“I should think not!” her mother said.
Martha boiled the egg, cracked it and put it into a small bowl and set it before her brother. Her mother began, rather slowly Josodad thought, to dish the savoury mess of mutton, onions and beans into the plates. Then, with a plate in her left hand and the spoon in the other, she turned her head, looking at the door and listening; it was all right, her expression said; and in a few seconds in walked her brother Lazarus, the one for whom the second boy had been named. He was a big, handsome, jovial man who up to four years ago had made a humble but adequate living as a weaver. Then his wife, a childless woman, had died and soon after he had married a widow who owned a prosperous vineyard. Upon her he had begotten a child, but she was too old for successful breeding; she and the child had died, less than a year ago. Since then he had eaten, several times a week, at his sister’s house, and once he had said to Josodad that he now knew that it was God’s will that he should be childless.
“So I look on these as my own,” he had said, indicating his nephew and his nieces. Josodad had known a moment’s envy for the cheerful man who could suffer two bereavements in a short time—three if you counted the still-born boy—and find comfort where it was to be found. Lazarus, like his sister, was sensible; they mended up the hole in their lives and didn’t go about with great, raw-edged wounds in their hearts.
For the first time Josodad noted, but without the least feeling of envy, the difference in the quality of the welcome extended to the uncle and that which he, the father, had evoked. His own presence cast a gloom, with Lazarus the sun entered and they all basked in its radiance.
The boy recounted, for his uncle’s benefit, his unsuccessful attempt at pipe-playing and Ebenezer’s verdict; and Lazarus said:
“No ear? That can’t be right. You have two; I can see them. One, two!” he said, pulling each ear in turn, and the boy’s sulky expression lifted and he laughed.
Then Mary made her report, and Lazarus said, “Well, there I agree with the old man. You know why? To play the pipe properly you have to
screw up your lips and in time that’d spoilthe shape of your pretty mouth.”
To the younger Martha he said, “Something tells me that you had a hand in this delightful dinner, my dear.”
Josodad’s wife said, “She did; she was almost entirely responsible. How did you know?”
“By the seasoning,” he said.
“It is exactly how you used to cook, Martha, when you could think of the taste and not how long the salt and herbs must last.”
He pleased them, effortlessly. Josodad, eating his own tasteless portion—all food tasted the same to him these days—felt like a stranger in his own house. And the worst of it was that he didn’t mind at all. They were happy. They gave the impression of being a happy, united family with the uncle as its centre. And that, even if he had resented it, was so natural that resentment would have been absurd and unworthy. Of course children clung to those who amused and approved of them and made simple little jokes. And of course a woman like Martha, who had mended her own life, felt more at home with her brother, who had mended his, than with a man whose grief was unassuageable.
It occurred to him suddenly, just as the elder Lazarus said:
“It will snow before sunset; of that I am sure,” and he himself had said:
“Then I must be getting back,” and sensed that his going would be a relief, I might as well be dead!
He regarded that thought for a minute and then revised it—They’d all be better off, if I were dead.
Lazarus, a good brother, as well as a pious Jew, would do his duty, take his sister and the children into his house, exert himself to find husbands for the girls, leave his vineyard to the boy. And when sometime Uncle Lazarus said—as he surely would, being a man of sense—That is a ruinous way to bring a boy up! the mother would take heed. She couldn’t turn on her brother with the unanswerable words—You reared Nathan!
He left them. Uncle Lazarus was in no hurry to get back; there was nothing he could do about the snow if it fell, except be thankful that it had come instead of frost. His winters now were easy and leisurely and he was prepared to spend the rest of the day in the cosy house where young Martha had mended the fire and they were all about to roast apples. There was nothing wrong with the leave-taking, he was their father and the children were reared to be mannerly; Martha asked when he would next be home and he told her truly that he did not know; much depended upon the weather. Lazarus said the snow was certain but he hoped that for Josodad’s sake it would be a light fall.
Then he was out in the cold air, alone; but no more alone than when he sat amongst his family.
His house stood a little apart from the village and he had to descend a slight slope, cross the end of the street and then mount again to where the flock lay in a sheltered valley between two hills. The last of the houses in the street was the smaller of the two inns in the town, the one kept by Ephorus the Greek, if the word ‘keep’ could be used in connection with Ephorus who, as Martha had said, was usually drunk. It was curious, and ironic, but it was true that the idle, drunken sot of an innkeeper, Greek by birth, was the only person who had ever come near seeing the depths of Josodad’s desolation. He had also, by a timely word, prevented Josodad from becoming a sot, too. For there had been a time, during the first autumn after Nathan’s death, when Josodad, having tried every mental form of self-consolation, faith in God, prayer, joy in his living children, and dismally failed to find what he sought, had experimented with drunkenness and found that to lie down with one’s head spinning, one’s stomach slightly sickened, did at least mean that one slept. Then, when one waked, grief, denied its nightly outlet, clamped down more fiercely, and a feeling of guilt because one had slept and forgotten, mingled with the sorrow; and the only remedy was more wine.
But one evening, Ephorus, quite drunk himself, had said, “Don’t do it, Josodad. Comfort is not to be found at the bottom of a wine cup. I know. I sought it there myself.” And Josodad, so lately a flock-master, and still a respected member of his own community, had been shocked back to sobriety by the thought that a drunken, Greek
innkeeper should feel compelled to speakto him like that. That had been his first reaction. Then Ephorus said, “We all have our losses you know, and they cripple us. But a cripple would be a fool to invite leprosy as well. I know,” he said, “I did it. Grief made a cripple of me and then I made myself a leper—I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, and I’m a fool to do it. You Jews don’t understand metaphors.”
“We call them parables,” Josodad said, thinking of the prophet Nathan … Nathan … Nathan … who had rebuked King David for taking Uriah’s wife by telling him a parable of the man with the one ewe lamb.
“Use your own word,” Ephorus said, concentrating so fiercely that he was almost cross-eyed.
“And don’t go saying I’m a leper. I’m not a leper; nor a cripple as anybody about here understands the words. I’m just trying to tell you, because I feel for you, Josodad, I feel for you. I had a loss and it crippled me, I lost Dorcas and then I took to wine-bibbing and so I’m a leper, socially. Don’t you travel the same road. I’m just warning you .. . warning you.” He’d tossed off another cup of wine and relapsed into his usual silence. And Josodad had left his cup as it was, and had not, as he had intended, asked to have his flask filled to buffer him against his night thoughts.
He’d never been inside the inn since, but he’d always remembered Ephorus with a kind of affection; the one man in Bethlehem who understood what a loss was, an amputation that could cripple a man.
On this evening, so busy with his own gloomy thoughts, he noticed, with a distant, impersonal satisfaction on Ephorus’s behalf, that the inn was very busy. Bethlehem-born men coming back in accordance with the new order, to put their names on the tax register. He’d registered that morning, before going home.