CHAPTER TWO (still more history)
Mordecai sat thoughtfully as he gazed into the nearby street. Nobility of various sorts and species had colored his landscape during the last few days with an array of pomp and more pomp. The empire’s best had been ‘pomping’ their way through the streets of Shushan for ten plus days now. It had been a semi-regular parade that had to have topped the thousand mark by now. From what he had been told about the preparations going on within the confines of the palace, there would be plenty more to come in the next few days before the beginning of history’s biggest free lunch. Speculation was at high contagion, but common sentiment held that Xerxes was courting support for his attempt to redeem the Persian honor so rudely wrested from them by Greece.
The whole thing really made little difference to Mordecai. He subscribed to the philosophy that history was just a parade itself in which only the color of uniforms and the names of the capitals changed. All of the rest was pretty much the same.
His spectrum on foreign policy was limited to one direction and one location. The sum total of his worldview lay 650 miles due west in the form of a trodden down pile of rubble being worked over by a few displaced pilgrims. It had at one time been a marvel of splendor and wealth comparable, though much smaller, to Shushan itself. Those days had slipped through the hands of his father’s generation like the sand and ash that now gave silent testimony to their folly. The prophet had announced that God was making a good offer: beauty for ashes. Mordecai was not going to bring it up in God’s presence, but it didn’t seem like the Almighty was making out too well in this trade. He, himself, was a man of numbers, accounts, and values and this did not seem anywhere near to meeting the specifications he required for his seal to give the kiss of legitimacy to any transaction. Despite going against his carefully curried accountant’s grain, his thoughts and prayers traveled daily to the makeshift recovery of the one time heart beat of every Jew: Jerusalem.
The once great bastion of monotheism had been picked over so many times that not even poverty’s shadow would pause to sift its cinders. The streets that had faithfully and patiently carried innumerable pairs of feet to this and that destination were almost untraceable for the chaos that stretched their width and length. There had been places where the curious would have to dismount and pick his way ahead on foot or leave his curiosity for another occasion.
Mordecai’s grandfather Kish had been too small to really remember his former address. Nonetheless, he had actually been in that city of all cities, and while still alive, his probing grandson had dogged him for any detail. He remembered a vine that had covered a tower; at least it seemed like a tower when viewed from his altitude. And there was a huge stone container of some type. Somehow in his recall, that vessel belonged to him by some unexplainable link. Had he sat upon it as a small child? Was it in front of his house? Whatever the case, these were the kind of fragments left to him personally that had been smuggled to a far away land, tucked inside the head of a child. He knew there remained neither tower nor stone pot to verify his small collection of notions.
The great general Nebuzardan (the parameters of whose greatness were now significantly reduced to a statue in Shushan receiving homage on a consistent basis from the local pigeon population only), had executed the order from the king of Babylon to destroy the city and the temple it housed. 
He had used fire and force to destroy all but the memories locked out of his sight and reach. To assure that no phoenix would issue forth from the ashes he left behind, he took with him the cream of Jerusalem’s children. The beautiful, the intelligent, the industrious were siphoned away in a long human rivulet as if a great cistern had sprung a leak that drained her of all that was precious in one night. A few vinedressers, farm hands, ditch diggers-the bottom end of the economic scale- comprised the provision for the upkeep of the ravaged countryside. Some imports from other Babylonish possessions served to weaken, via mixture, any lingering nationalism amongst this second hand remnant that involuntarily found themselves heirs to dismay and obscurity. In short, zeal and innovation were eradicated and paraded off, and their manacled footprints quickly filled in with blowing sand.
His grandfather had been gathered to his own shortly after Mordecai had completed his ninth birthday. He had celebrated fifty-five more since then. The loss of his grandfather affected him deeply. To the present, he did not quite grasp the fullness of why this was so. He did not suffer just the loss of a matchless bond, but the venerate elder had linked him to some other part of who he was; without that link, Mordecai felt he had lost mid-journey a critical portion of the stars that gave him bearings. Kish had known the one woman that Mordecai desired to know: Jerusalem. Now she would be forever a stranger to him, with their one common mediator removed irreversibly from the picture. Why should this bother him so? For this he had no answer to place on the balance pan on the opposite side of the scale. With the passing of time, the weight of the mysterious pull only increased.
The Great Decree, surprise of the ages, went forth about four years prior to the decease of his grandfather. Mordecai had only been five or so at the time, but even then, the presence that swept through Babylon was so much more than a royal diktat. It left a spell upon the hearts and minds of the people. It had settled forever the enduring dispute over the credentials of Jeremiah the prophet/liar depending on your bent. For things were most certainly beginning to fall out in line with his assertions. As long as there was the scent of meat on any bone of contention, Mordecai knew that his people would never tire of its draw. But, alas THAT bone had been laid to rest. Jeremiah would now be a hero. Not merely justified, venerated. He had stood firm in the midst of persecution and the mouths of a hundred united voices against him. He had been successfully defamed and relegated to the status of “bound for the mound” of trashed prophets. The leaders who were so threatened by his message and presence delighted in using him as their new proverb for all who fell under the radius of their somber warnings. Those railings would be meted back to them with the same cup they had used to so liberally dispense them.
Mordecai had yearned after the chance to be a pilgrim, to go and restore; to breathe his breath into the sleeping ashes of this Jerusalem he had only seen through the window of his grandfather’s reminiscing. He had garnered a few brushstrokes from the eyes of the many merchants with whom he dealt, but these harvested shards of the image were few and incomplete. It had been his heart-secret for years, but now, it seemed it would never go beyond those confines. Why? Why had God been so cruel to him? Why would the Eternal One light such a torch within his heart and mind without allowing the least ray to illumine a journey’s path? He knew no answer, but was not of those who viewed Jehovah as capricious. Somehow hope and realization would kiss despite the accumulation of his years that pushed Jerusalem farther away with cold consistency.
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