The murderer at Bethany

The few remaining patrons looked up with alarm when he appeared. Everybody knew trouble when they saw it. And although nobody had seen his face before, they knew his kind.

From the kitchen she surveyed him with squinting eyes. A largeish woman, somewhere near middle age, looking as if she once might have been almost pretty. A matronly figure, visibly secure about herself and her establishment.

The girl who helped her seemed relieved when the older woman beckoned with a quick sideward motion of the head that she could go. The startled young servant cast a white-eyed glanced at the hulk of a man who had to stoop when he entered the wattle lattice that framed the open terrace. She was clearly relieved to be dismissed. She was afraid of men like him.

“I’ll close up later,” the woman assured her, still without taking her eyes off the stranger.

With the restaurant now empty, the woman strode confidently towards where the big man had seated himself on a low bench by a table.

“You’re not from here,” she declared flatly in a neutral tone.

He met her gaze for a moment, before answering: “Neither are you. I can tell by your accent.”

She gave a snort and wiped a lock of hair from her sweaty brow with the back of her forearm.

“I was born in the north,” was all she explained, mildly self-conscious about how she lisped her “s”.

She tried to place him. A mountain of a man. His bulbous round head showing two days of stubble from its last complete shave. He was older than he looked at a distance, she realized. Powerfully muscled. Nobody around here wore tattoos. But he had them on his neck and arms. They were foreign symbols she did not recognize. His speech was local, though. He was the toughest-looking man she’d seen in years. Tough, but apparently shaken. She could see it by the way his fingers lightly trembled when he fidgeted with a bowl of shaved salt flakes that the previous patrons had left.

“I’m about to close soon,” she informed him. “And I only have red wine and flat bread, at the moment.”

She briefly cast her gaze at the winding valley below, before adding: “Supplies haven’t come through yet. Under the circumstances, as you’ll understand.”

The big man nodded. The well-trodden main road was still littered with the recent earthquake’s stones and rubble. But it had been less severe here, he thought. He could tell by how many houses had survived. Still, there hadn’t been much traffic on the road. Men were still too bewildered to return to commerce just yet.

“Bread and wine will do,” he answered, tiredly.

He growled in a voice that was more tired than menacing, even though it sounded like rolling boulders on a streambed during a flood.

She eyed him suspiciously for an extra moment before vanishing to prepare his order. When she returned, he was staring eastward in the direction that he had come from, as though lost in thought.

She set a tankard before him, and swiftly poured the crimson wine to almost overflowing. Beside it, she placed a clay bowl with that morning’s unleavened bread, together with a little jar of sauce.

“What brings you to these parts,” the woman enquired, still seeming oddly fearless in his presence.

Again, his fingers trembled as he reached out to dip a piece of bread into the sauce.

“I… Well, you might say, I’m… searching for something….”

It seemed odd that a man of such formidable appearance spoke so insecurely.

“Searching? Searching for what?” the woman persisted bluntly.

He hesitated again, before saying, “I’m not sure. But I think I’ll recognize it when I find it.”

Standing with folded arms, the woman let the topic go. She understood the minds of men. She knew when not to pry too deeply. Sometimes men can bear the piercing of an arrow bravely. But not the thistle’s tiny barb.

Then, almost as if on impulse, the woman drew a bench out and seated herself opposite him at the table, leaning forward just a little.

“Something’s wrong,” she declared in her stern, motherly voice.

It was the way a strong wife speaks to her husband. And an experience mother to her children. It was a question, disguised as a statement, and delivered in a tone that suggested that she expected a proper answer.

He stroked across the stubble of his broad chin. One eye was oddly blue, while the other was milky and opaque. An eye that had long since lost when the deep scar that had been laid across his face, all the way from his forehead to the corner of his jaw. 

Slowly, the solitary eye lifted to meet her dark gaze.

“Someone was killed on account of me,” he slowly answered, before adding bitterly, “two days ago.”

A heavy silence followed.

“I see,” the woman responded. “Was it a friend?”

The big man’s tankard hesitated before his lips.

“No, I never even knew him before.”

“Then what affair is that of yours?” the woman persisted.

The blue eye seemed to bore into her scull for several moments before he growled tiredly: “I myself deserved to die, but he who took my place had been entirely innocent.”

The woman took a moment to consider what he had said, and then responded frankly almost as if she hadn’t heard: “I too lost a friend two days ago.”

“I’m sorry,” said the dangerous-looking creature before asking, “Were you close?”

“Very,” she said.

“How did she die?” he wanted to know.

“It was a man,” she corrected him. “And he was murdered.”

The burly figured seemed to consider her answer for a moment.

“It’s the same with the man I spoke of,” the battered face then explained.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“So am I,” the big man added – just to make sure she’d understood exactly.

The woman watched him eat in silence for a minute but still without taking her eyes off him.

“You were a prisoner?” she observed, her eyes drawn to the faint scars around his wrists.

He gave a wry smile.

“Many times in my life. In galleys and in dungeons. But newly released from Jerusalem two days ago. Completely pardoned at the order of the procurator in person.”

That made sense. She’d known he was a convict. A man like he should have been tanned dark like the leather of an old saddle. But instead he had the sickly parchment-coloured skin of a man who had spent a many months indoors.

It looked as if the man had said enough, but suddenly his one blue eye re-connected, while he slowly and deliberately placed his tankard back onto the table.

“I was condemned to die that day, do you know that? But then out of the blue and for no reason whatsoever, they chose an innocent man to take my place. Only a day before the whole city had wanted my execution. Yet, when given the option, I was chosen at a whim to go free, while they sent a blameless young man to his death instead.”

The woman seemed a little shaken at what she had just heard, and her eyes narrowed to slits as she tried to search his face for more depth of meaning.

“You’ve killed many others, haven’t you? What makes this experience different?”

His eye looked almost angry as it bored into her.

Then it softened a little when he answered: “It is true. I have killed many men. Far too many across all my life. But this one was entirely different. All men deserve to die for something, even if it is a small thing. But not this one. This one…”

He seemed to be searching for a word or a phrase, and then stared at her hard before adding, “this one, seemed willing. Resigned. Almost eager to take my place.”

The proprietress refilled his tankard without being asked.

“You feel you bear the guilt for his death now, don’t you?”

He seemed to consider the question gravely before nodding.

“All the blood I’ve shed,” he admitted frankly, “looked the same kind of red to me. Just like this wine. In the cup that I am holding, it all blends together like one red eye without a personality. It doesn’t matter from how many gapes it had been pressed. And in my mind’s eye all the faces of the people that I’d killed, blend into one so I cannot even see their features anymore. But this man’s face, I cannot get out of my memory. And when I close my eyes, it is as if I feel his blood sticky upon my hands. I always knew I would receive my just reward for what I’d done in life. Prison. Torture. Finally, oblivion. But on this occasion – it feels as if I’m lost myself in a way that that transcends death itself.”

Her face had taken on a motherly expression now. And before her, the ugliness of his scars and the blue heathen marks etched into his skin did not look so menacing anymore.

“You know what eats me?” she said quietly. “It’s the fact that the last time I spent with him, I’d been too busy serving to actually sit and talk with him. I had a fight with my sister about it, here in Bethany, and it ended up spoiling the whole gathering. Sometimes we mean well but we do the wrong thing all the same. And before we know it, it is too late to fix. And then we look back and realize that that had been the last time we had to spend with a friend unlike any other. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Sometimes ‘too late’ has a finality to it that is profound.”

In his solitary eye it was as if a small spark of recognition had been ignited. He leaned forward earnestly and surprised the woman by taking her hand in both of his.

“Then tell me, good woman, where do we go from here? What are we supposed to do when it is too late to change what we have either done wrong, or neglected to do right? What salvation could there possibly be for someone as wicked as I am?”

She reflected upon his question with a sober expression, and when she spoke her voice was calm and dignified with a tone of a mother speaking to a child that had woken from a nightmare.

“There is something that he had said to us before he died,” she said. “I know it doesn’t make much sense now, but he once said that all who are heavy laden should come to him for rest. He also said he was the way and the truth and the life. And he told us that we had to repent and be baptized, for the forgiveness of our sins. Among many other things, he told us he would be killed, but also that he would return again. And that all those who believe in him could live forever. From now on, there will be sins too great to be forgiven anymore. Those are some of the things that he told us while he had been a life. And he must have said more besides, while I was too busy serving to sit and listen. All the more, is my regret.”

The murderer that sat before her seemed very shaken at her words, his fingers tightly clamped around her hand.

“We’re talking about the same man, are we not?”

She nodded briefly and said quietly: “I think so.”

“Then it is no coincidence that we met here, is it?”

She shook her head.

“Perhaps not.”

“Then I ask you again, what must I do in order to be redeemed of the guilt that consumes me now?”

“I’m not exactly sure just yet,” she replied. “But some of his trusted friends who had lived and worked with him for three and a half years will be passing here tomorrow. and I’m sure that they would want to meet you. And I know that they will have the answers that you are looking for. And perhaps for me as well. That I’m very sure of. I know they will be coming. They promised that they would take care of all of us when he was gone. He made them promise that, not long before he died.”

In the soft light of the setting sun, the face of the murderer across the table did not look dangerous at all anymore. He now looked just old and worn and desperately tired. And her own face, once so stern and composed, now looked fragile as that of a little girl.

He gave her hand a final little squeeze before letting go.

“I never asked your name?” he said, sounding somewhat more relieved.

“And I never asked yours,” she smiled back. “My name is Martha, by the way.”

He nodded cordially.

“Pleased to meet you, Martha. I haven’t used my real name in a very long time. But people call me Barabbas in this country.”

She nodded back at him, before turning her eyes towards the sun as it turned the heavens red like a shredded tapestry far across the Mediterranean Sea.

“I don’t know what the future holds for all of us, Barabbas,” Martha sighed at long last, “but I do know that nothing that has happened these last few days had been in vain. Everything has been working to a plan that is older than the world itself. And that in the end, everything will work out well for me, and I’m very sure for you as well.”

At that, Barabbas washed the last morsel of his bread down with the last of his wine. And then quietly allowed the stillness of the evening to pour balm upon all his wounds of many years. For the first time since he had been a child, he felt a little hope for whatever lay ahead of him.