No Lasting Burial (10 page)

“He
is Yonah’s son.” Her voice fierce.

“I
know!” Zebadyah cried, with a sharp gesture of his hands. Rahel shrank back
into the doorway. A few faces peered through the windows of nearby houses. “I
know! Do you think I do what I do lightly? You damned, unreasonable …
woman
!
Is your son more important than every life in this town? Would you imperil us
all with your grief, your pride? He cannot stay here; I have overlooked him for
too long because I loved my brother, because I love you.” He nearly shouted the
last, and then stopped abruptly, as if shocked at what he’d said.

An uncomfortable silence. The woman at her door, the priest outside it.

Zebadyah
breathed, “I am sorry.”

“I
am your brother’s wife,” Rahel said coldly. “Not yours. And you have no authority
within the walls of this house.”

Zebadyah’s
voice was muted now, pleading. “Bat Eleazar, just listen to
me.”

“I
am done listening.”

“He
is broken, unclean, and he carves images in defiance of everything we believe
in, everything we are. He has to go. It is God’s Law.”

“If
God had had a mother, his Law might have been less cruel.”

“Blasphemy,”
Zebadyah gasped, drawing back a step, a hand raised as though her words were
something physical that he could ward away. “I can’t … I can’t hear this!”

“Then
don’t.” Rahel’s voice was sharp and it began to carry; Koach could see doors of
nearby houses cracked open. His mother’s voice was fire; Koach was certain that
if she had addressed
him
in that tone, he would have withered like a
vine in the sun’s heat.

“This
is my husband’s house,” Rahel hissed. “My husband’s. The first man of this town. The man who
stood against the Romans when you would not. A man who
gave his
life
. So that my son could be born in
a Hebrew town. And how
dare
you come to his door and talk to me
of God? My husband knew God. Do you? Was it God who told you to hide shaking by
the boats? The night they beat and crippled your father, the night my husband
died
,
was it God who told you to bow and scrape before our heathen masters? Was it?”

Zebadyah
went pale. Utterly pale. “Remember yourself, woman,”
he rasped.

But
she shut the door on him.

For
a few moments Zebadyah stood very still. “I paid for my sins,” he whispered at
last. “I pay for them every night. Every night until I die.”

Then
it seemed to occur to him that he was speaking merely to a door of wood, and
not to Rahel or to her dead husband. He turned and walked away with his head
bowed. A few faces watched the priest from nearby doors. Zebadyah strode by
without looking at them. Then the doors shut again, closing each family once
more within the hungry gloom of its own house.

Koach
was breathing hard, as though he had run to the
kokhim
and back. He just
lay there on the roof, trying to take in all he had heard. No one had ever
spoken to him of his father’s death, or been willing to. His mother looked sad
when he was mentioned. Shimon’s face just went cold and hard. Koach only knew
his father’s name because everyone in town spoke it reverently when they
addressed his brother.
Bar Yonah
, they said,
Bar Yonah
, as though
Yonah had been some hero out of old stories, whose death had left a hole not
only in Koach’s life, but in Kfar Nahum itself. Koach tried to imagine him, a
man he’d never seen, standing with a fishing spear in his hand, or an oar, or a
knife, as Roman soldiers or the lurching dead came at him.

Koach
suddenly wanted to run down the steps into the atrium to his mother and demand
stories from her. Stories of Yonah that might tell him who
his father had been, and who
he
might be. But sounds from the
nagar’
s
house broke the moment, snapping his thoughts like kindling. He froze,
listening: the murmur of a voice in anger and a faint sound like a sob.

He
got to his feet and returned to the edge of the roof facing that house, and
looked down into it. The rug over one of the far rooms had been drawn aside,
and there was a light, a small candle burning on a table. Tamar was sitting on
the floor beside it, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. Her head was
down, her hair covering her face, but Koach could see that she was shaking and
that she was naked to the waist. He blushed hotly for just a moment, but the
tingling in his loins disappeared as quickly as it came, for everything about
the way Tamar held her body spoke of terrible pain. Koach had the impulse to
leave the roof and go unbar the door of his house, slip out into the street and
run to Benayahu’s door and knock and call out to her, make sure she was all
right. But just at that moment, a dark shape cut off the candelight, and he
knew that a man was standing between the candle and the door. His voice was
raised harshly, but his words were muffled by the room he stood in, and Koach
couldn’t be sure what was said. After a moment there was movement against the
light and a quiet crack, as of a hand striking flesh, and a small, strangled
sob. Koach sucked in his breath. He was beating her, and the crack of his hand
sounded again. And again. And
again
.
Koach’s hand became a fist.

The
shadow moved, and he glimpsed the man grasping Tamar’s hair, holding her still
as he hit her. But at that moment her gaze flicked up in pain, and she saw him.

They
saw each other. From the rooftop to the small room.

Had
Koach been able to think past the shock and the fury in his heart, he might
have expected to see anger in the girl’s eyes, or shame. Shame
that he would see her like this. But Koach didn’t see those things in
her eyes. Only recognition. Then her eyes glistened in
the light of the candle, as though filling with tears that she had forbid
herself until that moment.

And
her face relaxed. Like letting go of a burden too heavy for
her. Like glancing down and seeing warm bedding before you when you are
tired. Like relief.

Relief
that one other person knew she was suffering, and cared.

He
took a step back, but her gaze held him. A silent demand in her eyes:
Don’t
go. Don’t leave me alone.

So
he stayed.

Something
in him died and something else was born, something dark and furious, as he watched
the blows fall on this young and beautiful woman. He did not turn his head; he
would not betray her. He witnessed all of it. And when Benayahu had left his
daughter sobbing on her bedding, Koach longed to go to her, to tend her bruises
with a damp cloth or to hold her. But he didn’t know how. He could not call out
to his mother. Rahel was not a man; she could not interfere in the doings in
Benayahu’s house.
There was no one to go to, no one who would listen to
a one-armed boy, or care.  His brother, maybe,
a strong man, could leap from this roof to the other. But Koach was not his
brother. If he tried that leap, he would only break his body on the stones
between their houses. He might go down to Benayahu’s door, but why should the
nagar
open up his house to him?

He
did the only thing he could: he waited with her while she cried, though a gulf
of air separated them. Finally she lifted her face from the bedding, and the
misery in her eyes smote his heart. Quickly she brought her blanket up to her
face and dried her tears. Then Tamar rose and slipped from her room,
disappearing from his sight.

Koach
stood still on the rooftop. He felt emptied of all feeling. He counted the
beats of his heart. Somewhere around two hundred, he saw Tamar emerge onto her
own rooftop, stepping onto it from unseen stone steps. At first she didn’t look
at him. She just stood there with her head down, in her blanket, the moon on
her hair. As lovely as Batsheva must have looked to Dawid the
king. Like Dawid, Koach had seen her naked, but unlike Dawid, the sight
moved him to a desire to protect her, not possess her. He had seen her bruised
and now, as she lifted her head and their gazes met, he saw her heart in her
eyes. Her solitude and pain.

Neither
of them looked away.

Neither
dared call out, for fear of alerting Benayahu or breaking the intimacy and
peril of this moment.

They
stood like that a long time, seeing so much hurt in each other’s hearts.

Finally,
he mouthed the words in his heart, keeping them silent but exaggerating the movements
of his mouth, to be certain she would know what he said:

I
want to help.

I
know,
she mouthed back. Then:
You didn’t leave me. That is help.

A shake of his head.
I will help.

They
considered each other. Then she did something he did not expect. She let the
blanket slip from her shoulders, let it settle to her feet, gently as feathers.
For a moment, she held her arms across her breasts, then
let them fall to her sides. She lifted her chin, though her face burned. She
let him see her, all of her, her beauty and her bruises. This
gift of herself. Her father might strip her or beat her, but he could
not take this from her: her right to open her heart and her body to one whose
heart called to hers. Koach held his breath. All his life, he would remember this
moment. His first sight of her. The memory would be
holy to him. As though her rooftop were the place where God touched the world
and created beauty.

His
loins stirred for her, yet his face was wet.

Whether
he wept for her, for himself, or for them both, he couldn’t have said. His hand
trembled as he lifted his fingers to the clasp of his own tunic. He kept
himself fully clothed at most times, even in his mother’s house; he couldn’t
bear the way others looked at him when his deformity was visible. But he could
not hide it now, could not conceal it when this young woman had unclothed all
of her bruises, risked everything to be seen by one other.

He
kept his movements slow, his heart loud with his fear. It took some work, with
only his one hand and not his mother’s to aid him. But at last his clothes were
in a heap beside him, and he stood naked on the roof, the air cool on his skin.
There was mercifully no wind to chill him or carry to his ears the voices of
the
shedim
. He stood as straight as he could; his phallus had stiffened
and grown so that it stood hard, as he had found it lately in the mornings when
he woke, but for once it did not embarrass him.

He
wanted to give her what she had given him: a sight of all of him. Even, no longer concealed in its long sleeve, his withered arm and
deformed right hand, the hand that could never touch her face or bring her
pleasure or work to feed her. Never having felt so naked, he looked to
her eyes anxiously. Saw them tearful. But she was also smiling.

He
felt warm through every part of his body. Whatever the days ahead
brought—whether hunger or ill dreams or riders out of the south with heads tied
to their saddles, or stones hurled at him, or dead lurching up from the
waves—whatever the days brought, for the first time he was certain he would not
face those days alone.

Shimon’s
boat approached the shore, riding low in the water and almost tipping into the
sea from the weight of its nets. Even as the fishers breathed in the fecund
scent of kelp and dead shellfish, the stranger came wading out toward them, the
lake water about his knees, his eyes wild. “Your nets!” the man cried, an edge
to his words, a hill-country accent Shimon couldn’t place. “Your
nets!”

Shimon
stared at him as he heaved at the oar, uneasy. The man’s clothes were
strange—not a tunic and cloak but a long robe of brown wool. His arms and legs
were smeared with dirt, as though he truly had walked here out of the deserts
in the south. His hair lank about his bruised face.
His right arm bore bruises also, as though he had tried to shield himself from
blows. With him came the reek of a man who had spent long days without a roof
or clean water.

Even
as they heard the scraping welcome of the shingle against the keel, the
stranger took the gunwale in his hands. “So many!” he gasped, gesturing at the
nets, staring wide-eyed at the fish. His face was wild with shock. “So many! And they’re … they’re
beautiful
! I
didn’t know this would happen, I just cried out, I cried out, I cried out!” His
gaze shot to Shimon’s face, and in his eyes there was sudden joy, like a man
who has walked all his life in the dark and for the first time sees firelight
burning away the shadows. Shimon just stared back, the others silent behind him
in the boat, startled at this raving man.

“Don’t
you understand? I
heard
you!” the man cried. “I could hear all of you,
all last night, all of you moaning … your hunger, I couldn’t bear it,
couldn’t bear it, couldn’t … and I heard the father, I heard the father
weeping for you, and don’t you see, don’t you
see
, he must have heard
me
,
he must have heard me too, he must have heard me, the father heard
me
!”
His hands tightened at the gunwale, as though he were going to pull himself
into the boat, his voice rising. His eyes shone with tears. “Do you understand! Do you understand! It was too great to bear, the
hunger and the father’s cries and the screaming and the screaming and the
screaming”—his voice was now a wild shriek of joy, so that Shimon leaned back
away from the man—“and I cried out and
he heard me
!”

The
stranger’s eyes rolled back and he pitched to the side, crashing into the
water.

Shimon
swore and cast his oar aside, leaping to his feet. He sprang over the gunwale
as Yakob and Yohanna looked on, their eyes wide. He felt the water about his
shins, the cold shock of it against his toes, and pebbles shifting beneath his
sandalled feet. The boat scraped past him and he plunged his arms into the
water, groping. Shimon found the man and hauled him up. The stranger’s head
lolled back and his mouth fell open.

“We’ll
get the boat up!” Yohanna cried behind him.

Shimon
didn’t answer. He slapped the man’s cheek to rouse him.

Yohanna
and Yakob leapt from the boat, the familiar sound of their sandaled feet
sinking into the sand. Their hands gripped the gunwale and they began sliding
the boat up the shingle. Though large, the boats of Kfar Nahum were lightly
built; yet it was a great labor dragging the craft up toward the tideline.

After
a moment, Shimon dragged the man out of the sea and lay
him on the sand. Life came back to the stranger’s eyes, and he gasped, “Water.”

Shimon
got to his feet and ran to the boat, exchanging a bewildered look with Yakob.
Reaching in, he snatched up one of their waterskins, then
ran back to where the stranger lay.

He
held the waterskin to the man’s lips, saw his throat
move in great gulps. Then the stranger choked a little, and Shimon lifted the
waterskin and set it aside. Even as he did, the man’s hand grasped his wrist
with a fierce strength. His eyes were intense. For a moment the stranger fought
for breath. Then he gasped: “Cephas!”

Shimon
didn’t understand. Cephas was the Aramaic word for
rock
.

“Cephas,”
the man said, swallowing, getting more moisture into his voice. His gaze held
Shimon’s with an insistent, desperate demand. “Somewhere I have to be.
Something I have to do.”

Shimon
shook his head. He didn’t know whether that was a question or how to answer.

“Cephas,
Cephas.” The man fell back, his eyes turning toward the sky. “Something,
something I have to do. I knew it, I knew it so clearly, so clearly only a
moment ago. Like my father had spoken it right into my ear. Right
into my ear,
Cephas. When the fish came, I knew what it was, this
thing I have to do. For just a moment, a breath, I knew it, Cephas. I knew it.”
He seemed to be fighting to catch his breath. “Now it’s gone, gone, like …
like leaves blown into the desert.”

“Who
are you?” Shimon gasped.

But
the man closed his eyes and his grip on Shimon’s hand weakened. Then his chest
rose and fell as though he were asleep. Shimon slipped his wrist from the man’s
grip and stood, a little shakily. He gazed down at the man’s battered body in
its ragged brown robe. If Shimon had not heard the man’s eerie cries, calling
the fish, he would have thought him one of the boat people, the beggars and
outcasts wandering up and down the shoreline of the Galilee who had become
stuck here at their shore, too sick or too weak to move on. They often slept
under the derelict boats just above the tide’s reach. Shimon glanced uneasily
up at those boats where they lay rotting in the tall grasses, but there was no
sound or sign of movement. Yet there were always beggars there.

His
hands shook. Had this man’s cries—his eerie calling for fish over the
water—filled the nets? The man’s words were like raving. Like the words of a
witch who had called the
shedim
into his body to inhabit it. The body
was a house: what was living in this man’s house?

Yet
the nets had been empty, and now they were not.

“Yohanna!”
he called.

In
a moment, the son of Zebadyah was at his side. “Who is he, Shimon?”

Shimon
only stepped back, making the sign against the evil eye.

“Wait.”
Yohanna gave the man a closer look and drew in a breath. “I know this man.”

Shimon
looked to him quickly, but Yohanna only frowned. “I don’t know who he is. But
I’ve seen him. I’m certain of that. I have seen this man before.”

“He
must be one of the boat people, one of the unclean,” Yakob called behind them.
Glancing over his shoulder, Shimon saw the boat half up the shingle with Yakob
trying to pull it up alone, the veins standing out against his forehead. The
nets were still in the water. Cursing, Shimon sprinted for the boat and lent
his own arms, gripping the hooks beneath the gunwale and lifting the boat as he
dragged it. In a moment, Yohanna was with them, leaving the stranger behind on
the sand.

“He’s
not one of the boat people,” Yohanna gasped, as they pulled the boat up the
sand.

“He
looks
like one of the boat people,” Yakob grunted.

“Didn’t
you see his robe? Fine wool. Pattern
at the hem. Not rags. Not boat people. Essene, I think.”

“Essene,”
Yakob wondered. “What is an Essene doing here?”

“I
don’t know.”

“But
his face—he’s Galilean. He’s one of us. Not from Kfar Nahum, but he’s from
here.”

“I
know.”

Shimon
took a steadying breath and turned his back on the stranger with the bruised
arms and face. “Talk later,” he said. “Nets won’t wait.”

A
few moments of struggle, and they had the boat up into the tall grass above the
tideline. Yakob took the prow, guiding the boat into place in the line of
fishing vessels. Those still in use were at the end of the line nearest the
town; those farther down were long derelict, decaying and spattered with gull
feces, wooden corpses of themselves waiting for time to eat away their last
timbers.

Then
they ran back for the nets. Shimon glanced at the man lying in the sand, but he
didn’t have time to stand about wondering. They needed to be quick, for the
oncoming tide was tugging at the nets, and the flashing silver of the fish,
tails wriggling against the nets, was drawing down out of the sky white birds,
swooping low.

They
ran down the sand, which was wet and packed beneath the slap of their sandals.
They took up the casting ropes and strained to pull up the nets, fearing the
nets would break and spill this miracle catch back into the sea, the way a
broken body spills back into the dark the life God once breathed into it.
Shimon sucked in breath through his nose and breathed out through his mouth,
pulling hard on the ropes with each indrawn breath. He kept his eyes on the
water and the wild flopping of the fish, fearing that they might yet haul
another corpse out with the catch. His forehead was clammy with sweat.

Then
two hands grasped the rope beside his and pulled, and the net came half out of
the water. Shimon 
glanced to the side; the stranger stood there. The sea had washed
most of the smell of the hills from him; water still trickled from his hair,
making dark streaks down his robe. He returned Shimon’s look, then heaved at
the rope again.

“What
are you?” Shimon panted. He wanted to pull away from this strange beggar man,
but he didn’t want to let go of the rope. The nets were heavy. He could not
remember them ever being so heavy.

“A
friend,” the man said. He was calmer now, though his voice was strained.

“You’ve
been in the desert.” Shimon glanced at the man’s brown robe.

“I
have,” he said.

“Are
you an Essene?”

He
shook his head. Not one of the desert hermits, then, who lived in their small communities
hiding in caves from the dead and teaching their bodies to endure any hardship,
that they might draw nearer to God.

“You’re
tattered and bruised.” Shimon’s voice was thick with his distrust of outsiders.
“Are you unclean?”

The
question appeared to startle him. “No,” he said, and heaved at the rope. “No, I
don’t … I don’t think so. Not unclean.”

“I
don’t know what you are, who you are, but you called the fish,” Shimon said,
struggling to understand. “What
are
you? I
heard
you call them.”

The
man’s eyes were dark and he stared past Shimon and over the water, intently, at
some far other place. His voice changed, going quiet and intense, burning with
terrible clarity. “Something is happening, Cephas. And whatever is happening,
it will be like sword and like fire and like bread in the mouths of a thousand,
thousand children, and nothing will ever, ever be the same way again.”

Shimon
stared at him, uneasy.

The
stranger’s attention returned to the rope they were straining at. “I cried out,
and they came,” he gasped. “Barbels, musht. No
catfish, nothing unclean to throw back. How many will they feed?”

“The
town,” Shimon said. Hoarse. “The
entire town. For two weeks, maybe three.” He heaved at the net, and
suddenly it broke open, spilling fish over the sand, flopping and wet.

The
stranger gasped.

Shimon
caught his breath also. There, where the water met the land, where the net had
broken open at their pull, their last heave had pulled a white corpse half up
onto the sand. Its hand was caught in the netting, with the fish flopping about
it as though in panic at the unclean touch. The corpse itself was still, a gash
in its brow where Shimon’s fishing spear had caught it.

“No,”
the stranger whispered, his face white with horror, as though the appearance of
the corpse was some intimate betrayal. “No.”