Claudia Recalls the surprise visit of a teen-aged Jewess girl saved from rape by Pilate many years before

A strange piece of good luck, the closest I can come to believing in the intervention of the gods, occurred in the presence of Sarah and several of her closest women friends. It was a day when Pilatus happened to accompany me and met with the Jewish women. We were sitting at an outdoor eating place on a beautiful, sunny day. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a beautiful young lady, obviously Jewish by her garb, came towards us, waving her arms and smiling, accompanied by two adults who proved to be her father and mother.

As they neared our gathering the mother and father both knelt down, almost on their faces, and looked up at Pilatus, almost touching his sandals in a clear act of devotion. It was almost bizarre or so we first thought.

Neither Sarah nor any of the other women recognized the three strangers. The young girl rose and made some kind of a sign, not the Christian cross sign, some kind of a Jewish sign which all the women recognized at once.

She spoke in Hebrew to Sarah, too fast for me or Pilatus to comprehend. She was crying. She made a gesture towards Pilatus, looking at Sarah for approval. Sarah nodded and the young Jewess knelt down and kissed the back of Pilate’s hand. Her parents smiled in obvious approval. Then the three left, as quietly and as mysteriously as they had arrived. She looked back over her shoulder but only for a moment. She smiled, also only for a moment.

Pilatus and I both looked to Sarah, seeking an explanation for this strange ritual, this near adoration by three Jews for a Roman citizen, the former governor of their land. We learned that she was the girl who had been raped by a Roman soldier many years ago when she was but a child. Pilatus and I had come upon the hellish scene. Pilatus had drawn his sword and destroyed the genitals of the Roman soldier. The rape of a child, no matter that she was Jewish and no matter that her rapist was a Roman soldier, could not go unpunished by Pilatus.

I remembered the event like it happened yesterday. Pilatus stood and gazed at the young woman, off in the distance. He seemed in need to rush to her, to speak to her.

I knew by the admiring expressions on the faces of those twelve women that this one event, more than anything Sarah or I could say, formed a bond between the women and us and would lead to their men. A trust existed and it was created by the young woman from out of nowhere. I thought to myself that this, too, was a form of magical levitation, perhaps more elegant and more powerful and certainly more lasting than the magician in Rome.

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