Levi’s Chalice

Section One

The Realization

1

Thief! Come back!

The boy could run, and he could run fast. A precious cargo held tightly in hand as he increased his pace. Hunger had pierced him before. Not like this. An emptiness in his stomach seared as fire. Hunger pangs created anxiety which overruled his normal clarity. As an orphan and beggar the boy had learned the art of surviving proficiently. In his desperation today he didn’t even attempt to hide this action. If any proficient strategy compelled him at all it came down to nothing more than applying the element of surprise. The boy had bolted into a merchant’s tent, grasped a loaf of bread, pulled it off the stall and sped off, not a single motion wasted.

As the boy ran out of the tent, bread in hand, the merchant yelled out, Thief! Come back you little thief! He immediately called to his son, Ira, go after that little thief and bring him back.

Ira set out after him. He trailed behind seeing the boy swivel sharply on his feet and into another merchant’s tent. When Ira entered he saw the merchant waving his arms and yelling out in great anger at the boy as he escaped under the back of the tent with his coveted bread. With feet pumping hectically to propel him out from under the tent he toppled over a stall of jars. Being too tall to follow the boy under the tent, Ira ran back out the front of the tent moving quickly around to the back. The merchant of jars stood there screaming at the boy with the bread who continued running ahead. Ira could not believe the speed at which the boy ran. Although Ira stood taller, he had to make even longer strides to pick up the pace. The beggar boy ran relentlessly, straining his legs to maintain speed, and drawing deeply on what little energy he had left. Hunger had at once propelled him and depleted him.

The boy turned into an alleyway passage where he ran right into a man carrying a box of fruits which sent melons, grapes and pomegranates rolling across the ground in no small explosion. The boy and the man fell to the ground along with the produce. The man cursed while totally focusing on retrieving his fruits, oblivious to anything else as he chased after his rolling melons and pomegranates to save what he could. Taking advantage of the moment the boy stood up and took off running again. In a moment Ira arrived at the chaotic scene then took chase again.

The bread still tightly clutched in hand as the beggar boy ran. Just as he came to a stack of barrels near the other end of the passage way, he fell forward under the weight of the merchant’s son who had come close enough to clip his feet and send him flying. After a moment of catching a breath, the boy turned onto his back looking up at the merchant’s son quickly placing his arm across his face expecting to be hit. The blow never came. Instead he felt the loaf of bread being pulled out of his hands. Too exhausted to resist; his priceless cargo gone.

You look very sick, said Ira with distain. The toll of three days without food and unsuccessful begging of alms painted the boy’s dire-looking portrait. The beggar boy said nothing. Strangely, Ira could not take his eyes away from the sad and helpless bundle of a boy on the ground with pain showing clearly on his face. Ira took the loaf of bread in both hands, looked down at the boy for a long moment as if debating something in his head.

Then he ripped a chunk off the loaf. Dropping it on the ground Ira said to the boy, I will tell my father you got away with only a piece of the bread. He will have some satisfaction. Ira clearly observed the boy’s perplexed disbelief as he stared up at him. My father could have you in a work camp for this. Ira pointed an accusatory finger out, Never come back to our tent, never even walk nearby. He straightened out his tunic and head cloth, turned and just as he started to walk away he turned back and added, You have had good fortune today. Then he departed.

The boy watched the merchant’s son walk back down the long alley. He sat there befuddled, completely stunned at what had just taken place. This simply could not be. He wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened rather than admit that another person would ever show kindness for a beggar like him. And he would have believed it never happened except for the aroma of the freshly baked bread chunk that saturated his nostrils. Still, his mouth remained dry and unable to produce moisture. The beggar’s old adage played in his head. When you have nothing, anything is everything.

As he tucked the bread in his tunic the man he had knocked over when he entered the alleyway now approached, yelling and cursing as he drew nearer and nearer to the boy. Under his arm he carried a limp and torn box which now held broken and damaged fruits. Juices dripped from the box and scraps of fruit covered the man’s arms and hands, a threatening fist swinging in the air. His teeth tightly gritted. The boy quickly gathered himself, stood to his feet and started off running once again. The man knew he would be no match for the boy’s speed so the best he could do was settle for his curse words to follow the boy.

Just another day in the life of a beggar boy. The same as every other day. But another day in which he remained alive in the streets of Jerusalem.

2

The Place of the Broken Arches

To assure he wouldn’t lose the bread he placed his hand over his side holding it tightly. Walking briskly he occasionally looked back to be sure no one followed him. Still a sense of disbelief hovered as he found it hard to believe that the merchant’s son let him go and with some bread as well. Being much older he could have easily dragged him back to the merchant for punishment. You have had good fortune today, the merchant’s son told him, expressed it as though he decided to offer some mercy or leniency. In thinking about it the boy realized the actual situation for what it was. The merchant’s son didn’t let him go because of good fortune at all. No act of mercy or kindness had been involved. The merchant’s son simply saved himself a great deal of bothersome work. Had he brought him back, the merchant’s son would first have to secure him so he didn’t escape. Then he would have to notify the temple officials after which he would be called to testify as one of two witnesses to the crime. He would have to invest time in being questioned and making statements before the temple officials about what the boy did. The process would take too much of his time which would take him away from his other interests and his friends, all for one small loaf of bread. No, the merchant’s son showed no act of mercy and there would be no good fortune. He simply didn’t want to be inconvenienced. The boy wasn’t foolish enough to even imagine that anyone, especially a stranger, would extend him true mercy. He remained alone in the world and no one cared about him or his situation. Like all beggars he remained invisible to others because they refused to see the reality of it.

Not far off were the broken arches; a place away from the town where piles and piles of old and unusable broken concrete arches and remnants of fallen structures and columns from old temples and buildings were dumped. The area had no visitors, only the beggars and runaways and destitute people came there to be out of the view of the town’s people. Older beggars said that people who were sold into or born as slaves would stop here before they continued on a journey to escape from the Roman work camps although there were very few who succeeded. As noon had placed the sun at its peak, very few people if any would be there. The place of broken arches provided a somewhat safe haven only minutes from the marketplace where he had stolen the bread. As the boy entered he walked to a familiar section of broken interlocking concrete arches. One arch section lay across several others creating a tent-like structure. He hunched down to squeeze in. Under the cross sections were small pockets of shade which offered some relief. He took a moment to enjoy the feeling of cool concrete along his back as he sat against a broken column. Every time the boy came here he marveled at all the large broken structures. How much time and money had been required to make them. Now all the broken pieces tossed here held no value at all, just like him and the other beggars of Jerusalem.

He breathed deeply. With all that transpired he had forgotten his deep hunger. His stomach however, did not. Reaching into the tunic he removed the remaining section of bread. Biting into it he realized how famished he felt and chewed and swallowed so quickly it caused him to feel nauseous. Shifting himself to his opposite side he realized he wasn’t alone. Just diagonally off to his side in partial shadow sat a young girl. Catering to the discomfort in his stomach he had to partially bend over in an effort to minimize the stomach pain. Turning his head he squinted at her feeling he’d seen her begging alms in the square on numerous occasions. In a moment he knew. Her face held a distinctive feature; a wide oval shape with the biggest round eyes black as olives. Yes, that was her. She didn’t say a word nor did she look at him. When she noticed him glancing at her she moved farther back into a more shadowed area. She could sit there all she wanted, he felt. She could hope all she wanted. He had no intention of giving her even a crumb. He’d risked himself to get this bread; his reward.

Thinking it best to hide the bread from her view he twisted his front torso away from her view. Without a doubt he knew if the girl could figure a way, she would make off with his bread. He knew that to be so because if it were him, he would do the very same thing. Once again he gnawed at the loaf, head down over it in a protective stance. Again his stomach, having been empty for three days, churned more acutely. He fought off nausea. Not expecting it, and with adrenalin depleted, the exhaustion suddenly weighed down on him, beginning to cause his eyes to roll back. No, I’m wide awake, I’m strong, he told himself in the form of a command. His stomach churned and his body grew more and more limp. My bread . . . she will take my bread. Knowing he could no longer resist nodding off, he started to tuck the bread back into his tunic, but his eyes betrayed him before he could. Darkness.

When he finally awoke the sun rested at dusk. Immediately as he came to, his hands desperately searched around his body for the bread. His stomach churned again. This time not with nausea, but with a self directed anger. How could he have left the bread in the open making it easy for the girl to make off with it? Then his hand hit the chunk of bread now hardened. With caution and pacing himself he slowing ate the remainder of the bread. Its weight satisfied the hollow stomach. The moon’s light now fractured apart into rays slicing though the many broken pieces of concrete. He made his way back out to the opening where he carefully glanced around.

Two older men were positioning themselves and sat down on a large concrete section not far off. They were partially visible in the moonlight. Sparsely dressed he guessed they were probably slaves escaping from the work camps. Both men bowed their heads over what looked like a small blackened piece of meat they laid on the concrete. The boy remembered being told about this gesture indicating they were praying a blessing over their food. He snickered to himself as he observed. He could see no value to such an action. In his life only that which proved practical made sense. As young as he was, he learned over time by begging alms that only three practical factors held value: knowing the rules of the street, the techniques to apply when begging, and to never trust anyone, especially adults; a practicality that had served him well. With darkness already veiled he thought it best to stay the night in the broken arches. He made his way back in, but crawled under a space barely high enough to allow him to force his body through. No one would have any idea of his presence there allowing him to sleep safely through the night. He laced his fingers behind his head using his hands as a pillow. Lying on the dirt he thought about the day. Rarely did he need to steal food outright as he had earlier. There always seemed to be a way, but these last few days had been unlike any other. Not a single opportunity panned out. Especially discouraging was the upper room over the inn, his most productive place for sustenance. The room had been closed as the landlord had his family in to celebrate one of the religious feasts. Except for that fact he could have surely gone up to the room unnoticed to likely find some leftover food scraps, and on occasion he had even found coins. An overarching thought continued to nag at him, why did the oval faced girl not steal his bread? She had to have walked right by him to leave. The bread sat right there in plain view. Totally perplexed, he couldn’t seem to let the thought of it go.

3

He Carefully Figured Every Step of an Escape Route

When the boy awoke, heat stifled all around him. Most of the shadows were gone which told him noon had arrived. A haze of dust and noise carried all around. He squeezed out through the small opening and over to the place of entry. Across the way three wagons pulled up. Each wagon weighed down with more concrete fragments from old buildings and temples. Roman soldiers in chariots accompanied each wagon. The moment he saw the Romans he retreated back under the arched columns. Removing his head cloth he wrapped it around his nose and mouth to keep from breathing in the haze of dust or coughing and being heard. Slaves were off-loading the wagons using a lever and pulley to lift the fragments, letting them fall to the ground which sprayed up more veils of dust like moving clouds.

With no choice he sat back to wait it out. His throat now parched, he wanted to go into the town square and find an animal trough where he could drink. He looked back on the concrete where he’d sat with the bread and found several small groupings of bread crumbs remaining which he ate by licking his thumb, pushing it down into the small remaining treasure bits and lifting it to his mouth.

Unable to leave with the Romans there, he decided to plan out his afternoon. It would start with a walk to the inn where he expected to have an opportunity to go in. It had been three days, and he thought by now the inn would be back in use. So he hoped.

A man named Zohara owned the inn and served as the landlord. He rented out the upper room of the inn to various groups of people. One day in the past, the boy’s clandestine visit to the upper room brought him a treasure, a Jewish shekel. But that particular day did not allow him to keep the coin. As he slyly made his way down the stairway of the upper room on that day, Zohara happened to be walking up the stairwell only to bump into him. He tried his best to quickly squeeze by the man, without success. Zohara questioned him about being in the upper room in the first place. He hadn’t been asked to help clean on that day and had no business being up there. He pushed the boy back on the stairs. Deciding to search the boy, he found the coin, scolded him harshly and attempted to put him across his knee, calling him a dirty little thief. The boy’s unexpected strength wrestled him away from the landlord’s grip and he ran down the stairs without the coin. The incident however, did not deter the boy in the least. This simply taught him a new lesson after which he plotted an escape route out of the upper room that would not involve the stairway should he ever again be found there when he shouldn’t be. Never again would he give up anything to Zohara. Methodically he had carefully figured every step of a new escape route out of the room. The service cabinet against the far wall would become his step ladder getting him up to the window next to it. From there it would be a simple matter of opening the window’s hinged shutter and stepping through. Thick clinging vines covered the outside wall of the building sprawling down into an overgrown, unattended garden. The vines not only provided the perfect escape ladder, but the garden at its base would allow him to remain hidden once reaching the ground until the way out became clear. Today he hoped the timing worked out so he might have the chance to find food in the upper room.

He noticed that the sounds of the workers off loading the concrete pieces and the work wagons finally ceased. He moved to the open area to spy out the situation. The wagons were empty. The men were fastening harnesses back on the horses. In a moment the Roman soldiers hopped onto their chariots and led the wagons out. No sooner were they out of sight when the boy made haste to get to the town square where he satisfied his parched throat at a horse’s water trough just outside the square. From there he walked just beyond the marketplace where the Orache shrubs grew lush. Although he didn’t care for the taste the plant’s younger leaves were tender and edible. He sat down, selected leaves and slowly ate them, making faces with every bite. To take his mind off the unpleasant taste of the leaves he focused his thoughts on the opportunities and the challenges he had faced in his experiences in the upper room.

Finding something of value there such as food scraps, a coin or other items that had been dropped on the floor held a high likelihood. The boy not only knew this, but to a lesser degree so did the landlord’s two daughters. Alaya, the older daughter believed that she and her sister Shira were far too important to make the effort to go look through the room in advance of cleaning so they proved to be little competition for the boy. The sisters’ laziness opened a unique opportunity for him to get in the room in advance. Zohara would clean the upper room after guests departed with Alaya and Shira reluctantly following along.

The two story building had been in Zohara’s family for who knows how long. He rented out the upper room for gatherings of all kinds as an important part of his livelihood, in addition to running his inn located on the first floor. A bitter and stern man, Zohara’s wife died only a few years after their second daughter Shira’s birth. He never achieved a personal peace with her death. At first it served as a strategy to protect him from ever being hurt again. But he continued to nurse his wounded heart rather than healing it until it became a festering wound causing him to live without any apparent joy. The boy easily recognized this trait in the landlord and on occasion had been a victim of the man’s wounded heart.

The boy seemed oddly to understand the landlord’s pain of loss from his own life experience. With some regularity Zohara would call the boy to help his daughters clean the upper room after meetings ended. Since Zohara didn’t know where the boy would be at any given time, or how to locate him, in order to alert the boy that he needed help, the landlord draped a red cloth next to the entryway as a sign. That cloth indicated the only time the boy should be allowed in the upper room.

Zohara rarely ever paid the boy with money. Payments from the landlord typically consisted of a meal, and that only after his work had been completed and intensely scrutinized. As young as he was, the boy stood wiry and strong, alert and diligent at his tasks; the main reason the landlord used him. He also knew that despite his daughters calling the boy stupid, he was actually quite intelligent, after all what child with the ability to live off the bitter streets could be stupid? The landlord held a second reason for hiring the boy: a reluctant and unspoken pity based on seeing how the loss of his wife had affected his own daughters. Moreover, being an orphan, to the landlord’s way of thinking, signified a curse on the boy; one he could never escape or overcome. As with many orphans he assumed the boy would eventually die in the streets. And more than once when he became annoyed, the landlord would purposely remind the boy of that eventuality.

At times he found it an effort to be around the boy who held no qualms about broadcasting his disdain for adults in particular. From the boy’s life experiences adults were the reason that he had been left alone as an orphan. Adults, he had come to believe, were selfish, uncaring, untrustworthy and only concerned for themselves.

Despite these issues the boy possessed a natural work ethic, a knack for being attentive to detail, and he worked in a determined way. Whenever he swept the floor or scrubbed it on hands and knees the result proved spotless, not a crumb or stain remaining. Out of necessity the boy consistently did more than his share of the cleaning because the sisters’ sloppy work would be blamed on him by Zohara who would then cut his meal portion leaving him hungry. The daughters on the other hand delighted that they earned allowances to a great degree on the efforts of the boy’s hard work. Still, the food in whatever amount helped fill his stomach.

Zohara gained much of the boy’s labor for the paltry cost of a meal, so he coped with the boy’s disposition while never looking inwardly to reflect on his own. The boy held a keen awareness of the situation and he went along because he had no choice. He felt it better to deal with the discomfort of the landlord’s disposition than the pain of hunger. From time to time on opportune days immediately after groups departed the upper room the boy would sneak up before Zohara and his daughters arrived to conduct cleaning chores. In so doing he could quickly search the table for remaining food and the floor in hopes of finding a coin or other valuables that might have fallen from a guest’s pocket or carry bag. Whenever he did find something it amazed him how adults could be so careless with their valuables or think nothing of leaving uneaten food behind.

When you have nothing, anything is everything, he often repeated to himself.

4

This Remained One of His Protected Secrets

On one past occasion as the boy scrubbed the floor in the upper room he spotted a Roman coin. A ray of sunlight filtered through the window above the large service cabinet reflecting down between the bowls stored under the cabinet touching the coin’s finish with a shimmer that caught his eye. Once the cleaning tasks were complete, and being the last one out of the room he would quickly crawl under the cabinet and retrieve the treasure.

Having so often scrubbed this floor he knew every inch of it, even the deeper floor cracks that might capture something of value to him. The boy alone observed how the floor under the table had become warped on one end, and a slight incline drooped toward the service cabinet against the wall. If anything round or smooth fell to the floor, or had inadvertently been kicked by a foot, it would likely end up under the service cabinet. That very thing often happened when the men who gathered for meetings drank too much wine becoming oblivious to the realization that coins had fallen from their bags or tunics. This remained one of his protected secrets.

Zohara’s daughters paid no attention to details. They wanted only to be done cleaning as quickly as they could, exerting the least effort possible. They often lectured the boy on how they were above the lowly task of cleaning except for their father’s unfair demand that they work to earn allowances. They persistently asked him personal questions. It wasn’t long before he realized he should no longer tell them anything, because of their relentless gossiping. They were no better than adults, and could not be trusted. He could only trust himself.

He stood alone in the world from as far back as he could remember.