Kitobni o'qish: «The Master and Margarita / Мастер и Маргарита. Книга для чтения на английском языке», sahifa 2
2. Pontius Pilate
In a white cloak with a blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, into the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great55 emerged the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate.56
More than anything else on earth the Procurator hated the smell of attar of roses, and everything now betokened a bad day ahead, for that smell had been haunting the Procurator since dawn. It seemed to the Procurator that the smell of roses was being emitted by the cypresses and palms in the garden, and that mingling with the smell of his escort’s leather accoutrements and sweat was that accursed waft of roses. From the wings at the rear of the palace that quartered the Twelfth Lightning Legion’s First Cohort, which had come to Yershalaim57 with the Procurator, a puff of smoke carried across the upper court of the garden into the colonnade, and mingling with this rather acrid smoke, which testified to the fact that the cooks in the centuries had started preparing dinner, was still that same heavy odour of roses.
"O gods, gods, why do you punish me?. No, there’s no doubt, this is it, it again, the invincible, terrible sickness… hemicrania, when half my head is aching. there are no remedies for it, no salvation whatsoever. I’ll try keeping my head still.”
On the mosaic floor by the fountain an armchair had already been prepared, and the Procurator sat down in it without looking at anyone and reached a hand out to one side. Into that hand his secretary deferentially placed a piece of parchment. Unable to refrain from a grimace of pain, the Procurator took a cursory sidelong look through what was written, returned the parchment to the secretary and said with difficulty:
“The man under investigation is from Galilee, is he? Was the case sent to the Tetrarch?”
“Yes, Procurator,” replied the secretary.
“And he did what?”
"He refused to give a decision on the case58 and sent the Sanhedrin’s death sentence for your ratification,” explained the secretary.
The procurator pulled at his cheek and said quietly:
“Bring the accused here.”
And immediately two legionaries led a man of about twenty-seven from the garden court and onto the balcony under the columns, and stood him in front of the Procurator’s armchair. This man was dressed in an old and ragged light-blue chiton. His head was partly covered by a white cloth with a band around the forehead, and his hands were bound behind his back. Under his left eye the man had a large bruise, and in the corner of his mouth there was the dried blood of a cut. The new arrival looked at the Procurator with uneasy curiosity.
The latter was silent for a while, then asked quietly in Aramaic:
“So it was you inciting the people to demolish the Temple of Yershalaim?”
While speaking, the Procurator sat like stone, and only his lips moved a tiny bit as he pronounced the words. The Procurator was like stone because he was afraid of shaking his head, which was on fire with hellish pain59.
The man with his hands bound edged forward a little and began to speak:
“Good man! Believe me…”
But the Procurator, immobile as before and without raising his voice in the least, interrupted him right away:
“Is it me you’re calling a good man? You’re mistaken. Everyone in Yershalaim whispers that I’m a savage monster, and it’s absolutely true.” And in the same monotone he added: “Centurion Rat-Catcher to me.”
It seemed to everyone that the balcony grew darker when the centurion of the first century, Marcus, nicknamed the RatCatcher, appeared before the Procurator. The Rat-Catcher was a head taller than the tallest of the legion’s rank-and-file soldiers, and so broad in the shoulders that he completely blotted out60the as yet low sun.
The Procurator addressed the centurion in Latin:
“The criminal calls me ‘a good man’. Take him away for a minute, explain to him how I should be spoken to. But don’t mutilate him.”
And all except for the motionless Procurator let their eyes follow Marcus the Rat-Catcher, who had waved his arm at the man under arrest, indicating that the latter should follow him.
The eyes of all generally followed the Rat-Catcher wherever he appeared because of his height, and also, for those who were seeing him for the first time, because of the fact that the centurion’s face was disfigured: his nose had once been broken by a blow from a Germanic cudgel.
Marcus’s heavy boots pounded across the mosaic, the bound man followed him noiselessly; complete silence fell in the colonnade, and the doves in the garden court by the balcony could be heard cooing, while the water too sang an intricate, pleasant song in the fountain.
The Procurator felt like getting up, putting his temple under the jet of water and freezing like that. But he knew this would not help him either.
Leading the prisoner out from under the columns into the garden, the Rat-Catcher took the whip from the hands of a legionary who was standing by the pedestal of a bronze statue and, with a gentle swing, struck the prisoner across the shoulders. The centurion’s movement was insouciant and easy, but the bound man instantly collapsed to the ground as though his legs had been chopped from under him; he choked on the air, the colour drained from his face, and his eyes became senseless.
Easily, with just his left hand, Marcus tugged the fallen man up61 into the air like an empty sack, set him on his feet and began in a nasal voice, mispronouncing the Aramaic words:
“Call the Roman Procurator ‘Hegemon’.62 No other words. Stand to attention. Do you understand me, or do I hit you?”
The prisoner staggered, but controlled himself; the colour returned; he took breath and answered hoarsely:
“I understand you. Don’t beat me.”
A minute later he was standing before the Procurator once more.
There was the sound of a flat, sick voice.
“Name?”
“Mine?” the prisoner responded hastily, his entire being expressing his readiness to answer sensibly and not provoke any more anger.
In a low voice the Procurator said:
“I know mine. Don’t pretend to be more stupid than you are. Yours.”
“Yeshua,”63 the prisoner replied hurriedly.
“Do you have another name?”
“Ha-Nozri.”64
“Your place of birth?”
“The town of Gamala,” replied the prisoner, indicating with his head that over there, somewhere far away to his right, in the north, lay the town of Gamala.
“What are you by blood?”
“I don’t know exactly,” replied the prisoner animatedly. “I don’t remember my parents. I was told my father was a Syrian…”
“Where is your permanent home?”
“I don’t have any permanent place to live,” replied the prisoner shyly. “I travel from town to town.”
“That can be expressed more briefly, in a word – a vagrant,” said the Procurator, and asked: “Do you have relatives?”
“There’s no one. I’m alone in the world.”
“Are you literate?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know any language other than Aramaic?”
“I do. Greek.”
A swollen eyelid was raised, an eye clouded with suffering stared at the prisoner. The other eye remained closed.
Pilate began speaking in Greek:
“So it was you meaning to demolish the building of the Temple and calling on the people to do it.”
At this point the prisoner again became animated; his eyes ceased to express fright, and he began speaking in Greek:
“I, goo…” – at this point there was a flash of horror in the prisoner’s eyes at having almost said the wrong thing – “I, Hegemon, have never in my life meant to demolish the building of the Temple and have not incited anyone to commit this senseless act.”
Surprise expressed itself on the face of the secretary, who was hunched over65 a low table, recording the testimony. He raised his head, but immediately bent it down again towards the parchment.
“A host of people of various kinds throngs to this city for the feast. Among them there may be magi, astrologers, soothsayers and murderers,” said the Procurator in a monotone, “and liars may be found too. You, for example, are a liar. It’s clearly recorded: inciting to demolish the Temple. Such is people’s testimony.”
“These good people,” the prisoner began, then hastily added “Hegemon” and continued: “learnt nothing and muddled up66 all I said. In general, I’m beginning to worry that this muddle will continue for a very long time. And all because he records what I say incorrectly.”
Silence fell. By now both painful eyes were looking hard at the prisoner.
“I repeat to you, but for the last time, stop pretending to be mad, you villain,” pronounced Pilate in a gentle monotone. “Not a lot of what you’ve said is recorded, but what is recorded is enough to hang you.”
“No, no, Hegemon,” said the prisoner, his whole body tensing up67 in his desire to convince, “he goes around, there’s this man that goes around with goatskin parchment and writes incessantly. But once I took a glance at the parchment and I was horrified. I’d said absolutely nothing of what was recorded there. I begged him: for God’s sake, won’t you burn your parchment? But he tore it out of my hands and ran away.”
“Who is this?” Pilate asked with distaste, and put his hand up to his temple.
“Levi Matthew,” explained the prisoner willingly. “He was a tax collector, and I first met him in the street in Bethphage, where the corner of the fig orchard sticks out, and I got into conversation with him. His initial attitude towards me was hostile, and he even insulted me – that is, he thought he was insulting me by calling me a dog.” Here the prisoner grinned. “I personally see nothing bad about the animal to make me take offence at the word…”
The secretary stopped recording and cast a surreptitious look of surprise68 – not at the prisoner, but at the Procurator.
“. However, after listening to me he began to soften,” continued Yeshua, “finally threw the money down on the road and said he would come travelling with me.”
Pilate grinned with one cheek, baring his yellow teeth, and said, turning the whole of his trunk towards the secretary:
“Oh, city of Yershalaim! The things you hear in it! A tax collector, do you hear, throwing the money onto the road!”
Not knowing how to reply to this, the secretary deemed it necessary to duplicate Pilate’s smile.
“And he said that henceforth money was hateful to him,” Yeshua said, explaining Levi Matthew’s strange actions, and added: “And since then he’s become my travelling companion.”
With his teeth still bared, the Procurator glanced at the prisoner, then at the sun, which was rising steadily over the equestrian statues of the hippodrome lying far below to the right, and suddenly, in a nauseating sort of anguish, he thought of how it would be simplest of all to banish this strange villain from the balcony by pronouncing just the two words: “Hang him” – to banish the escort too, leave the colonnade for the interior of the palace, order the room to be darkened, drop onto a couch, demand some cold water, summon the dog, Banga, in a plaintive voice69 and complain to him about the hemicrania. And a sudden thought of poison flashed seductively through the Procurator’s aching head.
He looked at the prisoner with lacklustre eyes and was silent for a while, agonizing as he tried to remember why, in the full blaze of Yershalaim’s pitiless morning sun, a prisoner with a face disfigured by blows was standing before him, and what other totally unnecessary questions he would have to ask.
“Levi Matthew?” the sick man asked in a hoarse voice, and closed his eyes.
“Yes, Levi Matthew,” came the high-pitched, tormenting voice.
“But what were you saying, after all, to the crowd at the bazaar about the Temple?”
The voice of the man answering seemed to stab into Pilate’s brow; it was inexpressibly agonizing, and that voice said:
“I was saying, Hegemon, that the temple of the old faith would collapse and a new temple of truth would be created. I put it like that so it would be clearer.”
“And why were you, you vagrant, stirring up70 the people at the bazaar, telling them about truth, of which you have no conception? What is truth?”
And at this point the Procurator thought: “O my gods! I’m asking him about something unnecessary during the trial. My mind isn’t serving me any more…” And again he had a vision of a goblet of dark liquid. “Give me poison, poison.”
And once more he heard the voice:
“The truth first and foremost is that your head aches, and aches so badly that you’re faint-heartedly contemplating death. Not only do you not have the strength to talk to me, you find it hard even to look at me. And now I’m your involuntary torturer71, which grieves me. You can’t even think about anything, and you dream only of the arrival of your dog, evidently the only creature you feel affection for. But your torment will come to an end in a moment: your headache will go.”
The secretary stared goggle-eyed at the prisoner and stopped in mid-word.
Pilate raised his martyr’s eyes to the prisoner and saw that the sun was already quite high above the hippodrome, that a ray had stolen into the colonnade and was creeping towards Yeshua’s worn-down sandals, and that he was trying to stay out of the sun.
At this point the Procurator rose from his armchair, gripped his head in his hands, and on his yellowish, clean-shaven face an expression of horror appeared. But he immediately suppressed it by will-power72 and lowered himself back into the armchair.
The prisoner, meanwhile, was continuing with his speech, yet the secretary was recording nothing more, and merely stretching his neck out like a goose, trying not to let slip a single word.
“There you are, it’s all over,” said the prisoner, casting benevolent glances at Pilate, “and I’m extremely pleased about that. I’d advise you, Hegemon, to leave the palace for a time and take a walk somewhere in the surrounding area – well, perhaps in the gardens on the Mount of Olives. The storm will begin” – the prisoner turned around and narrowed his eyes at the sun – “later on, towards evening. The walk would do you a lot of good, and I’d accompany you with pleasure. Certain new ideas have occurred to me that you might, I think, find interesting, and I’d willingly share them with you, particularly as you give the impression of being a very intelligent man.”
The secretary turned deathly pale73 and dropped his scroll on the floor.
“The trouble is,” continued the bound man, whom nobody was stopping, “you’re too self-contained, and you’ve utterly lost your faith in people. I mean, you must agree, you really shouldn’t make a dog the sole object of your affection. Your life is a poor one, Hegemon,” and at this point the speaker permitted himself a smile.
The secretary was thinking about only one thing now: should he believe his own ears or not? He had to believe them. Then he tried to imagine in precisely74 what whimsical form the anger of the hot-tempered Procurator would express itself at this unheard-of impertinence from the prisoner. And this the secretary was unable to imagine, although he knew the Procurator well.
At that moment there rang out the cracked, rather hoarse voice of the Procurator, who said in Latin:
“Untie his hands.”
One of the legionaries in the escort struck his spear on the ground, handed it to another one, went forward and took the ropes off the prisoner. The secretary picked up the scroll and decided not to record anything for the time being, nor to be surprised at anything.
“Confess: are you a great doctor?” Pilate asked quietly in Greek.
“No, Procurator, I’m not a doctor,” replied the prisoner, rubbing a twisted and swollen purple wrist in delight.
From under his brows Pilate’s eyes bored sternly into the prisoner, and those eyes were no longer lacklustre; the sparks that everyone knew had appeared in them.
“I didn’t ask you,” said Pilate, “perhaps you know Latin too?”
“Yes, I do,” replied the prisoner.
Colour appeared in Pilate’s yellowish cheeks, and he asked in Latin:
“How did you happen to know I wanted to call my dog?”
“It’s very simple,” the prisoner replied in Latin, “you were moving your hand through the air” – and the prisoner repeated Pilate’s gesture – “as though you wanted to stroke something, and your lips…”
“Yes,” said Pilate.
They were silent for a moment. Pilate asked a question in Greek:
“And so are you a doctor?”
“No, no,” replied the prisoner animatedly, “believe me, I’m not a doctor.”
“Well, all right. If you want to keep it a secret, do so. It has no direct bearing on the case. So you claim you didn’t call on anyone to demolish. or set fire to, or in any other way destroy the Temple?”
"I repeat: I haven’t called upon anyone, Hegemon, to perform such acts. What, do I seem feeble-minded?”
"Oh no, you don’t seem at all feeble-minded,” the Procurator replied quietly, and smiled a fearsome sort of smile75, "so swear, then, that it didn’t happen.”
"What do you want me to swear on?” asked the unbound man, who was now very animated.
"Well, on your life, perhaps,” replied the Procurator. "It’s the very time to swear on it, since it hangs by a thread – be aware of that.”
"And do you think it was you that hung it up, Hegemon?” asked the prisoner. "If so, you’re very much mistaken.”
Pilate started and replied through his teeth:
"I can cut the thread.”
"And you’re mistaken about that too,” retorted the prisoner, smiling brightly and using his hand to shield himself from the sun. "You must agree that it s quite certain the thread can be cut only by the one who hung it up?”
"Right, right,” said Pilate, smiling, "now I have no doubt that the idle layabouts in Yershalaim followed on your heels. I don’t know who hung your tongue in place, but they certainly hung a quick one. Incidentally, tell me: is it true you entered Yershalaim through the Susim Gate, riding on an ass and accompanied by a crowd of plebs, who were shouting out greetings to you as though to some kind of prophet?” – here the Procurator indicated the scroll of parchment.
The prisoner looked at the Procurator in bewilderment.
"I don’t even have an ass, Hegemon,” he said. "I did, indeed, come into Yershalaim through the Susim Gate, but on foot, accompanied by Levi Matthew alone, and nobody shouted anything at me, since nobody in Yershalaim knew me then.”
“Do you know these people,” Pilate continued, without taking his eyes off the prisoner, “a certain Dismas, a second man… Gestas, and a third. Bar-rabban?”76
“I don’t know these good people,” replied the prisoner.
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
“And now tell me why it is you use the words ‘good people’ all the time? You call everyone that, do you?”
“Everyone,” replied the prisoner. “There are no evil people in the world.”
“First I’ve heard of it,” said Pilate with a grin, “but perhaps I don’t know enough about life!.. No need to record any further,” he addressed the secretary, although the latter had been recording nothing anyway, then continued saying to the prisoner: “Did you read about it in some Greek book or other?”
“No, I came to this conclusion with my own mind.”
“And is that what you preach?”
“Yes.”
“And so, for example, centurion Marcus – he’s nicknamed the Rat-Catcher – is he good?”
“Yes,” replied the prisoner. “He’s an unhappy man, it’s true. Since good people disfigured him, he’s become cruel and callous. I wonder who it was that mutilated him?”
“I can readily tell you that,” responded Pilate, “for I was a witness to it. Good people were falling upon him like dogs on a bear. Teutons had hold of his neck, his arms, his legs. An infantry maniple had walked into a trap, and if the cavalry turm which I was commanding hadn’t hacked its way in from the flank – then you, philosopher, would not have had occasion to converse with the Rat-Catcher. It was at the Battle of Idistavizo,77 in the Valley of the Virgins.”
“If I could have a talk with him,” said the prisoner dreamily all of a sudden, “I’m sure he’d change dramatically.”
“I imagine,” responded Pilate, “you’d bring the legate of the legion little joy if you took it into your head to talk with any of his officers or soldiers. It isn’t going to happen, however, luckily for everyone, and I’ll be the first to see to that.”
At that moment a swallow flew speedily into the colonnade, circled beneath the gold ceiling, descended, almost caught its sharp wing on the face of a bronze statue in a niche and disappeared behind the capital of a column. Perhaps it was thinking of making a nest there.
In the duration of its flight, a formulation had taken shape in the now lucid and lightened head of the Procurator. It was this: the Hegemon has heard the case of the vagrant philosopher Yeshua, also known as Ha-Nozri, and failed to find corpus delicti78. In particular, he has failed to find the slightest link between the actions of Yeshua and the disturbances that have recently taken place in Yershalaim. The vagrant philosopher has turned out to be mentally ill. Consequently, the Procurator does not confirm the death sentence pronounced on Ha-Nozri by the Lesser Sanhedrin. But in view of the fact that Ha-Nozri’s mad utopian speeches could be the cause of unrest in Yershalaim, the Procurator is removing Yeshua from Yershalaim and will subject him to imprisonment in Caesarea Strato on the Mediterranean Sea – that is, in the very place where the Procurator’s residence is.
It only remained to dictate this to the secretary.
The swallow’s wings crackled just above the Hegemon’s head, the bird sped towards the bowl of the fountain and flew out to freedom. The Procurator raised his eyes to the prisoner and saw there was a column of dust suddenly ablaze beside him.
“Is that all there is about him?” Pilate asked the secretary.
“Unfortunately not,” the secretary replied unexpectedly, and handed Pilate another piece of parchment.
“What else is there?” asked Pilate, and frowned.
After reading what had been handed him, he changed countenance79 still more. It may have been that dark blood had flooded into his neck and face, or something else may have happened, but his skin lost its yellow tinge, grew brown, and his eyes seemed to sink.
And again it was probably the fault of the blood which had flooded into his temples and begun pounding inside them, only something happened to the Procurator’s vision. And so it seemed to him that the prisoner’s head had floated off somewhere, and another had appeared in its place. On this bald head sat a sparsely toothed golden crown80. On the forehead was a round sore that was eating away at the skin and was smeared with ointment. A sunken, toothless mouth with a wilful, drooping lower lip. It seemed to Pilate that the pink columns of the balcony and the roofs of Yershalaim down below in the distance, beyond the garden, had disappeared, and everything around them was submerged in the dense, dense verdure of the gardens of Capreae. Something strange had happened to his hearing too – trumpets seemed to be sounding in the distance, low and threatening, and a nasal voice could be heard quite distinctly, haughtily drawling out the words: “The law of lese-majesty…”
His thoughts raced – brief, incoherent and extraordinary. “He’s done for81!” Then: “We’re done for!” And among them was an utterly absurd one about some sort of immortality, and immortality for some reason provoked unbearable anguish.
Pilate tensed, drove the vision out, returned his gaze to the balcony, and before him again were the eyes of the prisoner.
“Listen, Ha-Nozri,” the Procurator began, giving Yeshua a strange sort of look: the Procurator’s face was threatening, but the eyes were alarmed. “Have you ever said anything about the Great Caesar? Answer! Have you? Or… have you… not?” Pilate drew out the word “not” rather more than one ought to at a trial, and sent to Yeshua in his gaze a particular thought which he seemed to want to suggest to the prisoner.
“Telling the truth is easy and pleasant,” remarked the prisoner.
“I don’t need to know,” responded Pilate in a choked, angry voice82, “if you find telling the truth pleasant or unpleasant. But you will have to tell it. When speaking, though, weigh every word, if you don’t want not only inevitable, but also agonizing death.”
No one knows what had happened to the Procurator of Judaea, but he allowed himself to raise a hand, as though shielding himself from a ray of sunlight, and behind that hand, as behind a shield, to send the prisoner a look with some sort of hint in it.
“And so,” he said, “answer: do you know a certain Judas of Kiriath, and what precisely did you say to him, if you did say anything, about Caesar?”
“It was like this,” the prisoner willingly began recounting. “In the evening the day before yesterday I met a young man outside the Temple who gave his name as Judas from the town of Kiriath. He invited me to his home in the Lower Town and gave me hospitality.”
“A good man?” asked Pilate, and a devilish light glinted in his eyes.
“A very good and inquisitive man,” the prisoner confirmed. “He showed the greatest interest in my ideas, received me most cordially…”
“Lit the lamps…”83 said Pilate through gritted teeth in the same tone as the prisoner, and his eyes were glimmering as he did so.
“Yes,” continued Yeshua, a little surprised at how well informed the Procurator was, “he asked me to set out my opinion on the power of the state. He was extremely interested in that question.”
“And so what did you say?” asked Pilate. “Or are you going to reply that you’ve forgotten what you said?” But there was already a hopelessness in Pilate’s tone.
“Among other things,” the prisoner recounted, “I said that any sort of power is coercion of the people, and that the time will come when there will be no power, neither of the caesars, nor of any other sort of authority. Man will move on to the kingdom of truth and justice, where no kind of power will be needed at all.”
“And after that?”
“There was nothing after that,” said the prisoner. “At that point people ran in, started tying me up and led me off to prison.”
The secretary was rapidly scribbling the words down on the parchment84, trying not to miss a single one.
“There has never been in all the world – is not and never shall be – a greater and finer power for the people than the power of the Emperor Tiberius!”85 waxed Pilate’s cracked and sick voice.
For some reason, the Procurator was looking with hatred at the secretary and the escort.
“And it is not for you, you mad criminal, to deliberate about it!” At this point Pilate exclaimed: “Dismiss the escort from the balcony!” and, turning to the secretary, added: “Leave me alone with the criminal; it’s a matter of state86 here.”
The escort lifted their spears and, with their metal-shod caligæ8788 pounding rhythmically, they walked from the balcony into the garden, and the secretary followed them.
The silence on the balcony was for some time broken only by the song of the water in the fountain. Pilate could see the disc of water swelling at the top of the pipe, its edges breaking off89and dropping down in little streams90.
The prisoner was the first to speak:
“I can see that something bad has happened because of my talking with that young man from Kiriath. I have a premonition, Hegemon, that he will suffer some misfortune, and I feel very sorry for him.”
"I think,” replied the Procurator with a strange grin, "there is someone else in the world you ought to feel more sorry for than Judas of Kiriath, and who will have a much worse time of it than Judas! And so, Marcus the Rat-Catcher, a cold and confirmed butcher; the people who, as I can see” – the Procurator indicated Yeshua’s disfigured face – “beat you for your sermons; the villains Dismas and Gestas, who, with their gang, killed four soldiers; and finally the filthy traitor Judas – they’re all good people?”
“Yes,” replied the prisoner.
“And the kingdom of truth will come?”
“It will, Hegemon,” replied Yeshua with conviction.
“It will never come!” Pilate suddenly shouted in such a terrible voice that Yeshua staggered backwards91. Thus, many years before in the Valley of the Virgins, Pilate had shouted to his horsemen the words: “Cut them down! Cut them down. Rat-Catcher the giant’s been caught!” Once more he raised his voice, cracked by commands, yelling out the words so they could be heard in the garden: “Criminal! Criminal! Criminal!”
And then, lowering his voice, he asked:
“Yeshua Ha-Nozri, do you believe in any gods?”
“There’s just one God,” replied Yeshua. “I believe in Him.”
“Then pray to him! Pray as hard as you can! Stills.” – at this point Pilate’s voice sank – “it won’t help. You have no wife?” asked Pilate, mournfully somehow92, and not understanding what was happening to him.
“No, there’s just me.”
“Hateful city…” the Procurator suddenly muttered for some reason, then flexed his shoulders as if he were cold and rubbed his hands as though washing them. “If you’d been murdered before your meeting with Judas of Kiriath, truly, it would have been better.”
“You could release me, though, Hegemon,” the prisoner unexpectedly requested, and his voice became uneasy. “I can see they want to kill me.”
A spasm distorted Pilate’s face; he turned the inflamed, red-veined whites of his eyes to Yeshua and said:
“Do you suppose, you unfortunate man, that the Roman Procurator is going to release someone who has said what you have said? O gods, gods! Or do you think I’m prepared to take your place? I don’t share your ideas! And listen to me: if from this moment on you utter so much as a word, start talking to anyone, beware of me! I repeat to you: beware!”
“Hegemon…”
“Silence!” exclaimed Pilate, and his furious gaze followed the swallow that had again fluttered onto the balcony. “Come here!” shouted Pilate.
And when the secretary and the escort had returned to their places, Pilate announced that he was ratifying the death sentence pronounced at the meeting of the Lesser Sanhedrin on the criminal Yeshua Ha-Nozri, and the secretary recorded what Pilate said.
A minute later Marcus the Rat-Catcher stood before the Procurator. The Procurator ordered him to hand the criminal over to the Chief of the Secret Service, and at the same time to convey to him the Procurator’s order that Yeshua Ha-Nozri be kept apart from the other condemned men, and also that the Secret Service detachment be forbidden, on pain of severe punishment, to converse with Yeshua about anything whatsoever, or to reply to any of his questions.
