Read Online The Liars' Gospel by Naomi Alderman - Free Book Online Page A

like that. He will be all right, she
     tells herself, when he has to leave.
    She gives him lentil soup with flatbread and he eats it greedily. A thin dribble of the sunny liquid drips down the scraggly
     beard on his chin. He finishes, and she tries to take the bowl from him to wash, but he holds on to it with his maimed right
     hand, the three fingers stronger than both her arms.
    He says, “Why didn’t you tell them where I was?”
    She lets go of the bowl. She sits down opposite him.
    He says, “I didn’t come here to bring danger to you all. That isn’t what I wanted, I didn’t…”
    He slams his good hand down on the table. The earthenware pot jumps. He reminds her of her son at that moment. The memory
     brings a sickness to her stomach, and the sickness makes her angry.
    “Why did you come, then? What was it for? To stir up an old woman in her grief? To plague me with your love for a dead man?”
    He looks as if he is about to say something, but stops.
    She says, “There is no reason, except that you wanted a place to hide and knew that telling me your stories would make me
     take you in.”
    He stares down at his hand. At the place where his fingers were. He traces the line of the scar with his left thumbnail.
    He says, “I came to bring you good news.”
    She says, “There is no good news. My son is dead. That is all the news there can be.”
    He says to her, so softly that she can barely hear the words, “He is risen.”
    She does not know what to say, does not think she has understood, so she says nothing.
    He looks at her, to see if she has grasped the heart of his words.
    There is such a wild hope in her.
    She has had dreams like this. Dreams in which the men come to her and say, “It was a mistake! He has not died, he was rescued.
     He is still alive.” And dreams, more painful yet, in which she knows that she has one day, one hour to speak to him, that
     he has returned so she could cradle his head against her body and smell the scent of him and hear the sound of his voice.
     She has lost the sound of his voice.
    Gidon says, “He died and rose again. A miracle made by God. He showed himself to Shimon from Even, and to Miryam from Migdala,
     and to some others of his friends. He is alive, Mother Miryam.”
    His voice cracks and his eyes burn and water and his face glows with a fervent intensity and she finds a feeling rising up
     inside her so strong and so immediate that at first she cannot identify it until suddenly she finds that she is laughing.
    She laughs as if she were vomiting, it is from the stomach not from a glad heart.
    He is hurt by her laughter. He thinks she is mocking him, although this is not what is happening.
    He says, affronted, “So laughed Sara our foremother, when God told her she would give birth to a child at ninety years old,
     and yet it came to pass.”
    And she stops laughing, although she cannot help a smile from creeping to her lips, as if she were merry.
    She says, “You are too old, Gidon, to believe this.”
    He feels a flush across his cheeks.
    He says, “They came to the tomb, Mother Miryam, the tomb where he had been laid, and the body was gone. He had risen.”
    And she laughs again. “Are you so foolish? Are you so unwise? Gidon, I sent my sons for his body as soon as the Sabbath was
     over. So that he would not lie in a stranger’s cold chamber when he could be buried in the warm earth, like his forefathers.”
    He looks at her, puzzled and aggrieved, and mumbles, “Yet he is risen. He has been seen.”
    She says, “Did you come here for this? To convince an old woman that her dead son yet lives?”
    He says nothing. She is angry now.
    “If he lives, if they did not kill him, if he revived in the burial chamber, if God returned him to me, why is he not here,
     Gidon? Whom should he see more than his mother? Why would he show himself to Shimon and to Miryam from Migdala and not to
     me?”
    And even as she says it she hears the voice in her head of