Barabbas Read Online Free PDF Page B

hence, thou reprobate! they said to him fiercely.
    And pulling his mantle about him, Barabbas walked off down the street alone without looking back.

T he girl with the hare-lip was unable to sleep. She lay looking up at the stars and thought of what was soon to come to pass. No, she did not want to fall asleep, she wanted to keep watch this night.
    She was lying on some twigs and straw she had gathered in a hollow outside the Dung Gate, and around her she could hear the sick groaning and moving restlessly in their sleep and the tinkle of the leper’s bells, the one who sometimes got up and walked about because of the pain. The stench of the large refuse-heaps filled the whole valley and made it difficult to breathe, but she was so used to it that she no longer noticed it. No one here noticed it any longer.
    Tomorrow at sunrise … Tomorrow at sunrise …
    What a strange thought. Soon all the sick would bewell and all the starving be fed. It was almost beyond belief. How would it all come about? But soon the heavens would open and the angels descend and feed them all—at least all the poor. The rich would no doubt continue to eat in their own houses, but the poor, all those who were really hungry, would be given food by angels, and here by the Dung Gate cloths would be spread out over the ground, white linen cloths, and food of all kinds would be laid out on them and everyone would lie down and eat. It wasn’t really so very hard to imagine if one just thought that everything would be completely different from what it was now. Nothing would be like anything one had seen or experienced before.
    Perhaps she too would be in other clothes, one never knew. White, possibly. Or perhaps in a blue skirt? Everything would be so different because the son of God was risen from the dead and the new age had dawned.
    She lay thinking of it all, of how it would be.
    Tomorrow … Tomorrow at sunrise … She was glad she had been told about it.
    The leper’s bells sounded closer at hand. She recognized them; he usually made his way up here of a night, though it was not allowed; they had to keep inside their enclosure at the very bottom of the valley, but now in the night-time he took the risk. It was as if he sought human companionship and, for that matter, he had once said that was the reason. She saw him picking his way between the sleepers in the starlight.
    The realm of the dead … What was it like there really? They said that he was now wandering about in therealm of the dead.… What did it look like? No, she had no idea …
    The old blind man moaned in his sleep. And a little further away the emaciated young man lay panting, the one who could always be heard. Quite near her lay the Galilean woman, whose arm twitched because she had someone else’s spirit in her. There were many around her who thought they would be made whole by the mud in the spring, and there were poor wretches who lived on refuse from the garbage heaps. But tomorrow no one would go rooting about there any more. They lay twisting in their sleep, but she was not sorry for them any more.
    Perhaps the water would be purified by an angel breathing on it? And they would really be healed when they stepped down into it? Perhaps even the lepers would be healed? But would they be allowed to step down into the spring? Would they really? One didn’t know for sure how it would be.… No, one knew very little really …
    Perhaps nothing would happen to the spring and no one even bother about it. Perhaps the angelic hosts would float along through the whole Ge-Hinnom valley and over all the earth, sweeping away disease and sorrow and misfortune with their wings!
    She lay thinking that perhaps that was how it would be.
    Then she thought of that time when she met the son of God. Of how kind he had been to her. Never had anyone been so kind to her. She might well have asked him to cure her of her deformity, but she didn’t want to. Itwould have been easy for him to do