my father was the baby of his family, the little Benjamin beloved by everyone, and somehow or other in our family I fell into being his elder brother, and treating him as such. As eldest son I bossed him about a bit. Or rather, we became ... we became as friends.
"My father worked hard. But we were close. We drank together. We went to the taverns together. We shared women together. And I told him, drunk that night, how Marduk had talked to me for years, and how now I had seen him, and my personal god was the great god of Babylon himself.
"So foolish to have done it! What good could have come of it! At first he laughed, then he worried, then he became engrossed. Oh, I never should have done it. And Marduk knew this. He was in the tavern but so far from me that he had no visibility, he was vaporous and golden like light, and only I could see him, and he shook his head 'no,' and turned his back when I told my father. But you know, I loved my father, and I was so happy! And I wanted him to know. I wanted him to know how I had put my arms around the god!
"Stupid!
"Let me return to the background. The foreground is suddenly too hot for me and it hurts me and stings my eyes.
"The family. I was telling you what we were. We were rich merchants and we were scribes of our Sacred Books. All of the Hebrew tribes in Babylon were in one way or another scribes of the Sacred Books and busy making copies for their own families at all times, but with us it was a very large business because we were known for the rapid and accurate copy. And we had a huge library of old texts. I think I told you, we had maybe, I don't know, twenty-five different stories about Joseph and Egypt and Moses and so forth, and it was always a matter of dispute what to include and what not to. We had so many stories of Joseph in Egypt that we decided not to give all of them credit. I wonder what became of all those tablets, all those scrolls. We just didn't think all those stories were true. But maybe we were wrong. Oh, who knows?
"But to return to the fabric of my life. Whenever I left the court of the palace, or the tablet house, or the marketplace, I came right home to work all evening on the Holy Scriptures, with my sisters and my cousins and uncles in the scriptoria of our houses, which were big rooms.
"As I told you, I was never very quiet, and I would sing the psalms out loud as I wrote them, and this irritated my deaf uncle more than anyone. I don't know why. He was deaf! And besides, I have a good voice."
"Yes, you do."
"Why should a deaf uncle get so upset? But he knew I was singing the psalms not as I just sang that one for you, but as one would sing, with cymbals, dancing, you know, with a little bit of added dash, shall we say, and he wasn't so happy about it.
"He said that we were to write when we were to write and to sing the Lord's songs at the appropriate time. I shrugged and gave in but I was one for cutting up all the time. But I'm giving the wrong impression. I wasn't really bad ..."
"I know what kind of man you are, and were then ..."
"Yes, I think by now you do, and maybe if you thought me bad you would have thrown me out in the snow."
He looked at me. His eyes weren't ferocious. The brows were low and thick, but the eyes were plenty big enough beneath them to give him a pretty look. And, it seemed to me that he was warmer and more relaxed now than earlier, and I felt drawn to him and wanting to hear everything he said.
But I wondered: Could I throw him out in the snow?
"I've taken many lives," he said, plucking the thought right from me, "but I would not hurt you, Jonathan Ben Isaac, you know that. I wouldn't hurt such a man as you. I killed assassins. At least when I came to myself that was my code of honor. That is my code now.