Testament by Nino Ricci Page B

at that standoff; and then again, as suddenly as they had come, the soldiers withdrew and the message came through from the palace that we were free to go. This time, there was no rejoicing: under the leadership of Eleazar and a few others, we marched in almost total silence back to the palace square—where our booths, in the meantime, had been knocked down—and sat ourselves on the paving stones as if we were prepared to remain there until the end of days if we weren’t granted our original demand. We could see Pilate watching us from the palace windows; no doubt he had hoped that after he’d released us we would simply pick up and go, happy to escape with our lives, instead of stubbornly returning to torment him. When sunset came and we began to rebuild our booths and distribute what food we had remaining, he must have made a decision to cut his losses, for he sent his pages out again to announce to us that the standards would be removed.
    It was doubtful whether any of us in the crowd had ever quite believed that the matter would end in this way, that without violence, and by sheer force of will, we would achieve our goal. The normal expectation in protests of this sort was that there would be skirmishes or at least arrests, that the matter would be appealed finally to the governor in Damascus or to Rome where it would fester for months or years before any decision was made—in short, that our people would still in the end be made to suffer every indignity while the administration, even if it had massacred scores of us, would at best be only mildly reprimanded. That we were walking away now with what seemed total victory left us a bit stunned at first—it was as if we hadn’t quite understood why in this case thingshad turned out differently. Somehow Eleazar, either by stroke of genius or of luck, had rescued us, had found the way to save at once both our honour and our lives. I remembered a story I’d heard as a young man of a similar protest in Alexandria, where the Jews, to save their quarter from attack by fellow citizens during some dispute, had simply lain down in the path of the approaching mob; faced with the prospect of having to trample a mile of them, the mob had eventually turned tail and headed home. At the time, the strategy had struck me as foolhardy and craven. But now I saw the matter differently; I saw the power there was in confronting the enemy with the spectre of his own barbarity.
    Since it was dark by the time of Pilate’s announcement, most of us bedded down in the square for the night and only set out for home the following morning. We were a haggard lot by then, seeming more sombre and chastened in victory than we’d been in adversity. No one dared to rejoice until we’d seen with our own eyes that the standards had truly been removed. For my own part, I believed that Pilate would keep to his word—surely he wouldn’t risk another confrontation of the sort he’d just been through. Nonetheless, it was my plan to follow the crowd back into Jerusalem, as much, however, for the cover it provided for my return there as out of concern for the standards. I could not go any longer without some news of our group; it did not bode well, I thought, that I had recognized none of them amongst the protesters.
    It was exactly then, however, on the road out of the city, that I finally met some who were familiar to me, two young men whom I knew by the names of Rohagah and Yekhubbah. They behaved strangely towards me, hardly meeting my eye, and it was only by pains that I was able to learn from themthat I was under question because I had not yet returned to Jerusalem. I was outraged at this. I said to them that surely they’d had word of me from Tyre.
    The elder one, Rohagah, though they were neither of them much more than boys, said, “From Tyre we heard only that you had left in the night, and given no message,” which was untrue.
    The two of them were types of a new recruit that I did not get on