to chase, even though his commander shouts at him to come back, to hold the line, not to be an idiot.
Bar-Avo shouts and laughs and grabs his friend's arm and now they're off, leaping and running, the blood surging and their limbs singing, and shouting with fear and delight like a toddler chased by a parent pretending to be a monster. They whoop as they scramble over stalls and climb lumber piles, and grab on to roof struts to run along thatch or tile, grabbing handfuls of mud or broken pots to hurl at the soldiers. It is like the feeling when they first held a girl, because even though they had never done the thing before they knew exactly what to do somehow.
Ya'ir is the first one to set a torch of straw and oil aflame and throw it among the soldiers with a jar of oil, which splashes fire onto the men's legs and feet, causing a great howl. He laughs when he hears the sound, baring his teeth, and the others let out a rallying cry and begin to find flaming things to hurl.
And now it is a running battle on the streets. The soldiers advance, and the boys retreat, but each time they retreat they've done a little more damage, and the soldiers are a little more ragged, and the boys are a little deeper into the streets of houses where they've known everyone all their lives and anyone would take them in. Bar-Avo and Giora slip through the tiny gap between the house of Shulamit the seamstress and Zakai the spice seller, the gap that doesn't look like it's there at all, just wide enough to take their skinny frames, and collapse in the courtyard for a moment, their bodies aching from laughter and fear and exertion all at once.
They climb up onto the roof. Bar-Avo shows his bum to the soldiers. All around the streets, there's laughter and shouting. From another rooftop, three girls are watching the battle, whispering behind their hands and giggling. The boys fighting down below spot them and play up to it. Giora does a backflip along the street as other boys throw pots and bottles. The girls applaud and shout—commentary to the boys on where the soldiers are coming from, admiration for the acrobatics, anger to the advancing troops.
The thing turns from comedy to violence and back again as swift as a knife. One of those flaming jars of oil hits a soldier—his leg and arm begin to burn and his screams are hideous before his fellows smother the flames with a blanket and even still he whimpers as they carry him off. A red-headed boy is caught by the soldiers and, as he struggles to escape, one of them pulls out a sword and cuts off—somehow, in an awkward close-fought struggle—three fingers of his left hand so he is suddenly howling and bloody.
And yet over here Bar-Avo is clambering between buildings when a goat rushes out from a backyard enclosure, panicking at some small fire, and knocks him to the ground so that his friends laugh and point and howl with mirth. He picks himself up. His pride is a little injured and he makes up for it with a brilliant scheme, luring the soldiers down an alleyway with taunts, then scrambling up the wall with his friends' help while, from the rooftops, the others pelt them with rotten fruit in a box they'd found left over from the market.
There is no conclusion to the battle. It goes on like this until nightfall, with the soldiers making sudden rushes, capturing a few boys, and the boys throwing stones and sometimes fiery things and sheltering in houses and shouting rude slogans. A storage barn burns and they watch the flames together, fascinated by the slow crumbling tumble of the building folding in on itself. The fighting peters out before dawn, and Bar-Avo has still not been caught.
He has had a good riot. He was one of those young men throwing fire bottles but they did not take him, although a soldier had his leg at one moment and at another he scaled a wall to find on the other side a soldier waiting for him with a red shouting face. He and Giora helped one another escape through a soft place in the roof of a cowshed and then patched it up so that the soldiers who followed them in could not find them. Giora laughed so much that he fell to his knees and almost sank through the roof again.
There were girls watching them, and there was much pretence of protecting them even though the girls could easily have got away, but they nonetheless stayed on that roof, playing at being protected. And after sunset, as the day began to grow dim and the sky was the color of bright blossom shriveling to black and the night sounds of the mountains began to rise up, the soldiers slunk away back to barracks. They were dragging a captive or two but went so sullenly and having taken so little that the boys shouted catcalls behind them and the girls whispered, "You won, you really won." There were two sets of hands around Bar-Avo's waist in the dark and two sweet pliant bodies pressed against him and the girls did not seem to mind sharing as the night closed in and their hot mouths found him ready.
That is his first riot, and it seems as far away from death as it is possible for any experience to be. When he wakes the morning after, his head so clear and alive that he feels that God has made the sun rise inside his own skull, he wants to do it again, and again, and again, and wishes with his whole heart that every day would be a day of climbing and shouting and throwing and goats and manure and backflips and oil jars, and that every night could be like the night that has just passed sweet and warm and that every morning for the whole of his life would be like this blue radiant dawn.
He's been taken notice of already. His cleverness and his daring and his eagerness for the fight—that last one most of all. Men older than him, men who'd kept to the old ways and whose fathers hadn't given up the battle even when that stone in the wall fell in and the Romans breached the citadel, those men look at the rioters and pick out which ones seem to have something more than the rest.
There is a man, Av-Raham, who sits in the marketplace most mornings, sipping occasionally from a bowlful of smoke. He has a little potbelly and his hair is thin at the crown, but he has a shrewd eye, and men come to him all morning long with questions and requests. He is the one who knows where those cartloads of wheat looted from the Romans ended up. His friends are the people who receive the extra measures of oil which somehow appear when there are bandits in the north. It is he who owns the sharpest swords in Jerusalem, and he to whom one goes if one needs medicine, or aid, or revenge.
They bring Bar-Avo to him the morning after the riot. Bar-Avo is cocky, at least at first. He's only fifteen and he doesn't know what he's doing here. A small corner of him suspects that he's in trouble. A larger part of him doesn't care, because last night he had two girls and nothing that happens this morning can ever erase that. He's still buzzing from the fight.
They'd found him naked under a pile of old sacks, fucking one of those two girls again, his hair a cloud around his face, both of them moving slowly, tired but unable to stop. They'd waited until he was finished and then said, "Av-Raham would like to see you." And Bar-Avo had taken a swig of water from a jug by his side, swirled it around in his mouth, spat it out into the straw and said, "What if I don't want to see him?" They had explained most politely that Av-Raham was a good friend to his friends. And, swaggering, Bar-Avo had gone.
There was something he liked about the deferential air surrounding Av-Raham. He couldn't help imagining how it would feel to be the man whom others talked to in low voices, asked favors of and consulted. He was old—over fifty probably—and not handsome, not like Bar-Avo, but there was something charismatic about him. Over the years Bar-Avo would watch him closely to see how he did it. The formation of the inner circle within his group of followers. The constant denial that he was a man of any importance whatever. The impression that he was holding secrets and that, perhaps, he spoke to God. These are the skills by which a man leads, inspiring both love and fear.
That morning, the conversation was brief.
"They tell me you acquitted yourself well in the battle yesterday."
Bar-Avo has all the humility of a teenager.
"Yes," he says. "No one can climb as well as me, no one else hit as many soldiers with the oil pots, I think those are the most important things."
Av-Raham smiled an amused smile.
"The most important things. Tell me, do you hate Rome?"
And there's no question, none at all. Rome is all the things that are wrong in all the world.
"Yes."
"Then we may find a use for you. You are the son of Mered, aren't you?"
The mention of his father stings him. He was not a good father. Bar-Avo has not seen him for a long time.
"I'm a man now. It doesn't matter whose son I am."
And Av-Raham's eyes meet those of one of the men standing beside him and they both laugh. Bar-Avo cannot read the laugh, cannot see that it says: yes, we understand that, we have said those words ourselves when we were boys.
Bar-Avo shouts at this ring of slow, thoughtful men, "Do not ask me about my father! My father is dead! I have no father!"
And Av-Raham says, slowly, "None of us has a father."
Bar-Avo looks around at them, trying to see if they are mocking him.
"Or at least, God is our father," says Av-Raham, "no other father matters. You can be simply His son with us. Or mine, for I am father to many."
Bar-Avo squints and thinks and curls his lip.
"I will be the son of some father," he says at last, and that is how he gets his name, which means "the son of his father," and no other name he has had before has ever suited him so well as this. He is this now, a man who carries his own father with him, a nameless, invisible, intangible father.
Av-Raham, whose name means "the father to many," laughs.
"Either way," he says, "now you belong with us."
And that is that.
They give him little tasks at first, and he deals with them handily. A set of daggers to be smuggled past the guards—he conceals them under a cartful of vegetables a farmer asks him to take to market and gets paid twice for the journey, once by the farmer and once by Av-Raham's men. Messages to be carried. Lookout to be kept as they cut open the leather thongs holding a prized horse belonging to the Prefect in its stable, slap its thigh and send it skittering across the plaza, where, terrified by the smells and the noise, it falls and lames itself. Conversations to be overheard in the marketplace—there is always a use for information carelessly dropped.
He is bored sometimes, but also paid fairly well for his trouble—so much so that he can now be the man of his home, bringing his mother meat and bread. And when there is going to be a riot he knows it, and he is the one who can tell his friends where to be and at what time. And he knows where the fires will be lit and where the roofs will be torn off and what can be stolen early on because everyone will think that this saddle or that blanket or that wheel of cheese must have burned in the flames. A long campaign of resistance and anger is nothing if not pragmatic. Young men must be found to fight, and must be rewarded and encouraged, and people must eat.
Many days are dull—days of waiting for the fighting or for anything to happen. He does not mind the dullness. He finds himself more patient than he'd realized. The more he thinks on it, the more he wants what Av-Raham has. That quiet command, honor in the hearts of men. One has to wait, and work hard, and become trustworthy, before these things start to happen.
There is a day when Av-Raham shows him a map of Israel. He has never seen more than a little plan before—drawn on a table in wine, perhaps—to show where the grain store is in relation to where they are now, or which of three roads leads to the house of the girl he likes. This is a brushed-vellum masterpiece, kept rolled in a cloth bag and brought out ceremoniously when the men sit discussing their affairs.
Bar-Avo has come to bring wineskins he stole from a Roman officer when he was distracted by a commotion in the marketplace, and to receive his orders. But when he enters the small back room where these discussions are held, he cannot help staring at the map.
"They have moved their troops here," one of the men is saying to Av-Raham, putting a finger on the map, "so their supply lines will have to go through the mountain pass."
Bar-Avo sees at once what the map is. There is the sea, inked with fine blue waves. Here is the coast, here are the roads leading in from Yaffo to Jerusalem, up to Caesarea, down to the desert. He has imagined the countryside with this eagle's view when he walks from place to place. And all over the map are dried black beans—from one of the sacks kept in the storeroom which conceals the entrance to this chamber. Av-Raham sees him looking.
"They are the Romans," he says, pointing out the beans, "here is the garrison"—a cluster of beans near Jerusalem—"and here are the outposts"—all around the countryside. "We keep watch on where they go and what they do, so we know when new supplies will be dispatched to them and when they will be isolated."
"So you can decide when to strike," says Bar-Avo wonderingly.
"These are guesses really. Merely that. Our information is often out of date. But we try to steal from them when we can. There is nothing sweeter," Av-Raham says, smiling, his little potbelly shifting against the table as he leans forward, "than killing a Roman soldier with his own sword."
Bar-Avo smiles too. He has imagined himself a killer before, like all boys. Has swished a sword and imagined running someone through with it. He has taken lambs to offer at the Temple and seen the life go out of them and understood how simple and how important the thing is.
"How many of them will we kill before they leave?"
Av-Raham looks into Bar-Avo's eyes, then takes his left hand by the wrist, palm up. He plucks a bean delicately from the table and places it in Bar-Avo's palm.
"This is how we proceed now. One by one. But with God's help..."
Av-Raham sweeps the beans off the parchment with the back of his hand. It takes two sweeps, three, to clear them all.
"That is what we must do. Every one of them out. No peace until every single one of them is swept away."
"We'll drive them into the sea," says Bar-Avo, looking at the beans on the floor.
Av-Raham pulls Bar-Avo towards him, so Bar-Avo can smell the older man's scent of onions and spice and the cloves he chews. Av-Raham holds him at the back of the neck and kisses the top of his head.
"With a thousand boys like you," he says, "we will do it."
He is trusted, as time goes on, with bigger things. He is taught where the caches of swords are, and how to grease and wrap them so that they will not rust in their long months underground. He learns the different ways to set a fire in a building so that it will take with little kindling and without time to waste. He learns the names of the important men up and down the land. Av-Raham even has one of the old men teach him to read, though Bar-Avo always does so slowly and hesitatingly, for this is a skill necessary to a revolution.
It is entirely true that some of these skills are dull and he has to be convinced that learning them is necessary. But then there is the day when he first kills a man. That is not a boring day.
There was no reason for this to be the day, though he knew the day would come and that it would be a moment like this. He is nearing twenty now and commands a handful of men of a similar age or a bit younger. They make mischief, steal things where they can, riot and destroy property, telling themselves every time that, piece by piece, they are pulling Rome off their land.
Today it will be the baths. Rome has not built a grand bathhouse in Jerusalem as she does in many of her conquered cities, but there is a small pool, one story only, near to the dormitories for the soldiers stationed in Jerusalem. The soldiers bathe there and that is enough to make it worthy of attack. And it's used by some of the people in the town, those for whom the traditional ritual baths are insufficiently Roman, those who want to show their loyalty to the occupying power. Traitors, therefore, in their treacherous waters.
Bar-Avo and his friends have decided on a plan. There are open windows in the roof of the baths, and the building is next to several houses, one owned by a man who owes a great deal to Av-Raham and has been persuaded to let them use the window which leads out onto the curved bathhouse roof. Four of them go: Ya'ir, Giora, Matan and Bar-Avo himself. They shin down the wall from the window, each of them carrying a leather bag over his shoulder, each of them suppressing laughter.
Through the windows in the roof, they look down on the Romans at their bath.
They are hilarious, strutting about, each man naked as a child, caring nothing for their modesty, their decency, their honor.
"Look at that!" whispers Giora, the youngest.
He's pointing out the men being oiled by slaves. One in particular, a man in his fifties with a soldier's physique, has two male slaves working on his back, rubbing thick drops of yellow olive oil into his skin.
"I've never had a woman work so hard on me as that," mutters Ya'ir.
The man whose back is being oiled lets out a little moan of pleasure and the boys on the roof collapse in laughter.
"Neither has he!" says Ya'ir. "He's never touched a woman in his life, look at him!"
There are six or seven men being rubbed with oil in a similar way.
Bar-Avo says, "My mum does that with the lamb before she roasts it."
"Let's see if they bring out the herbs!" says Ya'ir, and they start laughing again.
"We brought our own herbs, remember?" says Bar-Avo, indicating the leather bag on Ya'ir's back, and Ya'ir's face cracks into a grin.
They position themselves at four different downward-facing windows. It will be important, for maximum impact, to start at the back and work forwards. Giora is over the window the farthest away from the exit from the baths. Beneath him are the hot steamy rooms where men are exercising to cause the sweat to run from their pores before they go to be oiled. They are all naked, jogging on the spot or punching at imaginary enemies. Giora pulls the bag from his back and hefts its sloppy weight in his hands. The contents are runny. He undoes the leather draw cord holding it closed just a little and gets a whiff of the contents. He screws up his face. They have each come with a bagful of liquid animal feces. They have mixed it with water and let it rot in a barrel for a couple of days just to enhance the effect.
Giora leans his body half over the window, lowers the hand holding the bag down and then, holding on to its handle, begins to whirl it round and round and round.
The rotten, liquid, soupy feces splatter in wide arcs across the roomful of naked men. The stench is appalling. The stuff is sticky and smells of vomit and disease.
It splashes onto the bodies of all those naked men, across their pink scraped torsos and in their hair, and one man, a young soldier, looking in an unlucky direction, gets it across his face and in his mouth and eyes. He starts and then begins to retch as he realizes what it is.
They run, of course they do. They make for the room with the plunge bath, which is next in line and where Bar-Avo is waiting with another thick full bag. He had found some dog's vomit to put into his, mixed with the shit. As the men start running through the building away from the whirling stench, Bar-Avo begins to empty his bag too, swinging it to make a splatter of filth, and then on, as they run in disgusted confusion, two of the men already vomiting, Matan empties his bag, and one of them, looking up to see where the pollution is coming from, takes some full in the face. They barely need Ya'ir's bag, so much destruction has already been wrought in the place, but he empties it anyway, into the plunge pool, where some of them had leapt, attempting to wash themselves.
The boys are laughing as they drop the bags through the windows and can't help staying to watch for perhaps a little longer than they should, as the men desperately try to clean themselves, and one of them knocks over a huge tub of oil, which spills slick and green across the tiled floor. Another man comically slips and falls in the oil—it's too good, like players performing just for them—and manages to tip more of it over himself and, struggling to get up, pulls another man covered in brown slime down on top of himself. There's a sharp snap as another one falls, and his arm is twisted awkwardly where he tried to break his fall—he's evidently broken a bone and this is the funniest thing of all. Ya'ir rolls on his back laughing and Giora shouts through the window, "Go back to Rome!"
They are of course watching too intently. They do not notice that a man has scaled the back wall with a ladder until it is too late and he is almost on them. He is not covered in oil or shit. He is a soldier in his full uniform, one of the men stationed outside in case of an attack on the bathhouses. They do not notice anything until Giora starts to shout and Bar-Avo turns his head from observing the men covered in oil trying to stand up and sees this soldier, his eyes like gleaming stones, his teeth bared, raising Giora above his head only to hurl him through the window down onto the floor below. There is a loud crack as Giora lands and Bar-Avo cannot see if he's moving, has no time to see.
The soldier draws his sword and the three of them, Bar-Avo, Ya'ir, Matan, scramble to their feet and back away across the roof. They are unarmed. The soldier roars and lunges. Ya'ir almost loses his footing on the edge of one of the windows and Bar-Avo pulls him back by the waist of his tunic. Taking his advantage, the soldier slashes at Ya'ir, brings his sword back red. Ya'ir screams, frightened, intense, like a child. The soldier's taken a great slice of flesh out of Ya'ir's raised arm and seeing this brings such rage to Bar-Avo that he surges forward, not thinking of himself, only of his anger and finding a place to sheathe it.
He is lucky. If he had tripped or missed his step the soldier's downward slash with his sword would have caught him on the back of the neck and his head would have rolled down through the window to the tiled floor beneath. Instead he manages to lunge low, while Matan dances backward and the soldier is confused for a moment.
Bar-Avo kicks out wildly at the soldier's knee and hits the perfect spot, at the side. There's a gristly crunch and the soldier trips, falls to his knees, shouts and grabs out, reaching for the back of Bar-Avo's tunic. He has him, he's caught him by the tunic collar, he raises the sword in his right hand and Bar-Avo catches at the soldier's wrist.
Bar-Avo is the weaker of the two. The soldier is behind him, pushing his arm down. Bar-Avo is trying to hold it back with his own right arm, but he's not strong enough and the sword is descending towards his ear, his face. And then the soldier gives a sudden start. Matan has kicked his spine and this moment of released pressure gives Bar-Avo enough leeway. He grabs the soldier's wrist, pulls the sword down and back and there, into the soft part of the throat, just above the armored breastplate.
The soldier falls backward. He chokes and groans and grabs at the sword sticking out of his throat. The blood bubbles down his front like the blood of the lamb when it is slaughtered for the sacrifice. And he dies just as easily, there on the roof tiles, his sticky blood dripping down through the open window. They stare for a minute, startled and silent, before the shouts from the bathhouse remind them to run, to scale the wall, to get away.
Bar-Avo had not quite meant it but had not tried to avoid it either. He feels nothing afterwards, not grief or shock or pity, only perhaps a kind of surprise that it was so simple. And a kind of shock at himself, at his own cool capacity. He knows something about himself now that he didn't know before, that it will not trouble him to kill a man. He thinks: this will be useful.
Av-Raham, when he hears, congratulates Bar-Avo in front of his men and says, "The first of many!" And Bar-Avo agrees. Yes. The first of many.
There are reprisals. Rome does not know precisely who attacked the bathhouse and killed the soldier, and Giora somehow managed to limp away on a broken ankle before he could be caught and questioned, so the Prefect's men round up a few dozen young men and give them lashes in the marketplace. They execute five or six for "stirring up unrest." Av-Raham sends gifts of money and promises of loyalty to the families of those young men. Rome wins nothing by this.
Bar-Avo marries soon after this, because the death has sharpened him somehow and the girls are not enough night after night. He has not got a child on any girl yet but at some point he will, he knows, and this thought, the thought that he might have to take a girl because he has given her a child, makes him think that it is time to marry.
He does not need to look too hard for a wife. There are a dozen girls of the right age—fifteen or sixteen—among the daughters of Av-Raham's friends, and they are sweet and kind and think him handsome. There is one he likes, Judith, not just for the spread of her hips and her neat bottom, but because she seems to understand when he talks.
He has not slept with her; it is not right to do so with the daughters of these men. But once they sat together in a barn during a rainstorm and he told her how he longed to make his mother proud, and take care of her in her old years, and at this Judith leaned her head on his shoulder and said, "She doesn't know how lucky she is to have a son like you."
He had kissed her on the mouth and her kiss tasted faintly of cherries, and he tried to do more but she pushed his hands away and moved to put a little distance between them.
"You think everything will always come easily to you," says Judith, "but one day there'll be something you can't get and then what will you do?"
"I'll have to ask your father for you instead," he says, and she laughs.
Judith's father, one of the zealous men, is delighted by the offer of a new son-in-law and agrees rather swiftly.
She is a good girl, and gives him six children in six years, all of whom live to be bright toddlers and then on and on. They are four boys and two girls and Bar-Avo is surprised suddenly to be a father to many small delightful people whom Judith presents to him each evening washed for bed, who ask him if he has apples for them, who are delighted by the gift of a shiny stone or a piece of misshapen clay.
Judith, sensible as she is, does not ask questions about where he goes during the day or who he sees or what they tell him. She knows where they keep the daggers, wrapped in leather in the roof, and knows to keep the children from them. She knows what food to give him to take if he suddenly says that he will be away for a few days, and who to ask if he's away for longer than he said. She is very calm if he happens to give her a message to tuck into the baby's wrappings and pass to a man selling saltfish at the market.
His job, in these days, is to gather followers. A movement of revolution needs an army and each man must be recruited individually.
He travels to Acre, and then to Galilee, and talks to the strong men who are gathering their fishing nets in from the great lake. Their arms are knotted with muscles. Their thighs are bunched like tree trunks. Their bodies are meaty like bulls'. These are men who can thrust with a sword or a spear and pierce straight through another man's body so that the point sees daylight on the other side. It is men like these that he wants. This is how to secure power, he sees. Work hard, be loyal to those who have much help to give you, but secure your own followers too. A day will come when Rome is gone. But before that, he will slowly become stronger and more powerful.
"Come and follow me," he says to the fishermen, "follow me and free the country from tyranny."
"We cannot follow you," they say, "we have hauls of fish to pull in and families to feed."
And he says, "Is not God the Master of all?"
And they say, "Yes."
And he says, "Then will not God provide for His children, if they will only follow Him?"
And one of them, more curious than the others perhaps, says, "How shall we follow?"
And at that Bar-Avo gives them instruction. How they will become trusted friends of those who are zealous for the Lord. How they will listen for the code words that will show that the speaker is a true messenger from Bar-Avo. Such a messenger will tell them that he has "God alone as leader and master." God alone. He says it again, and he knows how it feels to hear. No disgusting Emperor steeped in seamy sin upon his golden throne. No Roman army. No Prefect laying waste to good men's lives upon his whims. God alone, he says to them, as leader and master.
"What of the priests?" says one, and Bar-Avo knows by this question that he has them.
"The priests connive with the Prefect and Rome and wheedle for their own fortunes. Haven't you heard how rich the High Priest's family is? Where do you think that money is from? It's stolen from the Temple. And it's blood money paid by Rome for our lives."
And they believe, because they have heard the stories.
"God alone," he says, "leader and master of all. None but God. God alone."
They repeat it after him.
And when he walks on to the next village and the next most of the men stay, but giving him their word that he can call on them. And one or two—young men, men without families or men who long for the fight—walk with him. Strong fighting bodies, and he has them practicing their dagger thrusts in the evening and fashioning arrowheads. When he comes back to Jerusalem after three months' walking, he has a score of men built like muscled oxen with him and another twenty times that number who have promised their right arms to the cause. He will not need them yet. But they will all come to Jerusalem to sacrifice for the festivals of pilgrimage, and then suddenly he will have an army.
"There is a logic to battles," says Av-Raham, welcoming him back with a great feast and a calf spit-roasted over a fire of old olive wood. "There is a way to sense when the city is ready for war."
All his friends are there: Matan and Ya'ir, and Giora, who broke his ankle in the fall from the roof and walks with a limp now but is still useful to the cause. Bar-Avo's own mother has pride of place by the fire and his brothers and sisters with her, because now he is a man of some influence. It pleases him to see his family's hands shiny with grease from the calf slaughtered in his honor. His wife is here too, her body newly strange and enticing to him after so many months away, and their children filled to the brim with meat and dozing like a half-dozen little puppies draped across her lap. And Av-Raham and the elder men, who look at him with new respect now. They sent several men out to recruit but none has come back with such good news as he.
"I can feel it is coming now," says Av-Raham. "It will not be long. A year or half a year. Have you heard about the holy men each claiming to be the Messiah? This is a sure sign that the time is near. And the people who follow them? They will come to us."
They drink wine and eat meat. Their moment is at hand.
There are terrible rumors across the land of Israel, stories so shocking that they must be passed from person to person as quickly as possible.
Some say that the Prefect is demanding that the Temple give up its holy money, donated for the glory of God, to build some kind of latrine. Some say that the priests have agreed to it and that the gold will be transferred under cover of darkness. This news alone is enough to provoke angry shouts in the street, insults flung at soldiers, stones and wine jugs thrown from upper windows at them as they pass in the street.
Bar-Avo leads a raid on a caravan bringing wine to a wealthy Roman merchant. It is for actions like this that the Romans call them bandits and murderers, but that is to misunderstand: they are freedom fighters. They kill the guards who resist them and let those who run go free. Inside the wagons they find not only wine but chests of gold and letters for half the most powerful men in Jerusalem and Caesarea. The letters confirm that the Prefect, Pilate, is weak and has been demanding additional resources from Syria. The money goes to shore up their support in the west and the south. Bar-Avo's esteem increases tenfold with this find.
Now, suddenly, he is the one to whom men come for advice. Av-Raham is still a leader, a man of much influence, but Bar-Avo is the rising star. They come to tell him about a preacher who slaughtered a cat outside the Temple to represent the sacrilege done there every day by sacrificing for the Romans, and one who has been making cures and who upset the tables in the Temple. They tell him about small risings and pockets of resistance. He is the one who decides what punishment should be meted out to men found to have been too generous to the Romans.
What does it take to make a man follow you? Not love. For love a man will mourn you and bury you when you are dead, but not follow you into battle. For a man to follow you, it must seem that you are the one who knows the way out. Every person is in a dark place. Every person wants to feel that some other man has found the road back into the light.
A few days before Passover the city is ready.
All of Bar-Avo's four hundred men are coming to Jerusalem to sacrifice for the festival. His provocateurs do not even have to make up stories, just remind people of what has already happened. They say, "Remember the Hippodrome?" and even men who were not born when it happened have heard the stories and see in their imaginations the great structure set aflame and thousands of men crucified up and down all the roads to the capital.
He holds a great feast just before Passover in a place where they've made camp with their allies, to the west of the city. They roast lambs upon great fires and sing songs and call down curses on the head of every Roman. He lays out his plans to the men—how it will be when we take control of the city, who will take which of the gates, who will storm the high places and David's Tower. He is foolhardy, perhaps, because he cannot see every figure lurking at the edge of the crowd or ask where they have come from and what their name is. He holds up the bread and the wine at the meal and says, "Just as we eat this bread and drink this wine, so we will devour the armies of Rome and drink sweet victory!" And there are great cheers.
Shortly after dawn, when the birds are still calling out and the sky is streaked with pink-tinged clouds, he wakes with his wife next to him, soft and sweet-smelling, and thinks for a moment, why did I wake so suddenly, and then he hears the cry again. Loud and low and afraid: "Soldiers!"
They are coming from three sides. There is little time to do anything. He and Judith knew this day might come, that is why only the baby is with them, strapped to her body. The other children are safe with his mother. Judith kisses him hard, white with determination and anxiety, and runs to the horse. She is away and clear of the reach of arrows before he joins his men for the battle.
Someone must have given away their position, it is the only explanation. Someone sold them out for a handful of silver. As the soldiers close in, Bar-Avo looks at the faces of his men. One of them, with his guilty expression, will show himself a traitor. Not his dear friends, surely not, not Ya'ir, not Matan, not Giora? He watches them, while his men fight with the soldiers and he fights alongside the rest, even though he knows they will lose. He watches for men who seem to be hanging back in the fight—one of them knows he will not get his money if Bar-Avo is freed—and at last he thinks he spots who it is, though his heart breaks open. Ya'ir. Open-faced, strong and handsome, and the one he loved the best of all. Ya'ir is the one hanging back. Ya'ir is the one who, he remembers, took care to embrace him last night at the banquet and address him by name even though they all knew not to do so.
His men kill four soldiers, but the soldiers kill three of his before they reach him. There are young men—about the age he was when he started to riot—throwing themselves onto the backs of the soldiers and beating their heads to keep them from him. They know to make for him, it seems, presumably to cut off the head of the beast and leave it wriggling on the floor. He fights off two with his short sword, taking one with a slice to the throat, another with a jab to the groin, but more come and more, and someone wrests the blade from his hand and pushes him back.
As the soldiers reach him, he cries to his men, "Do not deal too harshly with Ya'ir!" and he sees the fear grow on the man's face as he turns to run. They will kill him if they catch him. Good. And if they do not, and if he escapes, he will kill Ya'ir himself, for if the man wanted money he could always have come to Bar-Avo.
And now they are here, three men from Samaria, bought by Rome to fetch him to their dungeons and their Prefect. They will not take him easily. There is a dagger in his boot and he stoops, seeming to let his head go down, beaten, but draws out the blade in one easy motion and slices through the back of the ankle of the man nearest to him. He falls to the ground at once, and in the gap he leaves there's a break in the wall of men. Bar-Avo calculates and thinks: I could run now and regroup the men in the forest. But as he takes one step forward, there is a starburst at the back of his head and black spots before his eyes and then he knows nothing at all.
The next thing is the closest he ever comes to death, although death has always walked beside him like an old friend.
Before this he imagined he would meet death in battle, or that death would catch him when he tried to leap from one building to another and misjudged it and so fell into the waiting palm of death instead. Or that death would be a wolf on the road when he was alone and had left his knife in the camp. Or that death would be a Roman sword where he did not see one coming, the one he failed to dodge. He had never imagined capture.
When he wakes in the cell and realizes what has happened, he tests out how it feels. His head thumps, his arms and legs ache, there is a twisting in his belly. Very well, this is what it feels like to be injured in battle and not to take any food or water. He needs a woman with warm water to bathe him and a boy with a pitcher of cold water to quench his thirst, but neither of those things is here.
It does not feel like a disgrace, though. He had thought it might. It makes him angry and it makes him cunning. While he lives, there is a way out. He has learned that from the countless skirmishes with the Roman soldiers. The only man who can never escape is a dead man—while he lives, even surrounded by a ring of swords, he can look about him, identify what there is to use here and make good his escape.
He sits up and sees for the first time that there is another man, weaker than him, in here. He can tell from the way the man moves that he is not a trained fighter, or trained to endure many blows. The other man coughs and shivers but otherwise is so still that Bar-Avo would not have known there was anyone else in this small stone room with dirty straw on the floor.
"You," says Bar-Avo, "what's your name?"
The man remains silent. Bar-Avo can see his dark eyes staring at him, hungrily he thinks. With great intensity. Bar-Avo is not daunted.
"I am Bar-Avo," he says. "I command some of the zealous forces around Jerusalem. Tell me, friend, have you fought alongside us against Rome? Or have you battled for freedom in some other way?"
This is an obvious gambit, but in the context it is more likely to succeed than not. Men in Roman jails have often been rebels, or might like to style themselves so after the fact. At the very least, men in Roman jails have no love for Rome.
"I am going to die," says the man slowly.
Ah. Yes. It takes some men this way.
"That is certainly their intention," says Bar-Avo, "and they surely aim to carry it out. But if you have made your peace with God there is nothing to fear from death. Do not be afraid."
"When I die," says the man, "the whole of creation burns, and God Himself descends from heaven to judge the righteous and the guilty."
Hmm.
"I can see you are a great teacher," says Bar-Avo after some thought, "and that the spirit of God is in you. Tell me, do you have many followers?"
"All of the earth are my disciples, but it must not be spoken. Do not speak of it."
It is very possible that this man will be of no use whatsoever. Nonetheless, he must sound him out. He has heard strange men like this before and knows their usual preoccupations.
"The time has not yet come for you to be revealed, I understand."
The man nods slowly and shifts his hands. The shackles clink.
"The world will burn," he says apropos of nothing, "when the abomination that causes desolation is in a forbidden place, then there will be great earthquakes and famines. It is then that I will come in clouds with great power and glory. Only then will my name be known."
There is something about him, it is curious. Although the things that he says are nonsense and Bar-Avo has met ten times ten of his kind, nonetheless there is a conviction to his voice. Perhaps a hundred times a hundred such madmen have merely ordinary skill of rhetoric and so they are not believed and people see in them only a sad wreckage of a confused mind, but one in ten thousand are gifted with this combination: the calm manner of self-assurance, the penetrating gaze, the low commanding voice, the particular way of holding his limbs even now, even shackled. God throws such a one together from time to time: an arresting man. If he had not been thus mad, he could have been a great man.
"I know who you are," says Bar-Avo. "I have heard about you. You are Yehoshuah of Natzaret. You have near six hundred men with you, they say."
He had not heard that the man was captured. But he had heard that there was such a man: a healer, a caster-out of demons. Some of his own men had gone to seek healing for a wound that would not knit or a deaf ear.
"There will be more," says Yehoshuah, "there will be many more. Listen"—and Yehoshuah leans forward and Bar-Avo, despite his mind, despite his sore limbs and his aching head, cannot help leaning forward too—"listen Bar-Avo, son of no one, don't you think that God Himself will take his revenge for what has been done in this city? You make your plans and gather your forces to you, and you hope to overturn His will, but don't you know that He has sent the Romans to scourge us so that we'll repent and return to Him before the end of the world comes? Bar-Avo, king of bandits, God is angry with His creation and the time has come to fold it up and put it away. You are as much a tool of His will in this as any Roman soldier."
Bar-Avo shivers. He has thought this himself, alone, late at night. Where is the Lord in all this? When he is fighting to rid the country of Rome, when he wants to see the holy Temple purified of their unclean bodies, isn't their presence a sign that God has turned His face away? And if He has turned His face from Jerusalem, it can mean only one thing.
"Are you a prophet?"
Yehoshuah smiles.
"I may not tell who I am." He pauses. "It is no accident that you and I are in this cell together."
Bar-Avo struggles. There are more false prophets in Jerusalem than seeds in a pomegranate, and he cannot say why this one is striking him so forcefully. Perhaps it is just that his head is sore and he knows this may be his last night on earth.
"If you are God's prophet, why not tell your men to join with ours? To fight with us and drive the Romans from Jerusalem and set up God's house again?"
Yehoshuah smiles and wipes his dirty face with his dirty, shackled hand.
"Bar-Avo, murderer and leader of murderers, do you think God needs help to do His work?"
Bar-Avo is stung and impatient. This is the same rhetoric he has heard a thousand times from the people who support the Temple, who preach moderation, who don't trust in God but in their own full bellies and warm beds.
"God has told us what He wants already. He says that no idol shall be tolerated, that we shall destroy all those who make graven images. He has given us work to do already and we are too cowardly to do it. Join with us, do the work God has commanded, turn the heathens out."
"We are far beyond that time now," says Yehoshuah. "God has cast His judgment on the land."
Bar-Avo looks at him. His head throbs, his vision pulses with beads of light at the corners of his eyes. He knows he may die tomorrow on a cross set up by Rome.
"Shall we not try?" he says, and his voice is cracked and he longs for water although he knows they will not bring it, for he is already dead in a sense. "Shall we not strive with all our might to do what is needed, and if God in His wisdom decides to slay us all, shall we not then die knowing that we fought as hard as we could, that we tried for freedom?"
Yehoshuah says nothing.
"Shall we not strive to live? That is all we know, that life is good. Shall we not fight to gain our own lives?"
Yehoshuah says, and he smiles as he says it, "God's will, not my will be done."
And Bar-Avo, who has always been a fighter and a survivor, who has crawled out of holes not quite as dark but almost as dark as this one, finds himself thinking: very well, then. If this is your choice, you make my choice easier. Because he has a notion of what might happen next, since it is getting close to Passover and Jerusalem will be full of angry men and Pilate is a damned coward.
They come for them early in the morning. One guard places an earthenware vessel filled with dank, warm water in front of Bar-Avo. He drinks it greedily to the bottom before he even checks whether a similar jar has been given to Yehoshuah. It has, but the man drinks sparingly, and washes his face. Bar-Avo rubs at his face with the corner of his garment. He knows what is coming.
The guards kick at them to make them stand and, despite their shackled arms and legs, hustle them along the passage towards the light. The breath of wind is a cool kiss to the forehead. The sky is bright and clear with early-morning streaks of feathered cloud. Yehoshuah does not look up at the sky, but Bar-Avo cannot keep his eyes from it until they are dragged into the house where Pilate has his office.
They bring both the men in to see the Prefect, one after the other. Bar-Avo waits in the outer vestibule—he stands with his legs shackled and his hands now fastened behind him and his back aching and his knees aching and his shoulders aching, and he listens to the conversation taking place inside the room as best as he can hear it.
Pilate says, "They tell me you've been going around calling yourself the King of the Jews."
Silence. The sound of birds singing in the courtyard outside and of a maid clanging pots downstairs.
"Well, out with it. Are you the King of the Jews?"
"Those are your words."
This is not a good answer, though it will make Bar-Avo's task considerably easier. It would have been better at this stage to blame the priests, to imply that they had encouraged him to declare himself to foment rebellion against Rome. It would have been better to say that he would lay his men's loyalty, however much that is worth, at the feet of Pilate. It would have been better even simply to deny it. "No, I am not," would have been a better answer for a man who wanted to live.
There is a sigh and a sound of rustling paper.
"You understand that this is gross sedition and if you do not deny it and swear loyalty to your Emperor I will be forced to execute you?"
Pilate sounds tired and irritated. This is useful information which Bar-Avo might be able to turn to his benefit.
The man still says nothing when there is so much he could say that might save his life. Pilate doesn't trust the priests any more than he trusts the people. There is always a crack to work a knife into, to twist the blade, to break open.
"Very well. Take him away." This to the guards. They half drag, half bully Yehoshuah out the door directly past where Bar-Avo is sitting, but the two men's eyes do not meet. Some men give up their lives for nothing, but Bar-Avo is not likely to do so.
They bring him in. He is standing, with his hands bound behind his back. Pilate is sitting at his ease, sipping on a cup of hot soup, for a little chill is in the air this morning. The whole thing will have to be played as carefully as a game of knives.
"Do you think he has run mad, that man Yehoshuah?" says Bar-Avo, before Pilate has a chance to ask his first question.
It is a bold maneuver, to speak first, but it is a calculated risk. This way he sets the tone: reasonable, thinking. But he asks a question also, deferring to Pilate. It is a risk. Pilate could have him killed here, for insolence.
Pilate looks surprised. Looks at him full in the face. Says at last, "You were with him in the cells, weren't you? Was he mad then, or as sane as day?"
"He has moments of clarity and moments where he falls into insanity. I am not sure he knows what he's done, or why. Everyone is looking for a Messiah. Every leader has followers who tell them that they are the Messiah. I think he's started to believe them."
Pilate shrugs and raises one eyebrow.
"Well," he says, "Jerusalem won't suffer for having one fewer of those. Now. You have brought a great deal of harm to this city and this nation. The sooner the people learn that no rebellion will stand against us, the better it will be for them. I propose to put you to death. However, if you are willing to give up your co-conspirators, I will give you an easy death by the sword. If you refuse, we will torture you and then crucify you.
"We will, for example, slice your tongue to pieces and pierce your eyes with nails. And we will, of course, arrest some others of your followers whose faces we know anyway, so that whatever you do it will be put about that you betrayed them. Do you understand? There is no chance for glory. Either torture and ignominy, or ignominy but a quick and merciful death. I only need a handful of names and locations. Let's start, for example, with Giora. Tell me where he is now."
"I do not know," says Bar-Avo.
Pilate sighs. "You may be surprised," he says, "by how much you will start to tell us when the branding irons are applied to your flesh. The ears, they tell me, are surprisingly sensitive. And the bottoms of the feet. Quite brave men find themselves babbling like women after having hot coals and iron scourges applied to the bottoms of their feet."
It is time to take back this conversation. Pilate's lines are too practiced now; he is in a rhythm which will be hard to break.
"Do you think any one of us tells the others where they are to be found?" says Bar-Avo. "Prefect, you know better than that."
He lets it hang in the air for a second too long. The insolence of it catches Pilate short.
Bar-Avo pushes on: "You might as well ask that Yehoshuah where all his followers are now, all that rabble he brought with him from Galilee who fled as soon as he was captured. Every meeting place will have been changed the moment they knew I was taken alive. Every man I ever knew will have moved to another home. Every family will have been told to deny their sons. Prefect, you can beat me and scourge me for as long as pleases you, but don't think for a moment that my bruised body will do more than excite greater hatred of you. Even if they think I am a traitor, they will still hate you more."
Pilate looks at him. He knows that what he says has the ring of truth to it.
"A true leader," says Pilate, "does not care whether he is hated, as long as he is feared."
"And has it stopped them rising up? You'll never hold Jerusalem like this," says Bar-Avo. "Every man and every woman and every child will fight you. You can't take us by fear, only by love."
And he knows that this is the right thing to say, because his men have intercepted some of the letters from Syria and Rome, and he knows that this is what Pilate's masters have been saying to him for months now. These exact words. Not by fear, but by love. Bar-Avo is not stupid. He is not ill-informed. He is the leader of many men.
"Do you want them to remember you like this, Pilate? As a bloody tyrant? A man who made the streets run red, not one who brought the civilization and order of Rome?"
This is a gamble too.
"They will remember me for discipline. Rome does not bring marble and gold only, Rome brings order and obedience." Pilate is talking to himself now, for the most part. Bar-Avo has him. The right words at the right moment and Pilate is his now.
"If I were you," says Bar-Avo, "I would release that man Yehoshuah and put me to the sword."
Pilate stares at him and nods, as if he has said something tremendously wise and interesting.
"Why release him?"
"To show mercy. To bring the love of Rome as well as the scourge. You've done it before at the festivals. You know it works. It is clever."
Too much to compliment him in this fashion? No. Pilate is as vain as any man.
"They have already come to ask, it is true."
"Then release him. He has a body of followers, many of them women." He drops this in as if it is in Yehoshuah's favor. It is not. Rome takes only a little more account of women than Greece ever did. "That is my advice to you"—he lowers his head—"in return for a swift and merciful death. I've killed your men. Your soldiers will love you for doing away with me. It will be easier for you to keep them in line."
Pilate's lip curls.
"The soldiers will obey me because it is their duty so to do. They owe it to me, to Rome, to their Emperor."
He motions with his head to the little golden statue of the God-Emperor in the alcove shrine opposite the window.
"You should still execute me. If you want to be wise."
It is so easy to bait Pilate. He is entirely unable to conceal his reactions. He is angry that Bar-Avo has suggested a wise course of action, implied that he is not wise already.
"I know what men like you are. You consider it an honor to die at our hands, fighting. What if I don't want to give you that honor? What if I keep you here as my slave? There'd be no martyr's death for you then, no crowd of wailing women to keep your name alive and use it to spur on further rebellion."
Bar-Avo shrugs.
"I am in your hands, Prefect. Do with me as you see fit."
Pilate narrows his eyes, certain now that some game is being played with him.
"And what if I let you go?"
"My men would, of course, be delighted."
"Yes," says Pilate, "yes, your men. Ten thousand of them, they say, across Judea, loyal to you."
This is not true, but Bar-Avo does not contradict him. There are nearer five thousand and they are loyal not to him but to the cause. To live free is more important than merely to live. Loyalty to him would hurt that cause. They must be willing to give him up if necessary; he would do the same to them.
"Yes," Pilate muses, "let them taste the mercy of Rome as well as the kiss of her strap."
The man is not an idiot, and yet he behaves like an idiot. It is pride. If another man were considering this course of action, Pilate would bring him up easily on five or six points which make it unthinkably foolish. But he cannot bring his mind to bear on his own plans.
"They would be grateful to me, would they not, if I released their master?"
"They would suspect I had turned traitor," says Bar-Avo, because he can see the growing, gathering shimmer of the way to save his own skin.
"Hah!" Pilate smiles broadly. "Even better! Gratitude and mistrust. Magnificent. You could not have promised me anything better if you had designed it yourself."
Bar-Avo tries to make his face as impassive as a stone. As if the thought of what he has done has hardened his heart.
"I'll tell you what," says Pilate, "I'll make a game of it."
His men are in the crowd. Bar-Avo sees them as soon as he and Yehoshuah are brought out blinking into the light of the square below Pilate's home, the place where later on the Prefect has his soldiers massacre all those men.
They are here to see him die, perhaps. Or to start a riot, or join in with one if one starts. They mingle quietly with the crowd. The hoods of their cloaks are drawn up around their faces. There are perhaps two hundred people here and probably forty of them are his own men. Because of the respect and love they hold him. Not to try to save him, but to witness his death and bear witness of it to his friends, and to his mother, and to his wife and sons.
He sees two or three of the friends of Yehoshuah in the crowd. He had a smaller band, of course, and they were not strong men, not used to fighting or to witnessing death at the hands of Rome. He wishes more of Yehoshuah's men were here. Such a united force should see how Rome kills. If they saw, they could not help but rise up.
Pilate addresses the crowd.
"People of Jerusalem!" he shouts. "I come here today to offer you a choice!"
The crowd stirs and mutters. He has played this little game before. He does not always do it, only sometimes. So they should not become complacent, of course.
"Your will is important to me! Rome does not wish to hurt you, only to bring you order and good governance. Therefore, I have two criminals here: the preacher Yehoshuah, who called himself the King of the Jews, and Barabbas, a rebel who murdered men during the rebellion."
There is more muttering. Not men, the crowd are thinking to themselves, soldiers. Who do the Jews kill in a rebellion? Not other Jews. Soldiers. Even those who didn't know that Bar-Avo had killed soldiers know it now. Pilate has as good as said: here is a freedom fighter, a hero. Does he know he's said it? It's so hard to tell with that man whether he's being cunning or stupid. Or whether his cunning is the same as his stupidity, because only a stupid man would try to be cunning like that.
"I am going to allow you to decide which of these men shall live and which shall be executed. They are both criminals, both found guilty by your courts!"
But we know who influences the courts, murmur the crowd, we know who tells them whom they may find guilty and whom innocent.
"This man Yehoshuah has blasphemed against your God! And this man Barabbas has murdered men!"
But there are women in that crowd to whom Bar-Avo's men have given bread when the Romans burned the wheat field. There are men in that crowd whom Bar-Avo's men have fought with, defending their homes from bandits. There are children in that crowd whom Bar-Avo's men have found medicine for. No group of guerrilla fighters can last for long without the love of the people they live among. What could Yehoshuah possibly have to compare with that? No preacher has anything to offer to an oppressed people that compares with bread and water and tinctures and swords.
"So which do you choose?" he shouts. "You can save one and only one! Which of these men will you save?"
And there's no choice, none at all. Yehoshuah's friends try to call for him, but there aren't enough of them, and they're drowned out by the voices rising up one on another on another saying, "Barabbas! Give us Barabbas! Blessed Barabbas!"
It is a pitilessly cruel game. If they refuse to call out names—and it has happened before, like gladiators refusing to fight—Pilate will simply kill both men. It is entirely unfair. It makes a mockery of life itself. And yet what can anyone do but participate?
Bar-Avo stares at Yehoshuah. Yehoshuah is looking out at the crowd, where his scattered friends are shouting themselves hoarse on his behalf. There is a man with tears streaming down his face as he shouts, "Yehoshuah! Yehoshuah!" Bar-Avo can see his lips moving, but the sound does not reach, so great is the clamor of "Barabbas! Barabbas!"
Pilate is disconcerted by the vehemence of the cries. Whatever calculation he thought he'd made, it seems to have fallen out differently from his expectation. His shoulders slope. He quiets the crowd. They settle down watchfully. He could do anything.
"But this man," he says, "don't you want this King of the Jews?"
And it's clear to the crowd that he's mocking them now. As if they've been left with any such thing as a rightful king, as if they'd be able to tell their rightful king when they saw him.
It is nearly one hundred years this year since Rome took hold of Jerusalem and breached her and penetrated her by force. He is asking this question as if every king for one hundred years hasn't been placed on the throne by Rome. He despises them, and it is obvious in every word he utters.
"What shall I do with this King of the Jews?" he says.
"Execute him!" shouts someone in the crowd, and the rest take up the cry of "Barabbas!" again. The few pitiful voices calling out the other name are entirely inaudible.
How is it possible that a whole life can come down to this moment: seeing how many friends you have and how loudly they are prepared to shout your name?
Bar-Avo wants to live, he thinks, but not like this. But that is a lie. He realizes it as he stands there, with the humility of a man who has been for these past few days half dead, half alive. He wants to live and he does not much care how, as long as it does not destroy the cause he's fought for. He and Yehoshuah are both weeping, and the preacher's friends are still shouting his name, still desperately trying to save him, and it is obvious they love the man. If it were possible to save them both, Bar-Avo's men would be shouting for that. If it were possible to expel the occupiers from the land by shouting, they would shout for that until their throats bled. But there is never the choice to save both. There is never more mercy than absolutely required.
A look crosses Pilate's face, and he glances to his left and right as if he wishes he had more soldiers around him. If he were to refuse to give them Bar-Avo now, his life would be in danger. There are enough men in the crowd to rush them. Crowds have a single voice and mind and heart. This crowd wants Bar-Avo.
"Very well!" shouts Pilate. "I have heard your wishes! I hope that seeing the magnanimity of Rome will encourage you to be loyal! To love your Emperor! To stop your petty uprisings! I know that Barabbas, having felt this mercy, will join with me in longing for peace between the two great nations of Rome and the Jews!"
Yehoshuah's friends are still calling out, they are trying to get close to the raised platform on which the men are displayed. Yehoshuah himself stands absolutely silent, his head bowed, his hands tied, like Bar-Avo's, behind his back. Bar-Avo looks at Yehoshuah, while one of Pilate's soldiers saws at the ropes that bind him.
And eventually Yehoshuah looks back. He seems shocked and frightened and alone. He understands that he has failed to win a popularity contest, that he has somehow not made enough friends, or loyal enough friends, to fight for him on this nonsensical battlefield.
Bar-Avo too has heard the sayings of the rabbis: that one good friend is worth an army of hangers-on, that fools consort with a multitude while the wise man keeps his counsel among a few whom he can trust. They are wrong, the rabbis, in this matter. In times of peace a man has the luxury of picking a few good friends. In times of war one must hoard the love of men as one lays down stocks of grain and oil and jars of water against an ill-fortuned time. Bar-Avo's friends are his treasure house. They have saved his life.
Pilate does not have to release him, even still. There is no law that says he must obey the will of the people, just as no statute or edict from Rome has told him to ask them. But Pilate is too fearful a man to be willing to chance a crowd like this. He has rolled the dice hoping for Venus and it has come up Vultures.
They cut through Bar-Avo's ropes at last. His wrists are sore, his hands numb. There is a gash on his right hand where the knife slipped—though they were none too careful with it and perhaps the wound was intended. The soldiers hustle him by his shoulders to the edge of the platform and half lower, half push him off. He looks back. Yehoshuah's head is still hanging down. Their eyes meet as Bar-Avo reaches the ground and his friends begin to encircle him, hugging and patting and punching his shoulder.
Bar-Avo says, "I am sorry," and though the sound of his words is obscured by the noise of the crowd he thinks that perhaps Yehoshuah sees the words form on his lips and understands, because the man's head moves. It is something like a shake of the head, something like a thin smile, something like a sob in the movement of his shoulders.
He is touched by the man's ambiguous gesture. As his friends sweep him away, he thinks that perhaps they should attempt to mount a rescue, as they might try to do for one of their own captains. But such maneuvers are risky at best—they would not have tried one even for him. They are more likely to end in losing twenty men than saving one. It is odd, really, that the idea has even crossed his mind, since this man is nothing to him. Except, of course, that this is the man who will die in his place, whose death has bought his life.
He has lived his life in the exact opposite fashion to the way this Yehoshuah has lived and that is why he, Bar-Avo, lives and Yehoshuah will die.
In the marble-floored plaza, as he is taken out in triumph, a few men and women are weeping. He turns his head again to see Yehoshuah led through the iron gates towards the dungeon from which he will travel to the place of execution. The gate closes fast behind him and Barabbas can no longer see his face.
He goes to sit beneath the men who are being crucified, later. He is the most free bandit and murderer in the whole of Judea now, for the Prefect has liberated him in front of a great multitude and so he can go where he pleases and do what he likes.
Besides, two of the men crucified that day have fought alongside his men, stealing grain and arms from the Romans. He pays the guards to cut their wrists as the nails go in so that death will come to them more quickly and he waits until he sees them slump. He has their bodies taken down for burial before the evening, as is right. He has already told his loyal lieutenants to bring pouches of silver to the men's families. This is how a man makes friends and keeps them.
He would have told the guards to do the same trick with Yehoshuah, to ease his passing, but some of the man's family and friends are standing by. One of them, the man he'd seen weeping in the plaza, spits and shouts as he walks past, "Murderer! You should be up on that cross, not my master!"
And he finds he no longer has a mind to help that death go swiftly.
It is not, in any case, the worst method of execution Rome has ever devised. There is a particular thing they do which begins with hanging a man upside down by his ankles between two trees and slowly, across many hours or even days, sawing him vertically in half from scrotum to neck. It is astonishing how long a man will live like this, upside down, when he would die right side up. By contrast, crucifixion is merciful. There is another thing he has heard is done in Persia, where maggots of a particular beetle are introduced under the flesh and the man is fed milk and honey to keep him alive while the maggots burrow through his sinews and make their nest in his belly and sometimes crawl out alive through his eyes and ears and nose while he is still himself just living. Sufficiently living to scream, anyway. Death, the only inevitable item on the list of life, is nonetheless such a constant matter of human creativity. He finds he has an odd admiration for it. He would never have had the ingenuity to devise such methods.
He wonders, as he lingers by the crosses, whether it is his destiny to end his days here too, pinioned and waiting to be food for ravens. It is most likely, he thinks. That is how it will probably fall out. He will join all the thousands upon thousands of men whom Rome has nailed up, but the important thing is to make sure he has scratched her face before that day.
Afterwards, he finds the man who betrayed him. His dear friend Ya'ir, the one who was his most loyal and trusted follower, the one who fought alongside him, his most precious Ya'ir.
Bar-Avo is crying when he talks to Ya'ir.
"I trusted you," he says, "I gave you everything, I looked after you and your family, you are my brother."
Ya'ir, tied with rope at wrists and ankles, gagged across his mouth, says nothing.
"If you had a reason for me, any reason at all," says Bar-Avo, "maybe it would be different."
Ya'ir does not even attempt to speak. His eyes are dead already. What can the reason possibly have been? Only that he had capitulated, taken the Roman money, agreed to betray them because he had accepted that Rome was the only power and had the only favor worth gaining.
Bar-Avo leaps up from his chair and strikes him across the face, but still he says nothing.
They keep him for three days. They have to perform a certain number of unpleasant tasks to be sure they've found out everything he knows. Bar-Avo watches, for the most part, but does not participate, and it becomes clear over time that Ya'ir does not know much.
They hang him in the end, from a tree near the village where they've been hiding, and put it about that it was a suicide. If anyone questions this story or even wonders if it was true, they do not dare to say it out loud.
He sends later to root out what happened to that Yehoshuah's followers and family. It is not only sentiment that makes him do it; a rabble army looking for a new leader could be useful to him. He gets back a garbled tale that the dead man's body was stolen, probably by his family, but perhaps by some of the hangers-on who wanted to set up a shrine to the holy man. He asks his own people to report back if they find out the truth of the story, but no one ever tells him a convincing tale about it.
In those days, Av-Raham dies. It is not sudden or violent; he is an old man now, nearing eighty, and his spirit burns brightly but his body is frail. He has time to gather his men to him, to tell them to keep fighting—they know that—and to name his successors. Bar-Avo is named, of course, as the captain of the north.
They bury Av-Raham just before sunset and stand weeping over his grave for a long time. Bar-Avo lingers after the other men have departed, wanting to wring some final wisdom out of the dry earth. It is for him now to decide how to prosecute the ongoing war.
He says, "They captured me. They have spies among our ranks. If we push on we may perish and be defeated."
And from the grave he hears Av-Raham's voice and smells the man's scent, the smoke and the mild smell of frying onions: "Better perish than live under occupation. Better every man dead than that."
Bar-Avo is pragmatic. He knows that the dead often appear in dreams and visions, that just because you think you have smelled the scent of a man's clothes after he has died does not mean that you should do what that voice tells you.
Pilate is mobilizing his forces, striking back at the "bandits" who have harried his supply lines for months. It might be a time to retreat, to scatter the men to their homes and wait for the crackdown to end. It is not Bar-Avo's decision alone, but he is part of the decision. He says no, tell the men to come to the city even still. If there is no fight there will at least be a mighty demonstration of anger. We are ready now, or we will soon be ready. The people want to overthrow the Romans.
And he is right that the city is ready to burn. That is the riot over the money for the aqueduct. Six hundred people die in the public square.
Bar-Avo is not one of them, though he sees his friends cut down, and women, and children. His own son, still just a boy, might have been one of them if he, Bar-Avo, had not gathered him into the folds of his cloak and broken through the Roman line using his teeth to tear at the soldier holding him back, bringing up his mouth red and with a chunk of the man's face warm and bleeding in his mouth.
Men and women and children. It is the smell Bar-Avo remembers most as the years cloud up his memory of precisely how he escaped and who he left behind to die when he ran.
Bar-Avo pricks himself with this memory when he grows weak, when his heart says for any moment "enough." It will never be enough until they have rid the land of every Roman on it. It will never be enough.
And perhaps on the same day that Bar-Avo decides this, Pilate begins to think to himself: so many dead, and still the thing is not concluded? Perhaps he does think so, there is no way to be certain.
And then it is the last days of summer and the wheat is high, and then it is autumn when the fruit trees bring forth their goodness, and then it is winter when the winds howl, and then it is spring again and the earth which has died is reborn. And ten years can go past like this quickly and they continue the fight.
Pilate is finally ordered home to Rome after one massacre too many, and there is some brief rejoicing. It is true that he has killed many thousands of Jews, that his men have left the city worse and more afraid and more angry than it has ever been, but at last he is gone, and perhaps this is hopeful.
In Rome the old goat Emperor Tiberius dies and a new emperor ascends to rule. His name is Little Boots and he is full of the promise of a new era of tolerant understanding, but it falls out that he is madder than his predecessor and the name Caligula is soon a byword for cruelty and sickness. Caligula believes he is a god—though the people of Judea already know that no man can ever be a god—and sees no reason, as a god, to keep to the old compacts between Rome and Jerusalem. He orders his statue to be placed in the holy Temple. His generals attempt to explain to him that the Jews will rebel, that this has been tried before, that they would have to kill every man in the city to make this happen.
"Then kill every man in the city," Caligula says. Or something similar to that. Or something as unconcerned as that, at least.
Caligula's madness has encircled him so that although he rules an empire as wide as any ever known, he is entrapped within the labyrinth of his own mind. He cannot see beyond the horizons of his own loves and hatreds, his own family, his own cock. He fucks his sister, they say, and makes his horse a consul, and when his sister falls pregnant he cuts the unborn child out of her belly.
In Jerusalem the new prefect, Marullus, attempts to place the statue. And the anticipated consequences come to pass.
Bar-Avo has three thousand men under his orders now in Jerusalem alone, and more importantly the people are with them, the households give them shelter, the young men come to fight with them. This statue of the Emperor Caligula, his nose upturned to the heaven, a laurel wreath on his mad brow, is too much for the people of Judea to tolerate and the High Priest cannot convince them, does not even try to do so. Caiaphas is gone now, and it is another of Annas's sons who meets with Prefect Marullus to say, "Not this, not this, there will be no way to stop the killing." But the Prefect, even if he were the best man in the Empire, would have to obey the commands of his God-Emperor.
Caligula has set himself against the God of Israel. Upon Him particularly and necessarily, for both are jealous gods. All the people who will have to die to wage that war of god on God are insignificant.
Massacres and riots and rebellions and battles are nothing new now. Mothers sharpen weapons for their sons. Grandparents shelter fleeing rebels, saying, "He was never here, we have seen no one." Men are slaughtered in the noonday square and their bellies sliced open so that their entrails slide out glistening as they yet scream. There is death upon death, and though it never starts to feel easy, it begins to feel expected. The land is becoming accustomed to living this way.
For every Roman excess there is a rebellion. Every rebellion is put down with increasing brutality. Every act of brutality hardens the people a little further, making the next uprising more violent. Every act of violence justifies a more extreme show of force in suppressing it. There are fewer and fewer people among the Jews who trust Rome at all. Even to speak of trusting Rome now, of wanting peace with Rome, is to forget the murdered sons, the repulsive statues in the Temple, the men with daggers concealed in their cloaks. The thing has no end. Or no end but one.
Bar-Avo sidles up to a man in the marketplace. Who is he? A baker, by the scent of him and the flour dusting his drawstring trousers and his leather shoes. Bar-Avo has never seen him before. He probably does not deserve to die. There is a crumb of dandruff above his ear. The back of his neck is red from too much sun. He has a hot boil starting just above the place where his tunic rubs his neck. Some woman probably loves this breathing body, or is used to it at least. Some woman would have a hot compress with fragrant herbs to draw the poison out of that boil this evening after his work is done. He should not have come here to stand in the marketplace.
To do good, sometimes, one must do evil. He reminds himself that this honest baker has paid his taxes like a good citizen of Rome. That perhaps he sends loaves to the Roman garrison or to the Prefect. That he collaborates, over and over again, just by living in the city and not rising up against them.
Bar-Avo's cloak flows around him in loose, deep folds. Within the cloak is the dagger. The crowd surges and bounces. There are sizzling scents of freshly cooked meat from the stalls. People are loud, shouting for attention from stallholders, watching out for the thieving hands of small children, demanding from one another where they need to go next and have they tried yet the bread with dill, the cheese, the wine, the garlic, the oil? He waits until a surge pushes him forward into the baker.
They learned the lesson Pilate taught them extremely well. Pilate understood the methods of terror. Pilate is no longer the prefect, but his methods are still effective.
Bar-Avo's dagger slides out so smoothly. No one sees it within the folds of the cloak. He finds the baker's ribs with a steadying hand and sends the dagger through just here, behind the heart, with that horizontal slicing motion that cuts the heart in two. The baker says "ump." That is all. It was an easy death, insofar as men are ever afforded an easy death. His body slides against the wall but the crowd does not let him fall completely to the ground quite yet, they are pressed so tightly. No one has even noticed. Bar-Avo moves a little away. It does not have to be far. It is not wise to try to run. He has learned that before.
He has already sidled up to the meat stall, is haggling with the vendor over the price of a pound of chicken hearts, when someone else finds the baker is dead. It is a woman. She is screaming over the body slumped sideways against the wall, the red flower blooming across his back.
People still remember the massacre in the public square. They know whose trick it is to conceal men with daggers in the crowd. Bar-Avo says to himself: it is not I who have done this, but Rome, who taught me that this is the way to bring fear to the city. The crowd begins to turn towards the baker's body to find out what the commotion is. Now. It is time now.
"Romans!" shouts Bar-Avo. "Roman spies! They're among us with their long daggers!"
"Yes!" shouts someone else, because people are always eager to spread bad news and to lie to augment it. "I've seen them in the crowd! I saw a soldier's knife under a cloak! They're here! They want to kill us all!"
There is a stampede then. Stalls are overturned, hot fat spitting as it fizzles on the moist stone and makes the ground slick, piles of good fresh bread trodden into the dirt, dogs barking and grabbing for unattended meat, apples rolling here and there, women screaming and men taking the opportunity to grab what they can. People fall and other people tread on them, and children are crushed up against the walls and little fingers are squashed underfoot. Bar-Avo sees a child screaming, under a teetering pan of hot oil for frying cakes, and he snatches him up, lifting him above his head, so that he is out of reach of the crowd, which now thinks with one mind.
That is what he has learned in his life. What a crowd thinks. How to change what a crowd thinks. How not to think like them.
He holds the child above the crowd, smiles at it as he would at any of his own children, gives it a roll he has snatched from one of the stalls, dipped in rendered goose fat. The child munches contentedly and when the commotion has settled down the mother finds them and takes her baby gratefully, with a smile.
By this time the market is quieter and almost empty, with just a few sobbing stallholders to count the cost. Let the people remember, he thinks. Let them remember that they are not free. That this happened today. Just because the Romans did not do it, the Romans could still do exactly this. They must never forget that these people are in their homeland. Whatever is necessary to do to be rid of them must be done.
This was the special thing Pilate taught them. The cloak and dagger. Bar-Avo and his men do not often do it. But sometimes, when things begin to seem too peaceful, when it appears that perhaps they have forgotten. People need to be reminded all the time. Most men will simply fall asleep if you let them.
They gather more and more men to them. Not just fighters but preachers, fishermen, healers, sailors, spies in distant lands. His men go combing the streets for people who will be sympathetic to their cause. There is a point when they are particularly interested in healers and holy men—people listen to these men when perhaps they will not listen to a man with a sword. If a man can heal, it is a sign that God is with him. They want God with them.
So they bring him, once, a man who worships that dead preacher, Yehoshuah, as they bring many men whom they have found preaching in the marketplace or teaching in a quiet spot at the edge of town. The worship of Yehoshuah is a rather esoteric cult, though not the strangest that exists, and the man seems grateful for the attention.
His name is Gidon of Yaffo and he is not far off Bar-Avo's own age, rangy and quietly fervent, speaking as Yehoshuah did of the end of days, which will surely come within our lifetimes. He tells how Yehoshuah died and rose again from the grave and was seen by several people.
"Did you see it?" says Bar-Avo.
"I have seen it in my heart," says Gidon of Yaffo.
"That is not the same thing. Did any man you would trust with your life see it?"
"I would trust them all with my life for they have seen the risen Lord."
"But you did not know before to trust them. And if the Messiah is come," says Bar-Avo, "why does not the lion lie down with the lamb? Where is the great crack of doom that presages the end of the world and the final judgment of all mankind? Where is the true king of Israel now, if he has performed this strange trick and returned from the grave? Why does he not take his throne?"
"These things will happen," says Gidon of Yaffo, "soon and in our days. I have heard stories from the very mouths of those who saw miracles. Before this generation has passed away, there will be the signs and portents, the lord Messiah will return and the Temple will run red with blood."
"That last," mutters Bar-Avo to Isaac, the man who brought Gidon of Yaffo to him, "will surely happen, for we will make it happen. Fellow," he asks, raising his voice, "will you take arms with us to fight the Roman scum?"
Gidon shakes his head. "We do not fight for this broken land and this corrupt people. When our Lord returns he will cleanse the earth himself."
"Then you are of no use to me," says Bar-Avo, and sends him on his way.
Isaac says to him, "Romans as well as Jews are taking on this teaching."
Bar-Avo shrugs.
"I have heard it preached in synagogues in Egypt and in Syria. Slaves and women like it, for they say that they encourage all to join in, with no exceptions."
"Tell me again," says Bar-Avo, "when there are as many temples to Yehoshuah as there are to Mithras or to Isis."
"It might happen," says Isaac stubbornly. "My grandfather said he remembered his grandfather telling him of when only a few men worshipped Mithras. There were not always such temples. Gods rise and fall—"
"As the angels on Jacob's ladder, yes, I know. And only our God rises above them all and lives forever. And what good will it do if you are right and the dead man Yehoshuah becomes a god?"
Isaac blinks.
"He was a Jew, Yehoshuah. If he were... not like Mithras or Ba'al, but if his worship were even as widespread as the cult of Juno—"
"Juno!"
"All right, Robigus then. Even Robigus, the god of crop blight, if he were even as loved as that... a Jew... might not the Empire soften towards us?"
Bar-Avo looks at him. What a kindhearted boy he is. How did he get to be so simple, in a world this hard?
Bar-Avo speaks very quietly and low and very slowly.
"Rome hates us," he says. "We are their conquered people and we are dust under their feet."
"But if—"
"Listen. If they want something from us, they will take it. They will not stop hating us. They will find a way to say that the thing they want was never ours to begin with."
Isaac looks at him with those trusting cow eyes.
"Do you think that when they send our good oil to Rome they say, 'This is oil pressed by Jews'? They say, 'This is oil brought from the far reaches of the Empire by the might of Rome.' If Yehoshuah ends by being loved in Rome they will find a way to use him against us."
Bar-Avo puts his hand on the boy's shoulder.
"You fight bravely," he says, "and you love peace. I know it is hard to understand. We want to find a way towards peace. But the only way is the sword. If we do not drive them out, one way or another they will crush us."
And Isaac is still looking uncertainly towards the man who preached long after Bar-Avo has gone.
And then it comes time for him to do what perhaps he had always been destined to do. If we believe that God has seen all things before they come to pass, that every woman is destined to bear the children she does, and every betrayer is bound to betray and every peacekeeper intended by God to attempt to keep the peace, perhaps too a warmonger is destined for that purpose by the good Lord who made him.
On the hillsides the mothers weep for their fallen sons. In the marketplace men preach curious doctrines and strange new ideas to fit with these uncertain times. In the Temple, Annas the former High Priest and father and father-in-law of High Priests, dies quietly without having secured the lasting peace he longed for. He dies knowing that war may come again at any minute, and that the streets of Jerusalem are no less bloody than when the Empire first breached the Temple wall. His sons gather to mourn him and one of the youngest among them, Ananus, becomes High Priest in his stead.
And it is morning and it is evening. And it is one hundred and thirty years since Rome first breached Jerusalem and still she squats over the city, enforcing her will, enslaving the people. And something must be done. Something more extreme.
It is clear to all that they are on the verge of open war with Rome. There have been scuffles, Romans have been thrown out of the city and are pressing their way back in. Some urge war and some urge peace. Ananus, the new High Priest, makes a speech in the center of Jerusalem. It is a good speech and a merciful one, calling upon the people not even yet to despair, for they may still come to some good accommodation with Rome and there need not be war. He calls on them to think of the values of their forefathers, and the love which they feel for peace. Annas, his father, would have been proud of his son for giving this speech and the people are moved by it.
Bar-Avo does not hear the speech but he hears word of it from a dozen different men. Well. So much blood spilled and yet still the thing is not done. How quickly people forget the taste of freedom, swapping it for this easy comfortable thing they call peace. Sleep is peaceful. Death is peaceful. Freedom is life and wakefulness.
He feels a kind of contempt for the people of the land these days. He is fighting for them, but apparently they do not understand why or feel gratitude. He has to lead them by the hand through every part of the journey and still they can be swayed off course by any mildly effective rhetorician in the public square.
Well, sacrifices must be made. For the good of the people, sacrifices must be made.
There is a storm the night they invade the Temple. It's not a coincidence. The Temple is guarded by thick walls, by strong men. There are barred gates which are lowered at night to keep the treasures inside safe while the men sleep. The whole city of Jerusalem is a great guard to the Temple also. If they had tried to take the Temple on a dark quiet night, the moment one man saw them he would have shouted the halloo to the city and Jerusalem would have defended her greatest treasure and dearest joy.
So when the storm blows up, they know God Himself is signaling to them that it is time. When it comes louder and louder, when the thunder begins to roll across the sky in almost ceaseless peals and the rain lashes down and the wind screams, then they know that God has given them the cover they need. No one will hear them now, and no shouts of alarm from the Temple will reach the city. They gather their tools and their weapons and they run through the rain up the hill to the place where God lives.
Up on the hill, although they do not know it, Ananus has looked out at the approaching storm and taken a message from it too. God is saying, in words as clear as fire, that no one will stir from their houses this night. The rain has given them a night of peace, while the thunder is His voice shouting His presence over the land. They are safe, they are well.
"Tell your men to sleep," he says to the Levite head of the guards. "Leave a few men to stand watch, but let the rest of them sleep tonight."
And Ananus takes to his own warm bed in the Temple enclosure, sends word to his wife in the city that all will be well this night, gives his prayers to God for a good night and that his soul will be returned to him in the morning when he awakes. He plugs his ears up with soft wool to drown out the noise of the storm, pulls his pillow under his head and sleeps.
At the gates of the outer courtyard of the Temple, Bar-Avo's men gather. They are sodden already. The driving rain which the wind sweeps in all directions has poured on them like buckets emptied over their heads and flung at their bodies. This is not the gentle rain of blessing. It is the rain of anger, of the God who knows that His terrible will is to be done this night and who is already full of rage at those who dare to carry out His plan.
There are ten of them at this gate. There will be others elsewhere. Even with the protection of the storm, the work must be done as quickly as possible. Bar-Avo is not here yet—this is work for young men. The team at the gate is headed by Isaac, who will one day distinguish himself gloriously in battle but today is simply extremely competent, directing the men to cut through the five iron bars of the main gate.
They bring out their saws. There is no other way. The saws shriek, metal biting metal. It could not have been done on any other night—a single howling cut would have wakened a dozen men from the deepest slumber.
The rain drives and they are soaked through and dripping and their fingers slip. One man makes a deep cut in his own hand with the serrated saw blade, filled with flakes of rust and iron from the gate. They wrap it up and continue to work. A lone guard makes his solitary round of the ramparts at the top of the Temple wall. They press themselves into the shadows as he passes. Soon enough, one bar is free, then another, then another.
The skinniest of them presses himself through the gap and they can work the saw two-handed, so it goes faster. The fourth bar is out when a guard dozing in the outer courtyard thinks he sees something hazily, through the rain, moving at the gate. He is a large man, fat and tall, carrying a stout belly proudly before him and a stout club by his side. As he sees the men at the gate he shouts back behind him and breaks into a heavy run.
There is not enough space for the others to get through yet. The skinniest of the men at the gate—his name is Yochim—freezes, his shirt and cloak plastered to his skin by the rain. He is shuddering. The guard grabs him by his clothes, hurls him against the gate, shouting and calling through the storm, but the thunder crushes his words. He bellows again for the other guards, as he picks up Yochim and then roars into the boy's ear, "Where are the others? Where are your fucking friends?"
Yochim, dazed, blinded by the rain, deafened by the blow, lashes out with his hand, which he finds is still holding the saw, and the guard goes down, his face raked and his eye sliced in two. He is screaming and writhing as one of the other men passes Yochim a sword through the gate and, after a nod of confirmation, Yochim brings the point down through the guard's throat.
The body jerks and trembles and is still. Yochim sinks to his knees for a few quiet moments while the wind whips up again around them and the thunder roars and there are three quick flashes of lightning one after the other. Then he scrambles to his feet again, wipes his face, leaving a long smear of bright red blood on his wet cheek, and they begin to saw again.
The bars pop free one after another. Isaac squeezes through the gap, scraping his arm on a protruding tongue of metal. Ariel and Joseph follow him, then the others, carrying their swords now openly in their hands. They walk towards the guards' gatehouse. No one could see them if they looked out of that window, the rain is driving too hard and the night is too dark. They might see a shadow moving, but it could as well be a barred cloud moving across the face of the moon.
They stand by the door of the gatehouse. Inside it is warm and dry. Isaac boldly places his ear to the door. If someone inside opened it now, they would have his head off before any of the others could stop it. But no one opens the door. Isaac listens for a moment and holds up three fingers. Three guards.
They burst in, swords drawn, shouting with the raging voice of the storm that batters on the Temple. They slay one man before he has even been able to look around, a sword digging down into his neck from the top of his shoulder and dragged out again, leaving his head toppled at an awkward angle. The other two throw down their mugs and draw weapons to fight, but the numbers are too great.
One of them is a boy not much older than Yochim. He fights like a demon, whirling his arms and screaming and yelling. It is Isaac, the leader of the band, who steps in and cuts him with an upward thrust as his arms are raised, coming in through the armpit and slicing into the chest. The other man, older, in his fifties with a beard of pepper and salt, fights well and honorably. He backs himself into a corner of the room when he sees the numbers, forcing them to come at him one at a time. He manages to take an arm off one of the Edomeans—Haron—before they bring him down, bubbling blood from his mouth, falling to his knees and then onto his face.
There are more deaths. Six guards in the inner gatehouse. A dozen priests asleep in their beds—they surround them in the dormitory with raised swords and bring the blades down at the same moment so that all twelve die without waking. A man returning in the night from the privy dies with his head half in a dream he'd had of a woman—not his wife—bearing a garland of flowers. They give him a red necklace before he even knows who they are.
When they have taken the inner courtyard, they send for their eminent leaders—the men who are too old now to fight but will wish to see the glorious victory. They slit the throats of two guards posted at the door to the High Priest's house in the Temple when one of the men goes to take a piss and the other comes to see where he went.
They think that the High Priest will have escaped into the Temple building. But he is waiting there in the upper chamber of his small house. Perhaps he did not think it could come to this. Or perhaps, like his father, he believes so strongly in the power of the office that he knows no harm will come to him. Who would hurt the High Priest? And perhaps he can still reason with them. Perhaps it is not too late for peace.
It is then that Bar-Avo comes, a warm fur robe around him and four strong men by his side. They have saved this for him. He is an old man, but still commands the respect he did in the prime of his life—Av-Raham taught him how to do that. He comes wrapped in layers of warm clothes and with one of his men holding a hood above his head to keep him dry.
As they cross the threshold of the Temple, through the gates that are now thrown open, Bar-Avo finds himself thinking again of that man who was crucified in his place by Pilate, half a lifetime ago. Of how certain he was that the world was coming to an end, and how perhaps it is coming to an end, perhaps it has always been his place to make it come to pass.
They enter the chamber of Ananus. He has been the son most like his father, the one most fit to take Annas's mantle as far as the business of accommodating Rome goes. He has tried to keep this worthless peace, he has apologized for Rome and made excuses for her. He has made the daily sacrifices to Rome in the holy Temple. Bar-Avo has already had his elder brother Jonathan killed. Ananus does not know Bar-Avo's name, but he knows whom to fear.
When he sees who is there, his body tenses. He begins to shake. His lips become pale. He tries to call out for the guards, then stops himself, saying, "No, no, they're dead already, aren't they? Dead, for you have killed them, haven't you? Yes, I know you have."
Bar-Avo hits him across the face. It is not a hard blow. But no one has struck the High Priest in quite some time, probably since he was a little boy. He turns very white. Does he begin to understand now the seriousness of his situation?
"What do you want?" says Ananus.
Bar-Avo smiles. "Just to talk, High Priest. For now, only to talk."
"I have nothing to say to a man like you."
Bar-Avo strikes him again. It is like a game between them. Bar-Avo's composure does not alter as he hits the High Priest, or as he sits back in his chair and says, "Very well, then. I shall say a few things to you."
He reminds himself suddenly of another interview, where he was the one standing, and his interlocutor was sitting just so, composed, behind a desk. Is he Pilate now? Is any man with enough swords at his disposal Pilate?
They have the usual dance.
Bar-Avo requests information about the strongholds of the city, about the weapons in the Temple. Ananus refuses to answer.
Bar-Avo flatters, suggesting that the High Priest has a great deal of influence with the people and that a speech from him could convince them to fight against the Romans.
"If every man in this nation took up swords against them," says Bar-Avo, "they could not stand against us. United, we cannot be defeated."
"You will kill us all like this," says Ananus. "You and your fucking faction, you and your army of ten thousand men—don't you know there are fifty thousand who serve the Temple? Don't you think they're more important than you? Them alone. Not even beginning to count all the others."
"Traitors," says Bar-Avo, "collaborators. Rome would control Jerusalem for ten thousand years if they had their way. The land must be free. The people thirst for freedom!"
"The people don't care!" Ananus is shouting now. "They support you because you bring them bread and water and willow bark for their fevers."
"It's more than you do."
Ananus inclines his head, a little.
"We distribute bread also. And we give them a place to talk with the Lord. Most people... listen, ordinary people"—and Ananus has never sounded more patrician than now—"out of a thousand men, do you know what nine hundred and ninety want? A good price for their crops, a good husband for their daughter, good rain in its season and good sun in its time. They don't care who rules. They don't care about who controls holy Jerusalem as long as they can still go to their Temple and worship in peace. Most people want us to find a way to live peacefully with Rome."
"Rome who slaughtered their sons? Rome who raped their daughters?"
"Even so. There will be more daughters and more sons, thank God. And shall they also be sacrificed to fight an unwinnable war?"
"We shall win," says Bar-Avo, "for God is with us."
Ananus shakes his head. He is so old now, though his eyes are still sharp and his mind is not clouded. Once he had been as tall and as strong as his father. The best of the brothers, people said, the best of the five of them, with those muscles in his shoulders like hard knots of old rope. But the power in his mind is not in his body now. He could not fight these men off.
"God is with the victor," he says, "that is all God has ever done. Listen"—he places his hand palm down on the table, as if he concealed a trick underneath it—"it is not too late to make your peace. People remember my father. The men who were his friends are my friends now. I have a great deal of influence. I could speak on your behalf. Perhaps some arrangement can even be brokered. Your forces are strongest in the east, are they not? Perhaps we can make an agreement with the Roman captains in the east to give you some control of that region—"
Bar-Avo slams the heel of his hand onto the table.
"We do not negotiate," says Bar-Avo, "with the occupying force. The whole of the land is ours."
Ananus will not give up. No one who longs for peace can ever give up. Not even now, with the knife on the table before him.
"There will come a better day than this," he says, "there will come a better way. God has promised us this land. Don't you think it's for Him to fulfill His promises in the time and in the way He sees fit?"
The storm whips up again and around Ananus's little chamber the wind moans and the great gouts of rain like the blood of the lamb scattered to the four corners of the altar splatter in through the open window and the thunder crashes and the lightning cracks because God is angry with the land though Ananus does not know how he could have done differently.
He has lived his whole life under the words of his father, the same words the whole family lived by: keep the peace, keep the Temple working, keep the sacrifices which allow us to speak to God every day. It is he who has oiled the relationship between the new governor and the Temple, who has maintained his father's old relationships with Syria and Egypt, with informants in Rome and along the coast. Every man must choose what to dedicate his life to and he has chosen this: only peace. Not justice, because peace and justice are enemies. Not vengeance, not loyalty, not pride, not family, not friends, not—on occasion—dignity. Only ever peace, which demands the full load of a man's life. But his life has not been enough.
He is calling out loudly for his guards as they approach, although he knows his guards are dead, although the wind whips his words away and the thunder drowns them out.
Bar-Avo touches the spot on the man's forehead, between the eyes, but it does not calm him. He places a restraining hand on the forehead and their eyes meet.
"I dedicate your death to God," says Bar-Avo.
"You condemn all of us to bloody war," says Ananus.
"Rather everlasting war," says Bar-Avo, "rather everlasting flight and battle and flight again, than surrender now."
And he remembers the crowd shouting, "Barabbas! Barabbas! Barabbas!"
There is that Roman game called "one of two will die, and the crowd will decide which." If that game had fallen out the other way round, he would not be here now to complete this task, and that other man, Yehoshuah, would have continued his own curious work. And everything would have been different. But the world continues as it is and it is not given to us to see the contrary outcome. And Bar-Avo does not play that Roman game. It is he who decides who will live and who will die.
Ananus begins to say, "You are wrong," but he does not complete the sentence.
And Bar-Avo puts the knife to Ananus's throat and bleeds him like a lamb.
# Epilogue
"I should not mistake if I said that the death of Ananus was the beginning of the destruction of the city, and that from this very day may be dated the overthrow of her wall, and the ruin of her affairs."
—Josephus, _The Jewish War,_ V, 2
THERE IS A way to break a city, if a city needs to be broken. It is not a magnificent spectacle. It is no swift victory with an easy triumph to be taken in Rome before proceeding to greater glory in other lands. The people will be so ruined that they will have little worth even as slaves. The treasures of the city may be destroyed before you can parade them in glory. Nonetheless, sometimes there is no other way.
First, encircle the city with a great host of men—this kind of victory is expensive, also. One should attempt it only on a city, like Jerusalem, which has rebelled so flagrantly and with the spilling of such a quantity of Roman blood that no other option is available.
The people of Jerusalem had killed the High Priest whom Rome had set over them. They had appointed their own High Priests and minted their own currency and made every appearance of becoming again a sovereign nation with her capital in Jerusalem. Titus, the son of the Emperor Vespasian, was dispatched to deal with Jerusalem, along with four legions—that is, twenty-four thousand men—and in addition double that number of auxiliaries.
The honor of Rome must be preserved. Once Rome owns a city, that city cannot simply declare that it is free. It has to be retaken with such force that the news will echo around the world. Titus, the son of the Emperor, therefore, with a force of seventy-two thousand men.
Second, see that no man can leave or come into the city. Even if the city is encircled by men, you must take care to guard the high mountain passes and the places that seem impassable. It is these people's native land. They know its secret passageways.
Allow no food in, no wagons delivering grain, no fresh-pressed oil from the northern olive groves. Take those wagons to feed your own soldiers with. It will be a slow process. Stocks take a long time to run down. Hunger takes a long time to build. Be sure to keep your soldiers occupied, well fed and entertained. You would not want them to think of mutiny. Remind them often of the treasure that awaits them inside the holy city.
Then it is wise to build a high wall around the city. It will be your sentry if your lookouts are overwhelmed by attackers. Hunger makes men desperate and mad. They say that during the siege of Jerusalem women stole food from their children, men killed each other over a handful of barley. Stop up the watercourses into the city. The siege of Jerusalem lasted from March to August, the hottest months of the year. When hunger comes, it is without mercy. They say that men ate the dead. They say that a woman's house was found by the smell of roasting flesh and they discovered that she had cooked her baby in an oven and was eating its leg daintily.
If you are lucky, wise heads will prevail, urging surrender on the people before destruction comes. The zealots of Jerusalem had killed their wisest heads. Men attempting to desert were killed. Some flung themselves off the walls, preferring to die quickly rather than suffer the agonizing slow torture of starvation.
Your soldiers will be bored. Allow them their head a little, to release their energies. Soldiers building the platforms which would allow them, in time, to scale the walls of Jerusalem used to enjoy showing their food to the starving prisoners of the city. They allowed the sweet scent of roasted lamb to drift across the walls, so that every person in the city looked hungrily at every other one. Titus, a wise leader, also gave his soldiers captured escapees from the city to crucify in a variety of amusing positions. This one upside down. That one as if dancing. Another two nailed together as if locked in an embrace. Such simple entertainment will occupy them usefully.
Do not underestimate your enemy, however. The Jews were cunning. They dug tunnels under the wall surrounding them and hollowed out the earth under the soldiers' platforms, propping them up with timber. When the works were complete, they sent men in with bitumen torches to set the timber struts on fire and the first the Romans knew of the whole operation was when their platforms suddenly collapsed into the tunnels and pure flames burst through the ground and consumed them utterly. This lengthened the siege considerably.
Do not be concerned about setbacks, however. Hunger will eventually destroy the people. In Jerusalem, after a few months, they ate even the sacred wheat set aside for the Holy of Holies, and the sacred oil for the holy lamps. When they asked people to swear they had not a handful of barley, they used the very name of their God, Yahaveh, as the binding seal of the oath, that same name which had been so sacred to them that any who uttered it was put to death. Very few men, it turns out, love God more than they love their own aching hungry belly. They will sink to such degradation of themselves that you will scarcely believe it possible.
As time goes on, more and more people will attempt to desert the city. Use them where you can—for information, or to take as slaves. Do not hesitate to kill them if they seem useless.
Batter the walls, of course, night and day. Attempt to lever out stones. Build up your platforms again. There will come a time to invade. You will be fighting against weakened, sickly, hungry men. You will prevail, for Rome always prevails. This is the whole of the law.
There is nothing new under the sun, says Solomon, son of David, that selfsame David who stormed the walls of Jerusalem and took her from the Jebusites, who perhaps themselves had taken her from someone else.
So it goes the same way. The battering of the walls had not ceased for six days and six nights. The inexorable platforms rose level with the city walls and the commander, Titus, had them test the ground under the struts with long blades ceaselessly. The people in the city knew the end was coming.
They were different then from the way they had been one hundred and thirty years earlier, when Pompey first let a stone tumble from the wall in the glittering air. The services in the Temple continued, but what did they have to sacrifice? They had eaten the sacred oil and the sacred grain. There were no lambs left to slaughter. The priests circled the sanctuary with pale skin and dark hungry eyes and a gnawing sense within them that God was angry and His wrath could not be quenched.
Titus knew that the wall would fall the day he stood in the morning on the highest platform and addressed the citizens of Jerusalem. The stench of the place rose to his nostrils even as his generals helped him up the wooden structure. There were rotting bodies in Jerusalem, unburied. It was silent, apart from the birds circling overhead. He spoke loudly. The dark-eyed people on the ramparts could hear him.
"People of Jerusalem," he said, "you Jews have been in constant rebellion since Pompey first conquered you. Not just rebellion—open war with Rome. And why did you think you had any hope at all?
"Did you think you'd win because of your numbers? A tiny proportion of the Roman armies has been strong enough to defeat you. Did you think you'd win because of the loyalty of your allies? We are in the empire of Rome and no nation would support you over us. Did you think you'd win because you're so muscular and strong? Even the Germans are our slaves. Did you think you'd win because of your strong walls? There are no walls stronger than the ocean that encircles Britain and yet they kneel down and worship our swords.
"No. Do you know why you thought you'd win? It was because we were kind to you. We gave you too much. We crowned your own people as kings, we let you observe your religious laws, we even let you take collections for your Temple. We treated you well, and you have taken our kindness as a sign of weakness.
"Jews, surrender now. We will kill only the men and take the women and children as slaves. Surrender now or understand what it means for Rome to be unkind."
Titus is even now regretting the generosity of Pompey when he stood in his sandals in the Holy of Holies and said, "Let them keep their ritual, why not? They have fought bravely." Pompey should have crushed them, and then Titus would not have had to undertake this long and boring siege.
The people of Jerusalem sent back a message that if he would only let them leave, they would depart, every man, woman and child, into the desert and leave the empty city to Titus. Titus angrily replied that they should understand their position: they had been conquered, they could not bargain. He prepared his troops for the final assault.
The Jews say that at this precise moment a tiny beetle flew into Titus's ear and laid an egg which grew into a grub. And they say that over time that grub bored into his brain and lived there as a full-grown beetle, eating more and more of the matter of his head every year so that the pain and the sensation of being battered from the inside were utterly intolerable to him and when he died and they opened his head they found that the beetle had grown to the size of a bird. But no commentators other than the Jews mention this, so one may doubt the accuracy of these reports.
And the first stone fell, brought down by the battering engines. The soldiers swarmed into the city and began to kill, for they had waited a long time and many of their fellows had been killed by Jewish missiles and Jewish fire across those many months. Titus was no Pompey, and this siege had been no swift and well-managed affair. In any case, the purpose was not to secure the city for the good of Rome but to punish. To send a message.
The soldiers pulled down the buildings stone from stone. They slew anyone they met. They set fires in the colonnades of the Temple and the other public buildings, so that the silver and gold covering the timbers melted into shining puddles on the floor of the great plaza.
And they came at last to the Holy of Holies in the very heart of the Temple, where, they had been promised, the richest prizes of gold would be. They stopped then, amazed. Not just by the precious metals but by the workmanship, the rich decoration on every surface, the finely turned candelabrum, the beautiful silver trumpets whose metal was as thin as a blade of grass. Jerusalem's riches were here, indeed, her most precious things entirely inward.
The soldiers milled around the outer sanctuary, collecting the golden goblets and ewers. And one man, seeing the veil across the inner sanctuary ripped away and the space within revealed, jumped up on his friend's back to get a better view. And yes, the strange little sanctuary was empty. And, laughing, he pulled a burning timber from the hand of his friend and positioned himself just so and pulled back his arm, straining at the shoulder, and threw it like a javelin into the holiest place in the world.
The old wood and the dry cloth caught fire almost at once. And in the whole of Jerusalem there was a wailing, keening cry as of a woman who has woken in the morning to find her child dead.
There were other brutalities. The Romans set fire to one of the remaining colonnades of the outer court even though six thousand women and children were sheltering there, having been told by a false prophet that God had promised him that this place alone would be spared. The corpses were piled up so high on the altar of the Temple that blood flowed in a constant river down the steps.
They set fire to all the large buildings of the city: the council chamber, the tax office, the citadel, the palaces, the dwelling places of men of high rank, even the building that had once been the Prefect's home. By the eighth day of the August moon those who still lived woke to see the dawn bloodred, for the whole city was on fire.
The fires burned for days. And when they finally burned themselves out, the soldiers went through the city and if any stone was sitting on top of any other they pulled them down. Except for one wall, the Western Wall of the outer courtyard of the Temple, which had remained standing and which it pleased Titus to leave in place to show what a mighty feat he had accomplished by destroying this city.
Titus took his troops back to Rome and there he celebrated a great triumph, parading through the streets of the city the holy vessels he had won in battle from the Temple in razed Jerusalem. They constructed a triumphal arch of marble depicting the spoils of war, Titus's Arch, which stands in Rome to this day, just west of the Colosseum. And they minted a special commemorative coin in honor of the victory: Judea Capta, it read, Judea is captured. They struck more and more of them, for twenty-five years. And all across the Empire, from Britain to Egypt, from Spain to Turkey, when men paid for a loaf of bread or a side of pork or a turn at the whore, they paid with a coin showing a Jew bound with his hands behind his back or a woman weeping under a Judean date palm.
"How deserted sits the city that once was full of people!
How like a widow she is, who was great among the nations.
The princess among all provinces has become a slave."
—The Book of Lamentations
Time continued, of course. The Jews did not cease to rebel, nor did the Romans cease to smite them. The Emperor Hadrian, crushing a rebellion sixty-five years later and attempting to forestall another, renamed the city and forbade the Jews from entering it at all. His soldiers brought in new populations to Judea and chased the Jews out into other lands, to arrive in Antioch or Syria or Gaul or Kush or Rome herself and mourn their Temple and conduct their little rites of remembrance.
And in time, a new god rose in Rome. A small cult, grown slowly mighty. And although one might say: this was the triumph of the Jews, this Jew-god risen to a high place in Roman esteem, nonetheless by the time he arrived there he was no longer a Jew at all, quite the reverse in a sense.
For the new god was welcomed for one thing at least: it was evident to all that the destruction of Jerusalem must be a message from the God of the Jews. The wisest men sought for prophecies that could make the thing comprehensible. They thought of signs they had seen—perhaps a comet, perhaps a cow giving birth to a lamb. The new god, the Crucified King, provided an explanation: the Jews had angered their God by rejecting his true emissary. The people fingered their coins, rubbing their thumbs over that weeping Jewish woman, the figure of a man with his sword raised against her. It needed an explanation. If the Jews had rejected their God's true emissary, that was why Jerusalem, one of the greatest and most famous and most prosperous and most beautiful cities on the earth, had been destroyed. Blame could not, this explanation made abundantly clear, in any way attach to Rome.
Storytellers know that every story is at least partly a lie. Every story could be told in four different ways, or forty or four thousand. Every emphasis or omission is a kind of lie, shaping a moment to make a point. So when, between thirty-five and seventy years after Yehoshuah's death, Mark and then Matthew and then Luke the complier and then John the theologian came to tell their stories it was as well for them to exonerate the Romans, who ruled the empire they lived in, and to blame the Jews, whose wickedness had clearly caused the destruction of their holy city. It was as well for them to add in perhaps a line here or there in which Yehoshuah had predicted that the Temple would fall, that the city would fall. This made him look wiser, as it made the Jews look worse for not believing, even in the face of such clear evidence. Nothing happened without a reason.
Storytellers know that people enjoy tales that explain to them the origin of things, the way things come to be the way they are. This story is no different. Every story has an author, some teller of lies. Do not imagine that a storyteller is unaware of the effect of every word she chooses. Do not suppose for a moment that an impartial observer exists.
Once upon a time there was a man, Yehoshuah, whose name the Romans changed to Jesus, for that sat more easily on their tongues. There may well indeed have been such a man, or several men whose sayings are united under that one name. Tales accreted to him, and theories grew up around and over him. He became, like Caesar, the son of a god. Like the god Tammuz, or the god Ba'al, or like Orpheus, also the son of a god, it was said he died and rose again. Like Perseus, he was born of a woman who had never known a man. He was turned into a god and certain things were lost and certain things were added.
And when one peels away the gilding and the plaster and the paint that were applied to him, what remains? So much of what he said, he took from the Torah of the Jews. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is an old Jewish ideal. But Yehoshuah was unique, in his time and place, for saying, "Love your enemy."
It is a dreamer's doctrine. Visionary, astonishing. And a hard road, in times of war and occupation. If all involved had listened to those words, matters would have fallen out quite differently. And if those who claimed to follow him later had dedicated themselves to that one thing—"Love your enemy"—much bloodshed might have been avoided. But perhaps the idea was too difficult, for it is not much observed, even to this day. Easier to prefer one's friend to one's enemy. Easier to destroy than to build or to keep a thing standing.
And so the Temple burned. The walls of Jerusalem fell. The people were scattered into exile in ten lands and ten times ten. And they took with them their unusual stubbornness and their distinct ways. And a book walked those same paths, from synagogue to synagogue at first, telling a tale of how miraculous one man had been and how evil those who rejected him were, and therefore bringing good news for some and bad for others.
This was how it ended. And all the sorrow that came after followed from this.
# Notes on Sources
This is, of course, a work of fiction. Much of it is made up, especially the personal lives of public figures, which tend not to be recorded. However, many of the most surprising parts of this book are based in fact. So, a few brief notes on some of the things that are true. Insofar as we know what is true. My main sources have been the works of Josephus, the Talmud and the Gospels themselves.
## Miryam
"When his family heard about it, they went out to lay hold on him, for they said: 'He is out of his mind.'" —Gospel of Mark 3:21
"Then his mother and brothers came to see him and, standing outside, sent someone in to call him.... And he answered them saying, 'Who is my mother, or my brothers?' And he looked about on those who sat around him and said, 'These are my mother and brothers!'" —Gospel of Mark 3:31–35
Josephus, _Antiquities of the Jews,_ XVII, 10, contains an account of the rebellion at the festival of Shavuot (The Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost) in around 4 BCE, along with the result: "The number of those that were crucified on this account was two thousand."
## Iehuda from Qeriot
"A follower said to him: 'Lord, let me first go and bury my father.' But Jesus said to him: 'Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.'" —Gospel of Matthew 8:21–22
"And in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at table there came a woman with an alabaster flask of pure spikenard, very precious. And she broke the flask and poured it on his head. And some disciples were angry and said, 'Why waste this perfume? It could have been sold for a very high price and the money given to the poor.'... Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve apostles, went to the priests to betray him." —Gospel of Mark 14:3–10
## Caiaphas
"Seven days before Yom Kippur [the Day of Atonement] we sequester the High Priest from his house... we even make sure there's another wife for him, because what would happen if his own wife died?" —Talmud Yoma 1, 1
"And the priest shall write these curses in a scroll, and he shall wash them out in the bitter waters. And he shall make the woman drink the bitter waters that cause the curse." —Numbers 5:23–24 (the whole ritual is recounted in Numbers 5 throughout)
The massacre in the square by plainclothes soldiers is recounted in Josephus, _The Jewish War,_ II, 9.
## Bar-Avo
Sicarii mingle with the crowd and kill people with daggers concealed in their cloaks in Josephus, _The Jewish War,_ II, 13.
## Epilogue
"[Titus's soldiers] caught every day five hundred Jews; some days they caught more... they nailed those they caught, one in one way and another in a different way, to the crosses for a joke. Their multitude was so great that there was no room for all the crosses." —Josephus, _The Jewish War,_ V, 11 (Titus's speech here is also largely taken from Josephus)
# Dramatis Personae
## Jews
### (anglicized versions of the names are in italics)
**Yehoshuah/** ** _Jesus_** a wandering healer and teacher
**Miryam/** ** _Mary_** the mother of Yehoshuah, and several other children, living in the village of Natzaret
**Gidon of Yaffo** a fugitive
**Yosef/** ** _Joseph_** Miryam's husband, a woodworker
**Shimon**
**Yirmiyahu**
**Iehuda** sons and daughters of Miryam
**Iov**
**Dina**
**Michal**
**Rahav** a woman of Natzaret
**Ezra the Teacher** a learned man
**Iehuda of Qeriot/** ** _Judas_** a follower of Yehoshuah
**Pinchas** Miryam's brother
**Shmuel** Miryam's brother
**Elkannah** Iehuda's wife
**Caiaphas** the Cohen Gadol, the High Priest of the great Temple in Jerusalem
**Annas** father-in-law of Caiaphas, a former High Priest
**Caiaphas's wife** a well-educated woman
**Darfon the Levite** a Temple administrator
**Natan the Levite** the chief Temple administrator, Caiaphas's friend
**Hodia's daughter** a wife in waiting
**Elikan** a young priest
**Bar-Avo/** ** _Barabbas_** a rebel and a murderer
**Giora**
**Ya'ir** rebels, friends of Bar-Avo
**Matan**
**Av-Raham** a rebel leader
**Ananus son of Annas** the new High Priest of the great Temple in Jerusalem
## Romans, or members of other nations
**Pompey** a military commander, also known as Pompey the Great
**Calidorus** a wealthy merchant
**Pomponius** a hanger-on of Calidorus
**Tiberius Caesar** the Emperor
**Pontius Pilate** the Prefect of Judea
**Caligula** the new Emperor
**Marullus** the new Prefect of Judea
**Titus** a military commander, later Emperor
# Acknowledgments
First of all, I must thank my mother, Marion, who passed on an interest in the history of this period to me, and my father, Geoffrey, a historian himself, who taught me the value of rigorous research, insofar as it is possible. The interest in lies I probably came to myself. I am grateful to my Hebrew teachers, who may not want their names associated with a book that is quite so visceral as this, and to Mrs. Louise Pavey, who taught me Latin and, more importantly, taught me to love it.
Thanks to my agent, Veronique Baxter, and my editor, Mary Mount, for support, faith and courage. Thank you.
Thanks to Giles Foden, who told me it was time to write it, and to Jacqueline Nicholls, Dr. Raphael Zarum, Daniel Harbour, Dr. Lindsay Taylor-Guthartz, my research assistant, Rebecca Tay, and Francesca Simon for pointing me in good directions to get to grips with this complicated period. Thanks to the friends and colleagues who have read it and discussed it with me: Andrea Phillips, David Varela, Miki Shaw, Dr. Benjamin Ellis, Natalie Gold, Susanna Basso and Daniel Hahn. Thanks to Seb Emina for the word "tallest" and other creative wonders and to Rebecca Levene for title inspiration. Thanks to the North London Writers' Group, especially Emily Benet, Neil Blackmore, Alix Christie and Ben Walker for wonderful, firm, thoughtful suggestions. Thanks to Esther Donoff, Russell Donoff, Daniella, Benjy and Zara Donoff, and to Leigh Caldwell, Bob Grahame, Yoz Grahame, Tilly Gregory, Rivka Isaacson, Ewan Kirkland, Margaret Maitland, Rhianna Pratchett, Robin Ray, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore and Nicole Taylor. Thanks to Adrian Hon, Alex Macmillan and Matt Wieteska for staying strong and holding the (besieged) fort.
Particular thanks to Professor Martin Goodman and Professor Amy-Jill Levine, who graciously took time to read and comment on the manuscript and picked up scores of errors. All errors that remain are, of course, my own. For those who want to start learning about the Jewish history of this time, I can't recommend better than Professor Goodman's _Rome and Jerusalem_ and Professor Levine's _The Misunderstood Jew._
And finally. All books, when one looks at it, have wide roots, fumbling out in search of help and inspiration. This one has a longer taproot than many, perhaps.
This is a true story: after I had mostly finished researching this novel my mother, Marion, happened to find her father's Victorian copies of Josephus. Eliezer Freed, my grandfather, who died when I was two years old, was a novelist and short-story writer, fluent in ancient languages, a self-taught musician, inventor and scholar. I flicked through his Josephus with mild curiosity about differences in translation. And there, in his own handwriting, I found that my grandfather had marked up precisely the passages that I'd been looking at: the ones about Jesus. He had the same question mark in the margin, the same part bracketed where we both, I imagine, made the same frown at the same moment.
So it seems as though my family has been after this hare for a while. I suspect that if my pious and kind grandfather had written a novel about Jesus his might have been a bit more gentle.
Jews aren't encouraged to think a lot about the afterlife. There's some reward, they say, for a life lived well, but better to focus on the world we can see, better not to spend your years on earth obsessed with the world to come. The life after death we should mostly anticipate is twofold: the continuation of our ideas and our studies, and the continued life of our children and grandchildren. So it feels fitting to end the book on this note, in my discovery that I have produced a very Jewish kind of resurrection.
**Look for Naomi Alderman's newest novel,**
**_The Power._**
**Turn the page for an excerpt of the book's opening chapters.**
# Roxy
The men lock Roxy in the cupboard when they do it. What they don't know is: she's been locked in that cupboard before. When she's naughty, her mum puts her there. Just for a few minutes. Till she calms down. Slowly, over the hours in there, she's worked the lock loose with a fingernail or a paperclip in the screws. She could have taken that lock off any time she wanted. But she didn't, because then her mum would have put a bolt on the outside. It's enough for her to know, sitting in there in the dark, that if she really wanted to she could get out. The knowledge is as good as freedom.
So that's why they think they've locked her in, safe and sound. But she still gets out. That's how she sees it.
The men come at nine thirty in the evening. Roxy was supposed to have gone over to her cousins that night; it had been arranged for weeks, but she'd given her mum lip about not getting her the right tights from Primark, so her mum said, "You're not going, you're staying in." Like Roxy cared about going to her poxy cousins, anyway.
When the blokes kick in the door and see her there, sulking on the sofa next to her mum, one of them goes, "Fuck, the girl's here." There are two men, one taller with a face like a rat, the other shorter, square-jawed. She doesn't know them.
The short one grabs her mum by the throat; the tall one chases Roxy through the kitchen. She's almost out the back door when he grabs her thigh; she falls forward and he's got her by the waist. She's kicking and shouting, "Fuck off, let me go!" and when he puts a hand over her mouth she bites him so hard she tastes blood. He swears, but he doesn't drop her. He carries her through the living room. The short one's pushed her mum up against the fireplace. Roxy feels it start to build in her then, though she doesn't know what it is. It's just a feeling at her fingers' ends, a prickle in her thumbs.
She starts screaming. Her mum's going, "Don't you hurt my Roxy, don't you fucking hurt her, you don't know what you're into, this is gonna come down on you like fire, you're gonna wish you was never born. Her dad's Bernie Monke, for Christ's sake."
The short one laughs. "We're here with a message for her dad, as it goes."
The tall one bundles Roxy into the cupboard under the stairs so fast she doesn't know it's happening until the dark is around her, and the dusty-sweet smell of the hoover. Her mum starts screaming.
Roxy's breathing fast. She's frightened, but she's got to get to her mum. She turns one of the screws on the lock with her fingernail. There's one, two, three twists, and it's out. A spark jumps between the metal of the screw and her hand. Static electricity. She's feeling weird. Focused, like she can see with her eyes closed. Bottom screw, one, two, three twists. Her mum's saying, "Please. Please don't. Please. What is this? She's just a kid. She's just a child, for God's sake."
One of the men laughs low. "Didn't look much like a kid to me." Her mum shrieks then; it sounds like metal in a bad engine. Roxy tries to work out where the men are in the room. One's with her mum. The other... she hears a sound to her left. Her plan is: she'll come out low, get the tall one in the back of the knees, stomp his head, then it's two against one. If they've got guns, they haven't shown them. Roxy's been in fights before. People say things about her. And her mum. And her dad.
One. Two. Three. Her mum screams again, and Roxy pulls the lock off the door and bashes it open as hard as she can.
She's lucky. She's caught the tall man from behind with the door. He stumbles, he topples, she grabs his right foot as it comes up, and he goes down hard on the carpet. There's a crack, and he's bleeding from the nose.
The short man has a knife pressed against her mum's neck. The blade winks at her, silver and smiling.
Her mum's eyes go wide. "Run, Roxy," she says, not more than a whisper, but Roxy hears it like it was inside her head: "Run. Run."
Roxy doesn't run from fights at school. If you do that, they'll never stop saying, "Your mum's a slapper and your dad's a crook. Watch out, Roxy'll nick your book." You've got to stomp them till they beg. You don't run.
Something's happening. The blood is pounding in her ears. A prickling feeling is spreading along her back, over her shoulders, along her collarbone. It's saying: you can do it. It's saying: you're strong.
She jumps over the prone man, groaning and pawing at his face. She's going to grab her mum's hand and get out of here. They just need to be on the street. This can't happen out there, in the middle of the day. They'll find her dad; he'll sort it out. It's only a few steps. They can do it.
Short man kicks Roxy's mum hard in the stomach. She doubles over in pain, falls to her knees. He swishes the knife at Roxy.
Tall man groans. "Tony. Remember. Not the girl."
Short man kicks the other in the face. Once. Twice. Three times. "Don't. Say. My fucking name."
Tall man goes quiet. His face bubbles with blood. Roxy knows she's in trouble now. Her mum's shouting, "Run! Run!" Roxy feels the thing like pins and needles along her arms. Like needle-pricks of light from her spine to her collarbone, from her throat to her elbows, wrists, to the pads of her fingers. She's glittering, inside.
He reaches for her with one hand, the knife in the other. She gets ready to kick him or punch him but some instinct tells her a new thing. She grabs his wrist. She _twists_ something quite deep inside her chest, as if she'd always known how to do it. He tries to wriggle out of her grip, but it's too late.
She cuppeth the lightning in her hand. She commandeth it to strike.
There's a crackling flash and a sound like a paper snapper. She can smell something a bit like a rainstorm and a bit like burning hair. The taste welling under her tongue is of bitter oranges. The short man is on the floor now. He's making a crooning, wordless cry. His hand is clenching and unclenching. There's a long, red scar running up his arm from his wrist. She can see it even under the blond hairs: it's scarlet, patterned like a fern, leaves and tendrils, budlets and branches. Her mum's mouth is open, she's staring, her tears are still falling.
Roxy tugs at her mum's arm, but she's shocked and slow and her mouth is still saying, "Run! Run!" Roxy doesn't know what she's done, but she knows when you're fighting someone stronger than you and they're down, you get out. But her mum doesn't move quickly enough. Before Roxy can get her up the short man is saying, "Oh no, you don't."
He's wary, pulling himself to his feet, limping between them and the door. His one hand hangs dead by his side, but the other's holding that knife. Roxy remembers what it felt like to do the thing, whatever it was she did. She pulls her mum behind her.
"Whatcha got there, girlie?" says the man. Tony. She'll remember his name to tell her dad. "Got a battery?"
"Get out the way," says Roxy. "You want another taste?"
Tony steps back a couple of paces. Eyes her arms. Looks to see if she's got anything behind her back. "You dropped it, dintcha, little girl?"
She remembers the way it felt. The twist, the explosion outward. She takes a step toward Tony. He stands his ground. She takes another step. He looks to his dead hand. The fingers are still twitching. He shakes his head. "You ain't got nothing."
He motions toward her with the knife. She reaches out, touches the back of his good hand. Does that same _twist_.
Nothing happens.
He starts to laugh. Holds the knife in his teeth. Grabs her two wrists in his one hand.
She tries it again. Nothing. He forces her to her knees. "Please," says her mum, quite softly. "Please. Please don't."
And then something hits her on the back of the head and she's gone.
When she wakes, the world is sideways. There's the hearth, just like always. Wooden trim around the fireplace. It's pushing into her eye, and her head hurts and her mouth is mushed up into the carpet. There's the taste of blood on her teeth. Something is dripping. She closes her eyes. Opens them again and knows it's been longer than a few minutes. The street outside is quiet. The house is cold. And lopsided. She feels out her body. Her legs are up on a chair. Her face is hanging down, pressed into the carpet and the fireplace. She tries to lever herself up, but it's too much effort, so she wriggles and lets her legs drop to the floor. It hurts when she falls, but at least she's all on one level.
Memory comes back to her in quick flashes. The pain, then the source of the pain, then that thing she did. Then her mum. She pushes herself up slowly, noticing as she does so that her hands are sticky. And something is dripping. The carpet is sodden, thick with a red stain in a wide circle around the fireplace. There's her mum, her head lolling over the arm of the sofa. And there's a paper resting on her chest, with a felt-tip drawing of a primrose.
Roxy is fourteen. She's one of the youngest, and one of the first.
# Tunde
Tunde is doing laps in the pool, splashing more than he needs so Enuma will notice him trying not to show that he wants to be noticed. She is flipping through _Today's Woman_ ; she flicks her eyes back to the magazine every time he looks up, pretending to be intent on reading about Toke Makinwa and her surprise winter-wedding broadcast on her YouTube channel. He can tell Enuma is watching him. He thinks she can tell that he can tell. It is exciting.
Tunde is twenty-one, just out of that period of his life where everything seemed the wrong size, too long or too short, pointing in the wrong direction, unwieldy. Enuma is four years younger but more of a woman than he is a man, demure but not ignorant. Not too shy, either, not in the way she walks or the quick smile that darts across her face when she understands a joke a moment before everyone else. She's visiting Lagos from Ibadan; she's the cousin of a friend of a boy Tunde knows from his photo-journalism class at college. There's been a gang of them hanging out together over the summer. Tunde spotted her the first day she arrived; her secret smile and her jokes that he didn't at first realize were jokes. And the curve of her hip, and the way she fills her T-shirts, yes. It's been quite a thing to arrange to be alone together with Enuma. Tunde's nothing if not determined.
Enuma said early on in the visit that she had never enjoyed the beach: too much sand, too much wind. Swimming pools are better. Tunde waited one, two, three days, then suggested a trip—we could all drive down to Akodo beach, take a picnic, make a day of it. Enuma said she would prefer not to go. Tunde pretended not to notice. The night before the trip, he started to complain of an upset stomach. It's dangerous to swim with a stomach complaint—the cold water might shock your system. You should stay home, Tunde. But I'll miss the trip to the beach. You should not be swimming in the sea. Enuma's staying here; she can bring a doctor if you need one.
One of the girls said, "But you'll be alone together, in this house." Tunde wished her to be struck dumb in that very moment. "My cousins are coming later," he said.
No one asked which cousins. It had been that kind of hot, lazy summer with people wandering in and out of the big house around the corner from Ikoyi Club.
Enuma acquiesced. Tunde noticed her not protesting. She didn't stroke her friend's back and ask her to stay home from the beach, too. She said nothing when he got up half an hour after the last car left and stretched and said he was feeling much better. She watched him as he jumped from the short springboard into the pool, her quick smile flashing.
He makes a turn under the water. It is neat, his feet barely breaking the surface. He wonders if she saw him do it, but she's not there. He looks around, sees her shapely legs, bare feet padding out of the kitchen. She's carrying a can of Coca Cola.
"Hey," he says, in a mock-lordly tone. "Hey, servant girl, bring me that Coke."
She turns and smiles with wide, limpid eyes. She looks to one side and then the other, and points a finger at her chest as if to say, Who? Me?
God, but he wants her. He doesn't know exactly what to do. There have only been two girls before her and neither of them became "girlfriends." At college they joke about him that he's married to his studies, because he's always so single. He doesn't like it. But he's been waiting for someone he really wanted. She has something. He wants what she has.
He plants his palms on the wet tiles and raises himself out of the water and on to the stone in one graceful movement which he knows shows off the muscles of his shoulders, his chest and collarbone. He has a good feeling. This is going to work.
She sits on a lounger. As he stalks toward her, she digs her nails in under the can's tab, as if she's about to open it.
"Oh no," he says, still smiling. "You know such things are not for the likes of you."
She clutches the Coke to her midriff. It must be cold there against her skin. She says, demurely, "I just want a little taste." She bites her bottom lip.
She must be doing it on purpose. Must be. He is excited. This is going to happen.
He stands over her. "Give it to me."
She holds the can in one hand and rolls it along her neck as if to cool herself. She shakes her head. And then he's on her.
They play-wrestle. He takes care not to really force her. He's sure she's enjoying it as much as he is. Her arm comes up over her head, holding the can, to keep it far away from him. He pushes her arm back a little more, making her gasp and twist backward. He makes a grab for the can of Coke, and she laughs, low and soft. He likes her laughter.
"Aha, trying to keep that drink from your lord and master," he says. "What a wicked servant girl you are."
And she laughs again and wriggles more. Her breasts push up against the V-neck of her swimming costume. "You'll never have it," she says. "I will defend it with my very life!"
And he thinks: Clever _and_ beautiful, may the Lord have mercy upon my soul. She's laughing, and he's laughing. He leans his body weight into her; she's warm underneath him.
"Do you think you can keep it from me?" He lunges again, and she twists to escape him. He makes a grab at her waist.
She puts her hand to his.
There's the scent of orange blossom. A wind gusts up and hurls a few white handfuls of blooms into the swimming pool.
There is a feeling in his hand as if some insect has stung him. He looks down to swat it away, and the only thing on his hand is her warm palm.
The sensation grows, steadily and swiftly. At first it is pinpricks in his hand and forearm, then a swarm of buzzing prickles, then it is pain. He is breathing too quickly to be able to make a sound. He cannot move his left arm. His heart is loud in his ears. His chest is tight.
She is still giggling, soft and low. She leans forward and pulls him closer to her. She looks into his eyes, her irises are lined with lights of brown and gold, and her lower lip is moist. He is afraid. He is excited. He realizes that he could not stop her, whatever she wanted to do now. The thought is terrifying. The thought is electrifying. He is achingly hard now, and does not know when that happened. He cannot feel anything at all in his left arm.
She leans in, bubblegum breath, and kisses him softly on the lips. Then she peels away, runs to the pool and dives, in one smooth, practiced movement.
He waits for the feeling to come back to his arm. She does her laps in silence, not calling to him or splashing water at him. He feels excited. He feels ashamed. He wants to talk to her, but he is afraid. Maybe he imagined it all. Maybe she will call him a bad name if he asks her what happened.
He walks to the stall on the corner of the street to buy a frozen orange drink so he won't have to say anything to her. When the others come back from the beach, he falls in gladly with plans to visit a further cousin the next day. He wants very much to be distracted and not to be alone. He does not know what happened, nor is there anyone he could discuss it with. When he imagines asking his friend Charles about it, or Isaac, his throat clamps shut. If he said what happened, they would think he was crazy, or weak, or lying. He thinks of the way she laughed at him.
He finds himself searching her face for signs of what happened. What was it? Did she mean to do it? Had she planned, specifically, to hurt or scare him, or was it just an accident, involuntary? Did she even know she'd done it? Or was it not her at all but some lustful malfunction of his own body? The whole thing chews at him. She gives no sign that anything happened. By the last day of the trip she's holding hands with another boy.
There is a shame like rust working its way through his body. He thinks over that afternoon compulsively. In bed at night: her lips, her breasts pressing against the smooth fabric, the outline of her nipples, his absolute vulnerability, the feeling that she could overpower him if she wanted. The thought of it excites him, and he touches himself. He tells himself he is excited by the memory of her body, the smell of her like hibiscus flowers, but he cannot know for certain. The things are tangled together now in his mind: lust and power, desire and fear.
Perhaps it is because he has played the tape of that afternoon over so often in his mind, because he has longed for some forensic evidence, a photograph, or a video, or a sound recording, perhaps that is the reason that he thinks of reaching for his phone first, in the supermarket. Or perhaps some of the things they have been trying to teach them in college—about citizen journalism, about the "nose for the story"—have been sinking in.
He is in Goodies with his friend Isaac a few months after that day with Enuma. They are in the fruit aisle, inhaling the sweet fug of ripe guava, drawn to them from across the store like the tiny flies that settle on the surface of the over-ripe, split-open fruit. Tunde and Isaac are arguing about girls, and what girls like. Tunde is trying to keep his shame buried very far down in his body so his friend will not be able to guess that he has secret knowledge. And then a girl shopping alone gets into an argument with a man. He might be thirty; she is perhaps fifteen or sixteen.
He has been sweet-talking her; Tunde thought at first that the two knew each other. He only realizes his mistake when she says: "Get away from me." The man smiles easily and takes a pace toward her. "A pretty girl like you deserves a compliment."
She leans over, looks down, breathes heavily. She clasps her fingers around the edge of a wooden crate full of mangos. There is a feeling; it prickles the skin. Tunde takes his phone from his pocket, flips on the video. Something is going to happen here that is the same as the thing that happened to him. He wants to own it, to be able to take it home and watch it again and again. He's been thinking about this since the day with Enuma, hoping that something like this might happen.
The man says, "Hey, don't turn away from me. Give me a little smile."
She swallows hard and keeps looking down.
The scents in the supermarket become more intense; Tunde can detect in a single inhalation the individual fragrances of the apples and the bell peppers and the sweet oranges.
Isaac whispers, "I think she is going to hit him with a mango." Canst thou direct the lightning bolts? Or do they say to thee: "Here we are"?
Tunde is recording when she turns around. The screen of his phone fuzzes for a moment when she strikes. Other than that, he gets the whole thing very clearly. There she is, bringing her hand to his arm while he smiles and thinks she is performing mock-fury for his amusement. If you pause the video for a moment at this point, you can see the charge jump. There's the trace of a Lichtenberg figure, swirling and branching like a river along his skin up from wrist to elbow as the capillaries burst.
Tunde follows him with the camera's eye as he falls to the ground, fitting and choking. He swivels to keep her in frame as she runs from the market. There's the noise in the background of people calling for help, saying a girl has poisoned a man. Hit him and poisoned him. Struck him with a needle full of poison. Or, no, there is a snake among the fruit, a viper or puff adder concealed in the piled fruit. And someone says, " _Aje ni girl yen, sha!_ That girl was a witch! That is how a witch kills a man."
Tunde's camera turns back to the figure on the floor. The man's heels are drumming the linoleum tiles. There is a pink foam at his lips. His eyes have rolled back. His head is thrashing from side to side. Tunde thought that if he could capture it in the bright window of his phone, then he would no longer feel afraid. But looking at the man coughing up red mucus and crying, he feels the fear travel down his spine like a hot wire. He knows then what he felt by the pool: that Enuma could have killed him if she'd wanted. He keeps the camera trained on the man until the ambulance arrives.
It is this video which, when he puts it online, starts the business of the Day of the Girls.
# Margot
"It has to be fake."
"Fox News is saying not."
"Fox News would say whatever makes the most people tune in to Fox News."
"Sure. Still."
"What are these lines coming out of her hands?"
"Electricity."
"But that's just... I mean... "
"Yeah."
"Where'd it come from?"
"Nigeria, I think. Went up yesterday."
"There are a lot of nut-jobs out there, Daniel. Fakers. Scammers." "There are more videos. Since this one went out, there have been... four or five."
"Faked. People get excited about these things. It's a what-they-call-it—a meme. You heard about that thing Slender Man? Some girls tried to kill their friend as a tribute to him. It. Terrible."
"It's four or five videos every _hour_ , Margot."
"Fuck."
"Yup."
"Well, what do you want me to do about it?"
"Close the schools."
"Can you even _imagine_ what I'll get from the parents? Can you imagine the millions of _voting parents_ and what they'll do if I send all their kids home today?"
"Can you imagine what you'll get from the teachers' unions if one of their membership is injured? Crippled? Killed? Imagine the _liability._ "
" _Killed?_ "
"Can't be certain."
Margot stares down at her hands, clutching the edge of the desk. She's going to look like an idiot, going along with this. It has to be a stunt for a TV show. She'll be the shit-for-brains, the Mayor who closed the schools of this major metropolitan area because of a fucking _practical joke_. But if she doesn't close them and something happens... Daniel will get to be the Governor of this great state, who warned the Mayor, who tried to convince her to do something, but all to no avail. She can practically see the tears running down his cheeks as he gives his interview via live feed from the Governor's Mansion. Fuck.
Daniel checks his phone. "They've announced closures in Iowa and Delaware," he says.
"Fine."
" 'Fine' meaning?"
" 'Fine' meaning 'fine.' Do it. Fine, I'll close them."
There are four or five days where she barely goes home. She doesn't remember leaving the office, or driving back, or crawling into bed, although she supposes she must have done these things. The phone doesn't stop. She goes to bed clutching it and wakes up holding it. Bobby has the girls so she doesn't need to think about them and, God forgive her, they don't cross her mind.
This thing has broken out across the world and no one knows what the fuck is going on.
To start with, there were confident faces on the TV, spokespeople from the CDC saying it was a virus, not very severe, most of the people recovered fine, and it just _looked_ like young girls were electrocuting people with their hands. We all know that's impossible, right, that's crazy—the news anchors laughed so hard they cracked their makeup. Just for fun, they brought in a couple of marine biologists to talk about electric eels and their body pattern. A guy with a beard, a gal with glasses, aquarium fish in a tank—makes for a solid morning segment. Did you know the guy who invented the battery was inspired by looking at the bodies of electric eels? I did not know that, Tom, that is fascinating. I've heard they can fell a horse. You're kidding, I'd never have imagined it. Apparently, a lab in Japan powered their Christmas-tree lights from a tank of electric eels. We can't do that with these girls, now, can we? I would think not, Kristen, I would think not. Although doesn't Christmas seem to come earlier every year? And now the weather on the ones.
Margot and the office of the Mayor take it seriously days before the news desks understand that it's real. They're the ones who get the early reports of fighting in the playgrounds. A strange new kind of fighting which leaves boys—mostly boys, sometimes girls—breathless and twitching, with scars like unfurling leaves winding up their arms or legs or across the soft flesh of their middles. Their first thought after disease is a new weapon, something these kids are bringing into school, but as the first week trickles into the second they know that's not it.
They latch on to any crazy theory going, not knowing how to tell the plausible from the ridiculous. Late at night, Margot reads a report from a team in Delhi who are the first to discover the strip of striated muscle across the girls' collarbones which they name the _organ of electricity_ , or the _skein_ for its twisted strands. At the points of the collar are electro-receptors enabling, they theorize, a form of electric echo-location. The buds of the skein have been observed using MRI scans in the collarbones of newborn infant girls. Margot photocopies this report and has it e-mailed to every school in the state; for days, it's the only good science in a host of garbled interpretation. Even Daniel's momentarily grateful, before he remembers that he hates her.
An Israeli anthropologist suggests that the development of this organ in humans is proof positive of the aquatic-ape hypothesis; that we are naked of hair because we came from the oceans, not the jungle, where once we terrified the deeps like the electric eel, the electric ray. Preachers and televangelists grab the news and squeeze it, finding in the sticky entrails the unmistakable signs of the impending end of days. A fist fight breaks out on a popular news discussion program between a scientist who demands that the Electric Girls be investigated surgically and a man of God who believes they are a harbinger of the apocalypse and must not be touched by human hand. There is an argument already about whether this thing was always latent in the human genome and has been reawoken or whether it is a mutation, a terrible deformity.
Just before sleep, Margot thinks of winged ants and how there would be just one day every summer that the house at the lake would swarm with them, thickly upon the ground, clinging to the timber-clad frame, vibrating on the tree trunks, the air so full of ants you thought you might breathe them in. They live underground, those ants, all year long, entirely alone. They grow from their eggs, they eat what—dust and seeds or something—and they wait, and wait. And one day, when the temperature has been just right for the right number of days and when the moisture is just so... they all take to the air at once. To find each other. Margot couldn't tell this kind of thought to anyone else. They'd think she'd gone crazy from the stress and, God knows, there are enough people looking to replace her anyway. Still, she lies in bed after a day of dealing with reports of burned kids and kids with seizures and girl gangs fighting and being taken into custody for their own protection and thinks: Why now? Why right now? And she comes up again and again with those ants, biding their time, waiting for the spring.
Three weeks in, she gets a call from Bobby to say that Jocelyn's been caught fighting.
They'd separated the boys from the girls on the fifth day; it seemed obvious, when they worked out the girls were doing it. Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far. "Once you've seen it happen," says a gray-faced woman on TV. "I saw a girl in the park doing that to a boy for no reason, he was bleeding from the eyes. The _eyes_. Once you've seen that happen, no mom would let her boys out of her sight."
Things couldn't stay closed forever; they reorganized. Boys-only busses took them safely to boys-only schools. They fell into it easily. You only had to see a few videos online for the fear to hit you in the throat.
But for the girls it has not been so simple. You cannot keep them from each other. Some of them are angry and some of them are mean, and now the thing is out in the open some are vying to prove their strength and skill. There have been injuries and accidents; one girl has been struck blind by another. The teachers are afraid. Television pundits are saying: "Lock them all up, maximum security." It is, as far as anyone can tell, all of the girls of about fifteen years old. As near to all as makes no difference. They can't lock them all up, it makes no sense. Still, people are asking for it.
Now Jocelyn's been caught fighting. The press have it before Margot can make her way home to see her daughter. News trucks are setting up on her front lawn when she arrives. Madam Mayor, would you care to comment on the rumors that your daughter has put a boy in the hospital?
No, she would not care to comment.
Bobby is in the living room with Maddy. She's sitting on the couch between his legs, drinking her milk and watching _Powerpuff_ _Girls_. She looks up as her mother comes in, but doesn't move, flicks her eyes back to the TV set. Ten going on fifteen. OK. Margot kisses the top of Maddy's head, even as Maddy tries to look around her, back to the screen. Bobby squeezes Margot's hand.
"Where's Jos?" "Upstairs."
"And?"
"She's as scared as anyone." "Yeah."
Margot closes the door of the bedroom softly.
Jocelyn is on her bed, legs stretched out. She's holding Mr. Bear. She's a child, just a child.
"I should have called," says Margot, "as soon as it started. I'm sorry."
Jocelyn's near to tears. Margot sits on the bed gently, as if not to tip her full pail over. "Dad says you haven't hurt anyone, not badly."
There's a pause, but Jos doesn't say anything, so Margot just keeps talking. "There were... three other girls? I know they started it. That boy should never have been near you. They've been checked out at John Muir. You just gave the kid a scare."
"I know."
All right. Verbal communication. A start.
"Was that the... first time you've done it?"
Jocelyn rolls her eyes. She plucks at the comforter with one hand. "This is brand new to both of us, OK? How long have you been doing it?"
She mutters so low that Margot can barely hear, "Six months."
"Six _months_?"
Mistake. Never express incredulity, never alarm. Jocelyn draws her knees up.
"I'm sorry," says Margot. "It's just... it's a surprise, that's all."
Jos frowns. "Plenty of girls started it before I did. It was... it was kinda funny... when it started, like static electricity."
Static electricity. What was it, you combed your hair and stuck a balloon to it? An activity for bored six-year-olds at birthday parties.
"It was this funny, crazy thing girls were doing. There were secret videos online. How to do tricks with it."
It's this exact moment, yes, when any secret you have from your parents becomes precious. Anything you know that they've never heard of.
"How did you... how did you learn to do it?"
Jos says, "I don't know. I just felt I could do it, OK. It's like a sort of... _twist_."
"Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell me?"
She looks through the window to the lawn. Beyond the high back fence, men and women with cameras are already gathering.
"I don't know."
Margot remembers trying to talk to her own mother about boys or the stuff that happened at parties. About how far was _too far_ , where a boy's hand should stop. She remembers the absolute impossibility of those conversations.
"Show me."
Jos narrows her eyes. "I can't... I'd hurt you."
"Have you been practicing? Can you control it well enough so you know you wouldn't kill me, or give me a fit?"
Jos takes a deep breath. Puffs her cheeks out. Lets the breath out slowly. "Yes."
Her mother nods. This is the girl she knows: conscientious and serious. Still Jos. "Then show me."
"I can't control it well enough for it not to hurt, OK?"
"How much will it hurt?"
Jos splays her fingers wide, looks at her palms. "Mine comes and goes. Sometimes it's strong, sometimes it's nothing."
Margot presses her lips together. "OK."
Jos extends her hand, then pulls it back. "I don't want to."
There was a time when every crevice of this child's body was Margot's to clean and care for. It is not OK with her not to know her own child's strength. "No more secrets. Show me."
Jos is near to tears. She places her forefinger and her middle finger on her mother's arm. Margot waits to see Jos _do_ something; hold her breath, or wrinkle her brow, or show exertion in the muscles of her arm, but there's nothing. Only the pain.
She has read the preliminary reports out of the CDC noting that the power "particularly affects the pain centers of the human brain," meaning that, while it looks like electrocution, it hurts more than it needs to. It is a targeted pulse which sets up a response in the body's pain receptors. Nonetheless, she'd expected it to look like something; to see her flesh crisping and wrinkling, or to watch the arcing current, quick as a snake's bite.
Instead, she smells the scent of wet leaves after a rainstorm. An apple orchard with the windfalls turning to rot, just as it was on her parents' farm.
And then it hurts. From the place on her forearm where Jos is touching her, it starts as a dull bone-ache. The flu, traveling through the muscles and joints. It deepens. Something is cracking her bone, twisting it, bending it, and she wants to tell Jos to stop but she can't open her mouth. It burrows through the bone like it's splintering apart from the inside; she can't stop herself seeing a tumor, a solid, sticky lump bursting out through the marrow of her arm, splitting the ulna and the radius to sharp fragments. She feels sick. She wants to cry out. The pain radiates across her arm and, nauseatingly, through her body. There's not a part of her it hasn't touched now; she feels it echo in her head and down her spine, across her back, around her throat and out, spreading across her collarbone.
The collarbone. It has only been a few seconds, but the moments have elongated. Only pain can bring such attention to the body; this is how Margot notices the answering echo in her chest. Among the forests and mountains of pain, a chiming note along her collarbone. Like answering to like.
It reminds her of something. A game she played when she was a girl. How funny: she hasn't thought of that game in years. She never told anyone about it; she knew she mustn't, although she couldn't say how she knew. In the game, she was a witch, and she could make a ball of light in the palm of her hand. Her brothers played that they were spacemen with plastic ray-guns they'd bought with cereal-packet tokens, but the little game she'd played entirely by herself among the beech trees along the rim of their property was different. In her game, she didn't need a gun, or space-helmet, or lightsaber. In the game Margot played when she was a child, she was enough all by herself.
There is a tingling feeling in her chest and arms and hands. Like a dead arm, waking up. The pain is not gone now, but it is irrelevant. Something else is happening. Instinctively, she digs her hands into Jocelyn's patchwork comforter. She smells the scent of the beech trees, as if she were back beneath their woody protection, their musk of old timber and wet loam.
She sendeth her lightning even unto the ends of the earth.
When she opens her eyes, there is a pattern around each of her hands. Concentric circles, light and dark, light and dark, burned into the comforter where her hands clutched it. And she knows, she felt that _twist_ , and she remembers that maybe she has always known it and it has always belonged to her. Hers to cup in her hand. Hers to command to strike.
"Oh God," she says. "Oh God."
Learn more about _The Power_.
This excerpt from _The Power_ copyright © 2016 by Naomi Alderman
# About the Author
Naomi Alderman is the author of _The Power, The Liars' Gospel_ and _Disobedience,_ which won the Orange Prize for New Writers, has been published in ten languages, and is being made into a film by Rachel Weisz. She was selected for _Granta_ 's once-a-decade list of Best of Young British Novelists and was chosen by Margaret Atwood to be part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She is the cocreator and lead writer of the bestselling smartphone audio adventure app Zombies, Run! She contributes regularly to the _Guardian_ and presents _Science Stories_ on BBC Radio 4. She lives in London.
naomialderman.com
# Also by Naomi Alderman
_The Power_
_The Liars' Gospel_
_Disobedience_
_The Lessons_
### Reading Group Guide
## THE LIARS' GOSPEL
_by_
## NAOMI ALDERMAN
# [A conversation with
Naomi Alderman ](toc.xhtml)
_What made you want to write_ The Liars' Gospel _?_
I first thought of the idea for this book about twenty years ago when I was sixteen or so. I was studying both Hebrew and Latin at the same time, which gave me two quite interesting perspectives on the same period. My Hebrew teacher was telling me that there were references to Jesus in some of the ancient Jewish texts of the period. I said, "Oh, somebody should write a book about this," and she said, "No, no, no, they shouldn't; no one should write a book about the Jewish Jesus." And of course that kind of strong reaction made it stick in my mind.
And then this idea would recur to me every Easter when there would be all sorts of things on the BBC about Jesus and Easter, and it would just be so simplistic an understanding of what was going on at the time: there are nasty high priests who did nasty things and Jesus died. It's so much more complicated than that.
_How did you choose the characters for these four gospels from among all the characters in Jesus's life?_
They are the ones who spoke to me.
I would have loved to have gotten something out of Mary Magdalene, but I couldn't make her say anything to me.
I suppose the high priest definitely chose himself because that character seemed so neglected, and I think he's my favorite of the four because it just feels like a perspective that I haven't ever seen.
Barabbas was definitely the last one for me to choose, and for a long time I wasn't sure he was right—but as I thought about it, he got more and more right.
Judas also, I think, basically chose himself. I was very interested in whether I could portray him as somebody who was incredibly sincere in his various beliefs rather than again as a pantomime villain character, a blackguard.
_Your portrayal of Judas is indeed more nuanced than the way we usually see Judas portrayed. Can you say more about how that character evolved?_
In fact, the character note for Judas I took directly from the Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest Gospel. This is what you get in the story: You have two things juxtaposed right next to each other. There's the story of how they go to Bethany, or Beith Anya, and this woman comes and pours perfume on Jesus's head. In Mark, one of the disciples said, "Why did you let her do that? The perfume could've been sold and money could've been given to the poor." And Jesus gives a really terrible answer. He says, "Why wouldn't I let her do it? I will not be with you for too much longer, but the poor will always be with you." It's a terrible answer. And then the very next line is "And then Judas went to betray him." Reading that as a novelist, I thought, well, "one of the disciples"—it seems like it was obviously Judas and that was obviously his reason. And once you have that as the reason—because that's quite a challenging question to which Jesus gives an evidently awful answer—that's the basic note of the character.
Incidentally, John, which was written much, much later, came to the same conclusion as me. So he goes, "Judas said, 'Why did you let her do it? The perfume could've been sold and the money given to the poor.'" And then John adds another bit saying that Judas only asked this because he wanted to steal the money and keep it for himself. And you go, "John, boychik, you know you're making that up. You saw what I saw in there, which is that if you're following a man who gives an answer like that, then you have a reason to feel like you have already been betrayed." This is the character note for Judas. He's a man who betrays, but he also feels he's been betrayed.
_What was your own religious background growing up?_
I grew up really Orthodox. My parents are both still really Orthodox. Not Haredi but very observant, keeping kosher and keeping Shabbos and keeping not only Passover and Yom Kippur but also Tu b'Shvat, Sukkot, Tzom Gedaliah. I was probably religious until I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. And I was still fairly observant until my first novel was published. It was really the publication of that novel that let me somehow leave it on the shelf.
_In many ways this is a book about the power of the story more than the power of the storyteller._
Thank you for understanding that. I would hate to tell anyone else how to read my novel, and I hope that I write in such a way that I don't force an interpretation on the reader. But to me, Caiaphas is the hero of the story, as well as the high priests who follow him. These people who sacrificed basically everything in order to keep the peace. And Barabbas is the villain. Now, I think I leave it open enough that you could read it the other way around. But I didn't expect at the end of the book to have come to that opinion.
And not everything that Jesus said is good. For example, the answer that he gives about the perfume is a terrible answer. But one of the things that he says, "love your enemy," that's a great saying. It's a great idea, and by the end of the book, having thought a lot about the history of the time, I thought it would've been better if they [the Jews] hadn't been in constant rebellion. The constant rebellion did them no favors whatsoever.
In a way, I'm with Josephus. He was a Jewish nobleman. For a while he had been part of the resistance against Rome, and eventually he changed sides and helped the Romans. He was a traitor. But the situation of a traitor is interesting, and sometimes people become traitors because the alternative is worse. So Josephus has his views and he wants to argue in his book that it would've been much better for the Jews to not resist, and after having looked into the period I ended up agreeing with him. But the fundamentalists in Jerusalem both then and today would completely disagree with that.
_In the book there are ways in which Jesus seems insane. When you were writing this book were you thinking of any similar modern-day extreme religious leaders, for example cult leaders?_
I started from the premise that he wasn't the son of God. So with that in mind, one has to explain some of the things that he said. Now some of the things that he said are very, very good, and if we can believe the account in the Gospels, he's clearly a thoughtful person who wants to dig into the meaning of rituals and laws. And let's not forget I grew up really religious and there are some really inspirational rabbis out there who dig into that stuff, who talk about it very humanely. If you don't believe in God and the Torah, then they do sound a bit insane, but at the same time I would not like to say that Jesus is mad. At certain points he definitely seems mad, but I think there's an element of madness to just believing things that people around you don't believe—and in that sense I think most of us have some private madness.
I definitely did try to think about the kinds of people throughout history who are like this, both people who have had wonderful influences and people who have had terrible influences.
I definitely think there's a pattern with Jesus that exists with a lot of other religious leaders. Some of them turn into what we call cults because they don't get a lot of followers, and some of them turn into what we call religions because they do get a lot of followers. And some of that is pure accident by simply happening to strike at exactly the right moment.
So if you look at the founding of Mormonism, or Scientology, you can see the same sort of things. There's the charismatic guy at the center, but interestingly, the thing doesn't usually start to take off until the charismatic leader has died and then there's somebody else who comes in and takes on the legacy.
_We've talked about the powerful men in this book. Now tell me something about the women._
Caiaphas's wife, who doesn't have a name, I love her. I discovered her in the text in the way that you discover the existence of a planet, by seeing how the other planets' orbits are affected by it. So Caiaphas is real. His father-in-law, Annas, is real. Annas had four sons and a son-in-law who all became high priests. So this is a very powerful man. The son-in-law is very suggestive because clearly there's an implied wife there whose father was the high priest, whose husband was the high priest, and whose four brothers were all high priests. It's impossible to imagine that she's an airhead. This is a woman right in the center of power and no one has even bothered to record her name. So that is part of the reason I didn't give her a name, as a little protest to the ill treatment given to this woman.
It seemed to me if you have four sons and a son-in-law who become high priests, then the son-in-law is in a slightly tricky position because he has to stay in the good graces of his father-in-law, who is an extremely powerful man. It seemed to me that the relationship with the wife would be critical. How that relationship with the wife was maintained would be of vital importance. I wanted to focus his story on that, so I made her cool. And I thought, with four sons and a son-in-law as high priests, is it possible that Annas would not have educated his daughter? Is that conceivable? I found it completely inconceivable.
And also the second wife, I love her as well. She's also called Hodia's daughter throughout, except he does ask her her name, and her name is the number daughter that she is—Bat Sheva, the woman whom David falls in love with (well, takes a fancy to when he sees her bathing on the roof, let's be real about it). That's also a terrible name, Bat Sheva, seventh daughter.
It seemed to me that to portray the life of Caiaphas accurately one would have to talk about the fact that his position is really dependent on whom he's having sex with.
_Judas is an observer amid this "insanity," and he slowly watches it unfold and gradually goes from being a believer to not so much. These moments of realization are painful. You feel for him._
Good! I've given up being an Orthodox Jew so I have some sympathy for people who have lost their faith. And I felt like I had to respect both parts of his story. There's the Christian tradition that he was the most beloved one of Jesus, they were the closest, and you have to respect that. And then you go, "So what does it take for a person to go from being the favored one and the closest one and the best one to being the one who betrays him?" Well, that takes a break, an intense emotional experience of loss. I wanted to convey that.
_This interview first appeared on jewishbookcouncil.org. It is reprinted here with permission from the Jewish Book Council, a not-for-profit devoted to the reading, writing, and publishing of books of Jewish interest._
_jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-liars-gospel_
_This interview was conducted by Ada Brunstein, a writer and editor of fiction and nonfiction._
# [Naomi Alderman's suggested reading for fans of
_The Liars' Gospel_ ](toc.xhtml)
## Nonfiction
#### _Rome and Jerusalem,_ Martin Goodman
A brilliantly researched narration of the events leading up to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
#### _The Misunderstood Jew,_ Amy-Jill Levine
This book—a close examination of who the historical Jesus really was—in all probability will radically change your understanding of the New Testament. The analysis is intricate and fascinating.
#### _Jesus the Jew,_ Geza Vermes
The first book ever to consider Jesus's Jewishness seriously—a groundbreaking work.
#### _Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Qu'ran,_ Lytton John Musselman
A wonderful book on the history of food in the region—crucial for placing myself mentally in the landscape, and some good recipe ideas!
## Fiction
#### _I, Claudius,_ Robert Graves
The classic novel of ancient Rome, based on impeccable sources and vividly imagined. A thrilling novel of politics and power.
#### _Emperor and Galilean,_ Henrik Ibsen
An astonishing play about the Emperor Julian's attempts to reassert paganism in the Roman Empire. A gripping evocation of how close Christianity came to being a historical footnote.
#### _Wolf Hall,_ Hilary Mantel
Is there anyone who hasn't read this? If so, read it at once—the muscular prose, the investigation of little-known aspects of a well-trodden story, were incredibly inspirational to me.
#### _The Daughter of Time,_ Josephine Tey
A bedridden detective decides to investigate the murder of the Princes in the Tower. A wonderful reexamination of a historical figure we thought we knew all about, and a fantastic detective story.
# Questions and topics for discussion
1. Why do you think Naomi Alderman chose to open the book with a description of animal sacrifice? Why was this ritual such an important part of ancient religious practice? Can modern religious rituals capture the same primal sentiments and reminders of mortality? Why or why not?
2. Yehoshuah's mother says of her son, "He was a traitor, a rabble-leader, a rebel, a liar and a pretender to the throne. We have tried to forget him here" (here). Why does she describe him this way? Is she right to be skeptical of the claims Gidon and other followers of Yehoshua make about him? How are her feelings about him different from those of his disciples? Is one relationship stronger or more compelling?
3. In her grief, Miryam asks herself, "What had been the point of all those thousand thousand acts of work and love that go to raise a child?" (here). How would you respond to her? Does her son's tragic death negate the years of effort she put into raising him? How does his estrangement from his family affect Miryam's feelings about him now?
4. Miryam draws parallels between Yehoshuah's teachings and those of the rabbis who came before him, for example Rabbi Hillel's "Golden Rule" (here). Do you think these parallels are valid? Which, if any, of Yehoshuah's principles were a break from previous teachings?
5. Miryam and Yosef are disappointed that their oldest son doesn't take a wife and have children (here). Why is this so upsetting to them? How might Yehoshuah's path have been different had he settled down and raised a family? Do you think he would have still become a prophet and challenged the power of Rome?
6. Why does Miryam lie to Gidon? Why are these lies so much more compelling to him than the truth? What are the consequences of these lies over time?
7. Iehuda seems to appreciate the freedom he has living among the Romans, including not being held to Jewish laws. Why do you think he feels less constrained by the culture of his conquerors than by that of his own people? Why does Iehuda lie about Yehoshuah? How is his lie different from Miryam's?
8. Do you agree with Iehuda's reasons for giving up Yehoshuah? How does Alderman's retelling differ from the traditional narrative? Have you come to understand Iehuda's choices? Why or why not?
9. Do you think Caiaphas does the right thing in response to the suspected infidelity of his wife? Why do you think the author makes this and other conflicts, and not Yehoshuah's story, central to Caiaphas's narrative?
10. Why does Annas tell Caiaphas the details of how the Temple incense is made (here)? How does this help explain the choices made by the high priests? Do you think they are right to cooperate with Rome to keep the peace?
11. In what way is Caiaphas a liar? Does his "special gift... to lie so well he does not even notice himself doing it" (here) ultimately do more good or harm?
12. What do Bar-Avo and Yehoshuah have in common? What about their messages is similar? What is different? Which do you think is more successful in his mission? What is Bar-Avo's lie?
13. What motivates Bar-Avo? Is his rebellion against a conquering power justified? Is there a difference between his actions early in his career and those he takes later? Do you agree that "To do good, sometimes, one must do evil" (here)? What do you think is the ideal political outcome in Bar-Avo's mind?
14. Ananus tells Bar-Avo that most men want "a good price for their crops, a good husband for their daughter, good rain in its season and good sun in its time. They don't care who rules.... As long as they can still go to their Temple and worship in peace" (here). Do you agree with Ananus? Why or why not?
15. Alderman bookends the novel with stories of two sieges of Jerusalem, one by Pompey and one by Titus. How were they and their legacies different? Would the second have happened if the Jews hadn't rebelled so strenuously and for so long? Were they wrong to do so?
16. What does Alderman mean by "all the sorrow that came after" (here)? Do you agree with her interpretation of historical cause and effect?
## Praise for Naomi Alderman's
# The Liars' Gospel
### Named a Book of the Year by _The Guardian_
"A visceral retelling of the events surrounding the life of Jesus. Alderman's would-be messiah is a puzzling drifter marginal to his own story; the ferocity of Barabbas and Judas seizes the narrative and occupies its center ground."
—Hilary Mantel, _The Guardian_
"Immediate and compelling.... An altogether gritty, intricately conceived re-creation of a time, a place, a people, and a life.... Alderman grafts sinew and muscle to the bare bones of an ancient tale and writes an entirely credible account of a time of occupation, social turmoil, and a nation at the crossroads."
—Ellah Allfrey, NPR
"Alderman's historical novel about Jesus depicts Roman-colonized Judea as a tinderbox where a clash between Jews and imperial soldiers leaves the landscape 'heaped with corpses.' Against this backdrop, Alderman probes the minds of Miryam (Mary), Iehuda (Judas), Caiaphas (the high priest), and Bar-Avo (Barabbas), who alternate as narrators, portraying a Jewish community in crisis, its leader and high priests co-opted by Rome's prefect, its temple in Jerusalem plundered, and its populace increasingly disillusioned and restive. By turns poetic and visceral, _The Liars' Gospel_ liberates towering figures from the stasis of iconography, giving them psychological depth."
—Abigail Meisel, _New York Times Book Review_
"Terrifically vibrant and wholly convincing.... While _The Liars' Gospel_ depicts Jesus's life from an ordinary, secular perspective, it achieves the delicate balance between allowing readers to understand—and even empathize with—the protagonists and letting them lead their own noticeably flawed lives."
—Ilia Blinderman, _New York Daily News_
"A daring and accomplished work on a broad canvas.... Alderman writes in tough, visceral prose; this is a world of blood and dust, sweat, sex, and violence.... She has no axe to grind here; there is no sense in which this is a Jewish author attempting to debunk the Christian story.... Her concern is with the human cost of such a movement in its wider context, and with the way stories grow retrospectively around a complex and controversial figure, whose own words often seemed so deliberately ambiguous."
—Stephanie Merritt, _The Observer_
"Exceptional.... Audacious.... A deeply researched, empathically imagined, ferociously told exploration of the Jew known as Jesus.... Alderman brings to life the world of a conquered Judea, perpetually in rebellion against Roman masters.... Each of the characters' stories is familiar from the New Testament, but each is inevitably reimagined.... The book is also a wonderful meditation on how storytellers bend reality into myth and how those myths can grow into religion."
—Michael Goldfarb, _Jewish Daily Forward_
" _The Liars' Gospel_ is a blood-drenched story of political strife in which the mission of Yehoshuah (Jesus) is almost marginal. The rigorous realism of Alderman's treatment is such that none of her narrators understand the ultimate significance of the stories they tell—or even who the hero might be. Judas is the only character in _The Liars' Gospel_ whose historical existence is unproven, but he is also the one with whom Alderman, scandalously, most identifies.... Without absolving his betrayal, the author interpolates the existing Gospels in a way that makes it perfectly understandable."
—John Barber, _Globe and Mail_
"An ambitious, largehearted book.... Miryam and Iehuda, whose religious representations usually flatten them in the popular imagination, are the characters Alderman brings most vividly to life, and she does so without sacrificing historical credibility.... Alderman plays a clever trick by telling the 'liars' gospels' in third person—she, along with her characters, becomes all four storytellers, each one with a different urgency at stake in the story, and each with a different 'lie' to shape the retelling."
—Leah Falk, _Haaretz_
"Superb.... A very visceral novel, filled with historical detail, clamoring egos, fears, manipulations, the instinct for survival, disjuncts, and mistold tales. Expect to be sucked in.... The best-known story of all takes on messy, intricate, surging new life when freed from its biblical shackles in Naomi Alderman's reimagining."
—Victoria Moore, _Daily Mail_
"Alderman's provocative novel puts Jesus back in the Jewish time and place whence he came.... It's a provocative and fascinating retelling of one of the foundational narratives of Western culture."
—Julie Subrin, _Tablet_
"Provocative and mesmerizing.... Alderman succeeds magnificently.... _The Liars' Gospel_ roots its characters firmly and vividly in their historical and political context. You can see, hear, smell, and taste first-century Judea on every one of its pages."
—Rebecca Abrams, _New Statesman_
"Alderman's vibrant descriptions of life in Judea, from the animal sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem to the bloody battles against Roman rule, richly illustrate a time of tyranny and suffering, as well as a people in desperate need of faith. Through haunting prose Alderman immerses the reader into the lives of these characters, and by endowing legendary personae with human vulnerabilities and passions, she transforms an ancient story into her own engaging meditation on power, oppression, and belief."
— _Publishers Weekly_ (starred review)
"Head-spinning perspectives on the life and times of Jesus, from a novelist who wields her pen like a sword."
— _More_
"Alderman re-creates with startling immediacy the culture of first-century Judea, with its political intrigue and riots, and with its characters wondering at what the life of Yehoshuah has meant to them."
— _Kirkus Reviews_
"Displays a flair for narrative and credible characters.... I couldn't put the book down and finished it over a weekend. Alderman's pace is breathless even when she lingers on concrete details such as sacrificing a lamb or making matzo. While her research appears to be meticulous, the novel's verve and pace transcend the weight of historical detail."
—Sharon Anstey, _Jewish Week_
"Courageous.... Alderman's revision of the Christ figure is a visceral, intelligent one, and it works superbly.... She suggests that Jesus's story cannot be seen outside of the context of Roman occupation and Jewish rebellion."
—Arifa Akbar, _The Independent_
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## Contents
1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Welcome
4. Dedication
5. Epigraph
6. Introduction
7. Miryam
8. Iehuda from Qeriot
9. Caiaphas
10. Bar-Avo
11. Epilogue
12. Notes on Sources
13. Dramatis Personae
14. Acknowledgments
15. A Preview of _The Power_
16. About the Author
17. Also by Naomi Alderman
18. Reading Group Guide
1. A conversation with Naomi Alderman
2. Naomi Alderman's suggested reading for fans of _The Liars' Gospel_
3. Questions and topics for discussion
19. Praise for _The Liars' Gospel_
20. Newsletters
21. Copyright
# Navigation
1. Begin Reading
2. Table of Contents
# Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2012 by Naomi Alderman
Reading group guide copyright © 2014 by Naomi Alderman and Little, Brown and Company
Author photograph by Naomi Alderman
Cover design by Julianna Lee
Cover art: _Jewish Woman from Tangiers_ (oil on canvas), Charles Landelle (1821–1908) / Musée des Beaux Arts, Reims, France / J. P. Zenobel / The Bridgeman Art Library
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
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First North American ebook edition: March 2013
Originally published in Great Britain by Viking, August 2012
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
The lines from the poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden are copyright © by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.
ISBN 978-0-316-23280-7
E3-20170706-JV-PC
| {
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Reiki Rhythms can be used as a private meditation, a background for walking/Yoga/excercise or other activity, and during massage or healing sessions.
'Attunnion' is recommended for use during Reiki Attunements.
Highly recommended for Reiki Teachers! You and your students will experience Reiki's powerful energy through the sound and vibration of Reiki Kotodama.
Reiki Rhythms can be used as a private meditation, a background for walking/Yoga/exercise or other activity, and during massage or healing sessions. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
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South meets East around a set of nutcrackers.
anik-hassan (36)in #science • 4 years ago
In South Africa Prof. Ramond dart in the twilight of his career had trained an apprentice and successor in Phillip Tobias. The two of them would meet a jubilant Louis Leakey in Central Africa in the Congo at the 4th Pan African Congress on Prehistory.
The new skull brought there by Leakey created no small stir, much excitement and no shortage of applause. It was here that Tobias, impressed with the size of the teeth and jaws, remarked "I have never seen a more remarkable set of nutcrackers".
The press heard it... the nickname stuck and "nutcracker man" it was from then onward.
Leakey, right from when he first set eyes on the specimen, saw the similarities to Australopithecenes but was convinced that no small brained Australopithecene could ever create tools and therefore had assigned a new genus to the skull - zinjanthropus because it was found surrounded by stone tools.
The scientists from the south who had found the first Austrolopiths simply concluded that this was and Australopith and they therefore, in spite of small brains, must have been capable of creating tools.
Despite this controversy surrounding this new find, which has basically become the norm, and still continues around new finds in paleo-anthropology to this day, Louis Leakey was once again treated like a celebrity as he toured the globe with his new skull.
The shackles of career past were now completely completely broken. He delivered 66 lectures in 17 universities and other institutions in little over a month. His tale of perseverance against all odds now came in handy. He quickly raised a grant $20 000 from National Geographic, more money than the East African operations had ever had before.
Philip Tobias, after thorough evaluation, would conclude that zinjanthropus was inappropriate as a new genus since this definitely was an austrolopithicene. It was however a new species and retained the boise portion.
Only in 1961 would it be firmly established, thanks to potassium argon dating of the various volcanic beds at Olduvai, that the "nutcracker man" was about 1.75 million years old.
#evolution #geology #africa
4 years ago in #science by anik-hassan (36)
- steemcleaners
- blacklist-a | {
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} |
Q: python convert letter to telephone number I am a beginner to python programming this is my first semester taking programming.I am having a little trouble. we are working with strings so i am guessing i would have to convert everything to a string.So the goal of this problem is to convert a telephone number with words such as:
1-800-flowers to 1-800-3569377
I am not allowed to use lists or dictionaries, just variables and must include a WHILE LOOP. this is what i had so far:
print('format: X-XXX-XXXXXXX')
user_input = str(input("give me a phone number: "))
key_alph='abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
key_num= '22233344455566677778889999'
total=''
while user_input[6:12].isalpha():
if user_input[6:12] in key_alph:
print(user_input[:6] ,key_num)
any help would be much appreciated.
if possible, could the answer not be revealed, but if oyuu have to in order to explain that would be fine. I do not know if i need to use the index function or the .append method....
thank you in advance
danny m
A: user_input = (input("give me a phone number: "))
key_alph='abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
key_num= '22233344455566677778889999'
counter = len(user_input[:6])
total=user_input[:6] #Stores the part of string which is not going to be changed ("1-800-")
while (counter>0):
alpha = user_input[-counter]
if alpha.isalpha(): #checks if each character in the input is a valid alphabet and not a number.
total+=key_num[key_alph.index(alpha)] #Appending the new characters after the "1-800-"
else:
total+=alpha #This will preserve if any numeric character is encountered and keeps it same as in the input
counter -= 1
print total
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
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Builders Risk Insurance, Contractor Builders Risk in Erie Pennsylvania - Domino Insurance Agency Inc.
During the course of construction, Pennsylvania contractors, whether large or small, have different risks. Therefore, contractors throughout Pennsylvania need a professional insurance agent to determine those risks. Domino Insurance Agency Inc. has been helping many contractors and builders to assess these risks and insurance needs.
Contact us to find out more about builders risk insurance in Erie Pennsylvania including the Buffalo, Cleveland, Clymer, and Pittsburgh areas. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
...rons, Face Masks, Cap, Health Care & Maintenance uniforms. Hotel Uniforms: Chef Coat & Pant, Apron, Chef Cap, Front Office, Service Crew, Utility, Coat, Blazer, Safari, Housekeeping, Tie, Bell Boy, Door man, Bar dress, Driver, Spa, Resort etc., We have variety of ranges as per clients satisfaction.
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"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
Understanding the movement of animals is critical to many aspects of conservation such as spread of emerging disease, proliferation of invasive species, changes in land-use patterns, and responses to global climate change. Movement processes are especially important for amphibian management and conservation as species declines and extinctions worldwide become ever more apparent. To better integrate behavioral and ecological data on amphibian movements with our use of spatially explicit demographic models and guide effective conservation solutions, I present 1) a synopsis of the literature regarding behavior, ecology, and evolution of movement in pond-breeding amphibians possessing biphasic life cycles to distinguish between migration and dispersal processes, 2) a working hypothesis of juvenile-based dispersal, and 3) a discussion of conservation issues that follow from distinguishing the spatial and temporal movements of amphibians at different scales. I define amphibian migration as intrapopulational, round-trip movements toward and away from aquatic breeding sites. Population-level management, in general, can be focused on spatial scales of <1.0 km with attention focused on adult population and juveniles that remain near the natal wetland. I define amphibian dispersal as interpopulational, unidirectional movements from natal sites to other breeding sites. Metapopulation- or landscape-level management can be focused on movements among populations at spatial scales >1.0–10.0 km and on importance of terrestrial connectivity. The ultimate goal of conservation for amphibians should be long-term regional persistence by addressing management issues at both local and metapopulation scales. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
On 6th March 2019 we held a Recovery Event at Bridge with the emphasis on mental health, this was in preparation for Mental Health Awareness Week 13th - 19th May 2019.
We were very lucky to have received an offer from Captain Krankypants (Trace Dann) to deliver a talk about Living and Surviving PTSD and Depression.
This was a personal, entertaining, emotional talk, which our staff, members and volunteers found the experience to be all of the above, but also, funny, thought provoking and for some very reassuring and comforting, and more importantly aware of mental health issues.
Two members of Bridge staff delivered a short presentation on the impact of substance misuse and how it affects the brains capacity to function, in relation to thoughts, feelings, reactions, emotions and responses. The presentation also highlighted the in-house activities currently, regularly on offer at Bridge, which promotes wellbeing, and includes Auricular Acupuncture, guided meditation and reflexology.
Approximately 70 people attended, and the feed-back has been very positive. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
Bloody Brain: Let's see… Where were we? Oh yes, we were talking about our relationship. Whether we are in this together. Like allies.
ME: You must be joking—us against the Bloody Brain? You can't be against yourself. No, what I mean is that sometimes I feel a level of intimacy. Us against them. You know, when people poo-poo us, or don't quite get our issues.
BB: Oh, yeah. Like when Natasha said that you can't keep using me as an excuse. When was that, a year into your recovery? Boy, she had no clue.
ME: Or when Danny told me to stop obsessing and move on. For crying out loud, I was writing about you, us. How could I not think about it?
BB: Or when that evil neurologist basically told you you were faking it. I felt like punching her.
ME: I felt like crying. Anyway, yes, that is the idea—those are definitely the 'us against them' times I'm thinking of. They still happen, though not as frequently.
BB: And you now know better how to handle those situations. You're pretty good at nipping them in the bud.
ME: I think there are other aspects of 'us and them' as well. For instance, when you get me to laugh at myself, at us, when no one else would really get it. Like on Friday, when I finally got home, and I was too exhausted to get into bed. I just lay there on top of the covers, motionless, my eyelids at half mast. When I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror, I started giggling.
BB: And during the review session Thursday you surprised me into laughing, with your clowning around. You did it to keep me from completely shutting down, didn't you?
ME: Yeah, exhaustion hit earlier than usual and you just started shutting down on me. I managed to wake you up, then you shut down again, then again and again. It sort of turned into a game.
ME: Yeah, I know, we're tired. Oh wait, weren't you going to get back to the issue of what you meant by allies.
BB: Right. But I can't remember what it was. I'm just too tired. Next time. Unless something else comes up. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
Wildfires in British Columbia affected Ketchikan's city-owned internet provider this weekend.
KPU sent out an alert on Saturday via social media warning customers of potentially slow service. Cushing said technicians also quickly started manually rerouting traffic onto faster roads.
"We continued to do that throughout the afternoon into the evening until about 8 p.m., when slowly our Canadian friends started giving us alternate routes so that we could start adding service back onto the microwave," he said.
KPU links to the Canadian grid through a microwave connection with Prince Rupert.
Cushing said full capacity was restored by 1 a.m. Sunday. But, he says, the wildfires are still burning, which could lead to more problems for local internet connections.
Cushing recommends KPU internet customers keep an eye on the utility's Facebook page for the most recent updates about service issues. | {
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} |
Tomm
PRESIDENT, CREATIVE DIRECTOR & FOUNDER
Tomm is passionate about his love for the automobile, whether he's restoring them or racing them, photographing them or writing about them. He is currently working on a '62 Thunderbird convertible, races an '06 Mustang GT convertible, and has his eye on fixing up a rust-free '67 MGB… or maybe a '59 Triumph TR-3A… Tomm lives with his wife and two children in a 112-year-old Victorian house, or as he calls it, a garage with an attached house.
VP of CREATIVE & TECHNOLOGY
Bill is an accomplished professional with a career in new media design. As for cars…that love affair began with Hot Wheels and Johnny Lightning race sets, then to building model cars, which led to his current restoration project… a 1968 Pontiac Bonneville convertible, which he first discovered during his college days! Bill holds a B.S. in Graphic Design from Rutgers University where he was also a lettered Wrestler. Bill lives in NJ with his wife, two children and his black lab, Cosmo.
EDITOR of NEWS & SOCIAL MEDIA
Ruby studied journalism and writing at Emerson College, in Boston, Mass. She had been going to car shows and events since before she could walk, and fell in love with cars at a very young age, specifically of the 1957 Corvette variety. Ruby has written for a number of automotive publications and loves having a career that blends her two passions, writing and the automobile, and is working towards making the automotive industry more appealing and accessible to women.
MOTORSPORTS EDITOR
Bob's mother claimed, in all seriousness, that his first spoken word was not "Mama" or "Dada" but "Oldsmobile," identifying a passing car. A veteran motorsports writer and speedway public address announcer, Bob has been to more than 100 speedways in the US and Canada covering everything from the local short track to Formula 1 and IndyCar. Bob also has always been a classic car enthusiast, and can be found roaming the aisles at Hershey every October.
DATA RESEARCH & QUALITY ASSURANCE ASSOCIATE
Nancy is a natural-born researcher, compiling much of the listings data that appears on CarShowSafari.com, including the list of museums and junkyards along with their website links. Her "eagle-eye" ability to spot quality control issues is uncanny. Nancy manages quality assurance, identifying, analyzing, and documenting problems with website program function and navigation. She is also the President and sole member of the Toyota Avalon Enthusiasts Society of America.
EMAIL MARKETING MANAGER & CUSTOMER SERVICE SPECIALIST
Carol manages all of CarShowSafari's email marketing, as well as being a customer relations wizard. She manages all customer interaction, handles any issues that might come up and leaves our customers with a smile. A true team player, she combines exceptional customer service, problem solving and process improvement skills to help us focus on growth. Carol possesses a natural ability to find solutions that make CarShowSafari.com more organized and efficient.
VP of INFORMATION
Along with his passion for information organization and implementation, Andre has maintained a very active interest in automobiles from a young age. His first recollection of working on a car was helping his career-military father to install a fuel gauge in a 1962 VW and later inherited a 1963 Corvair Spyder as his first car. From that experience he was hooked, and still restores Corvairs to this day. Andre is also a highly-accomplished expert of military aviation history.
Roger has worked in finance, technology and global markets with numerous technology companies. He is a MBA graduate of NYU Stern School of Business and has worked in the software industry in strategy, business development, and sales & marketing. He has been published in "The Stamford Social Innovation Review" with speaking credits including the State Department, leading universities and many global conferences. Roger drives a 4-wheeler complete with dashboard hula girl and bouncing Buddha. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} |
Egham – OKI Europe Ltd is helping businesses come 'ALIVE WITH COLOUR' by offering end customers free mono printing for a year* and free banner paper with select high-performance digital LED colour printers and multifunction printers (MFPs) purchased between 7th January and 31st March 2019.
Each eligible device included in the offer from OKI's innovative portfolio of LED colour printers and MFPs, is designed and built to give businesses the flexibility to create professional quality, High Definition Colour sales and marketing materials cost-effectively in-house.
The function-packed colour printers and MFPs are ideal for everyday business documents including invoices and customer letters, as well as business cards, posters, flyers and retail signage and advertising on an unrivalled range or media, making it quick and affordable to generate professional results and meet a wide range of colour printing requirements on a single device.
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The colour campaign includes OKI's popular C612n/dn and C712n/dn A4 colour printers, the compact C800 Series A3 colour printers, and the ultra-reliable, high-capacity MC800 Series of smart multifunction printers.
"Our high-performance digital LED colour printers and MFPs open-up a wide range of possibilities for businesses seeking to upgrade their printing capabilities and attract new customers," says Lee Webster, General Manager, Office Products, OKI Europe Ltd.
*Customer must purchase black toner and banner paper from OKI within 30 days of printer invoice date. Cost of the black toner and banner paper must be claimed back by submitting an online claim form. Free toner and banner paper estimated to last for one year, based on typical monthly print volumes. Offer valid on selected colour models purchased between 7th January 2019 and 31st March 2019 while stocks last. Terms and conditions apply. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
Longchamp Racecourse - Triumphant Horse Racing
Longchamp Racecourse is one of the most important horse racing venues in Europe. Located minutes from the Eiffel Tower, the Longchamp Racecourse features a 2,400-meter (about 1.5-mile) course and the area extends over 57 hectares, between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne. There are four horse racing tracks of different sizes: the large track (2,750 meters), the average-sized track (2,500 meters), the small track (2,150 meters) and the sprint track (1,000 meters). There are 46 different starting posts on the tracks for horse racing distances ranging from 1,000 to 4,000 meters. The turf track comprises an uphill and downhill slope with a challenging rising straight as you come out of the final bend. The Finish line extends over 650 meters to the 2nd post.
The first ever race was run at Longchamp on Sunday April 27th 1857 in the presence of Emperor Napoleon III and his wife Eugenie and a massive crowd. In the late spring of 1914, Longchamp hosted the first Grand Prix de Paris, which was the world's richest race at that time, with prize money totaling FF 300,000. As a complement to this race, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe was run for the first time on October 3rd 1920. It was named in tribute to the courage of French soldiers during the First World War. Today it is considered the most important flat race in Europe and participants are winners of classical races in England, Ireland, France, Germany and Italy. The mile and a half long track is difficult with ups and downs and only an animal with speed and stamina in equal measures will triumph here. The highlight of the horse racing calendar, the Arc de Triomphe Weekend that takes place on the first weekend in October each year is followed by 45,000 spectators and 1 billion television viewers in 191 countries!
Longchamp Racecourse lives up to legendary French culinary traditions and has two very tastefully decorated restaurants. They are "Le Panoramique" that overlooks the race course, and "La brasserie Gladiateur". In addition there are other fast food outlets and bars. The Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe Lucien Barrière VIP Village is positioned close to the finishing line and stretches all along the Longchamp track. It offers the perfect views of the proceedings on the track. The VIP Village is the ideal place to enjoy an exceptional day watching the world's finest thoroughbreds in action.
A scenic venue for flat racing Longchamp holds 31horse racing meetings a year with races for Quinte + betting from March 25th to October 24th. Its variety of tracks and famous hill is a tough test for the world's best thoroughbreds. There are certain landmarks and special features of the course including a historic windmill, the old time totaliser- in a neo-Norman structure, the Suresnes pond and the woods. Children can enjoy free pony rides at the port de Suresnes and central lawn entrance. Young children can be left with qualified child-minders to take part in creative workshops or other fun activities. | {
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Recently, top architects and designers gathered to celebrate their nominations for the AIA LA Design Awards at the prominent and chic Snaidero USA showroom, located in the heart of the Design District of West Hollywood—the perfect backdrop for this event. Attendees included nominees from the AIA| LA Design, Next LA, Presidential, CC, and Cote Awards categories. Approximately 75 leading architects and designers were in attendance and enjoyed a decadent feast, which included lobster rolls, a selection of pate and cheese varieties, a quesadilla station, and chocolate covered strawberries. The sumptuous spread was prepared by chef Kurt Ehrlich and sponsored by Architectural Digest. Throughout the event, nominees mingled and met other industry professionals while enjoying festive signature cocktails, including Moscow Mules, Falling for Daisies, and Bourbon Bucks mixed by Black Lab Ventures and sponsored by Element's Room. Snaidero USA proudly collaborated with AIA Los Angeles to commend and entertain all the innovative talent and design mavericks in the city of Los Angeles. The AIA LA Design Awards ceremony was held on October 24th. Snaidero USA, AIA Los Angeles, Elements Room, and Architectural Digest congratulate all of the nominees and winners. See the list of winners here. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} |
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