No Lasting Burial (22 page)

The
house sang. In ten, twelve, fifteen voices, they sang their love of the Shabbat
Bride who brought with her a covenant of rest and peace between God and all
living things for whom even the drawing of breath is a labor.

Then
something happened that had never happened before in Kfar Nahum or in any
village of Israel. Those who were seated because their bodies gave them pain
rose shakily to their feet. Sinews reknit themselves. Limbs straightened and
strengthened. One beggar’s murky eyes cleared and gazed for the first time on a
world of color and shape. The healing passed by touch from one person to the
next, swift as a whisper, and the room filled with heat. Each face lit with a
glow like that of flames on a winter night. The hair of the men and women
crowded into the house rose as in a lightning storm, and wind swept against
their faces. They heard the timbers of the walls creak with the pressure of
God’s presence, the
shekinah
that had fallen on
their fathers’ tents in the desert, now filling this small house until the
stone out of which it was made groaned. Then the heat rolled through the door
and out into the street, and dust billowed in the sudden wind.

The
townspeople and the boat people looked on each other in wonder, hearing each
other’s voices. Most of them hadn’t sung in years.

Not
in this silent town where even the synagogue knew neither music nor laughter.

Not
in this place of grief.

Not
in the house-shaped tombs of Beth Tsaida by the sea.

One
of them didn’t sing.

Koach
took up a clay pestle, small and heavy, that his mother had dropped by the
firepit, and then retreated to the doorstep. There he stood and gazed out at
the dust blowing in the street. He was shaken. Singing and joy and that heat in
the house were as alien as the fish flopping in their hundreds on the sand. He
clutched his weak arm. The dust gusted up from the street as though stirred by
the footsteps of the Sabbath Bride.

Whatever
had killed Tamar was out there still, prowling the shore or the wild slopes
like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Likely the sound of song
and feast loud over the shore would bring it back, summoning that lurching
corpse like a guest arriving late.

Koach
glanced down at his right hand, the hand that was thin and dead. He tried to
make it into a fist. His fingers didn’t even twitch.

His
eyes stung.

What
if that arm were to be healed? That would not make him a man, not make him
whole. He had been denied his
bar ‘onshin
. He had been barred from the
synagogue. He had been struck, spat upon, thrown to the dirt.

You
have a worse injury
,
Yeshua had told him.

The
other young men—Yakob, Bar Cheleph, Bar Nahemyah, Yohanna—they were not in his
mother’s house feasting with the old and the women and the beggars. They were
probably all on the shore, watching for the dead or searching for signs of
Benayahu.

Even
while he sat idle here.

He
had only one arm, but he had two eyes; he could watch. He could shout. He could
do his part. He drew in a breath. It was for boys to mope and men to act, he
told himself. He’d had no
bar ‘onshin
, but at least he could do his best
to be like a man. Anything less would shame the woman he’d loved, who was dead.
He thought of Shimon entombing Tamar, doing her the honor he could not, and his
face burned.

The
surge of heat and power within the house behind him faded, but he still heard
many voices singing, his mother’s among them, pure and beautiful as he’d rarely
heard it before. He didn’t know what was happening, what was changing within
this town. He didn’t know what was changing in him. But he knew what he had to
do.

He
might step inside again, find his carving knife. But no,
no
, he would
not go to watch for the dead with that in his hand. He was a youth who carved
things of beauty and fittings for boats; his blade would remain a craftsman’s
tool, not a zealot’s knife. His grip tightened instead about the pestle his
mother had used for grinding meal.

Koach
took a breath. This was a thing he had to do. But he would wait for his
brother’s return; he wouldn’t leave his mother alone in a house crowded with
others.

So
he watched the dust move with the wind’s breath, and listened for the approach
of his brother’s feet.

It was almost dusk before Shimon staggered back into the town. Even as he reached the outskirts, he heard the singing of women. He stopped, astonished. Listened. Strained his ears as though his ears were cups to fill with all that music. He drew in a ragged breath. How long—how long since he had heard music like that? The Sabbath Bride was walking across the water into the town, following the last footsteps of the setting sun, and for the first time since Shimon was a boy, the town was welcoming her.

The singing stopped about the time that Shimon reached his mother’s house. The door was open, but Koach stood at it like a door-keeper, with a pestle clutched in one hand, and their gazes met. There was a question in Koach’s eyes.

Shimon found he couldn’t speak, so he only nodded.

He saw the relief and sorrow in his brother’s eyes and was startled, for it was not the sorrow of a boy he saw, but a man’s grief. Whoever this youth was, he was not
hebel
. Suddenly Shimon wondered if his brother had grown to manhood while he slept between the nights’ battles with the sea. The thought shamed him. But there was also a warm flicker of pride for his brother, something he hadn’t felt before.

“I have to go,” Koach said quietly.

“Go?”

He lifted the pestle, and his eyes glinted with a hardness that Shimon had seen before only in the eyes of the fishers.

“Something’s still out there. Zebadyah’s sons have gone already to watch. They’ll need help.”

Shimon stood very still. He could hear voices within the house, but not their words.

“Be careful,” he said at last. There was nothing paternal in his tone. It was just one brother’s advice to another.

Koach gave him a grateful look, and then inclined his head respectfully. “You also,” he said. He stepped past Shimon and began walking quickly around toward the back of the house and the stretch of shore behind it.

Shimon watched his brother go. He gripped his shoulder a moment; it burned where the rock had cut him. Maybe that corpse up on the hill had been the only one they had to worry about. But he didn’t think so. From Koach’s tone, he knew Benayahu had not been found. And there might be others. Sometimes, it was not just one corpse you dragged up in your nets. There might be three or four. Since his thirteenth year he’d known that any winter might be the town’s last. Nothing was certain, nothing was safe.

He stepped inside his house, turned and shut and barred the door by long habit. And stopped. Startled. There were new scents in the air. Fish roasted for food, and the sharper scent of spices. His mother must have placed a fish over the spirit fire to keep the
shedim
from the house. He hadn’t smelled
that
in—so long. For the first time, it really sank in that there were
fish
. There was food. There were hearts to lay on the coals to keep the
shedim
away. And maybe, just maybe, everything was going to be all right.

He blinked, his throat tight, and stepped through to the atrium.

The beggar-stranger from Natzeret stood with his back to the olive tree. Perhaps twenty men and women of the town—and perhaps ten boat people—sat around him, their faces upturned, listening. Some of them, Shimon knew, had been broken in body. One had been blind. And that young woman had been mute, the one who appeared to be wearing his father’s coat—his
father’s
coat, but Shimon was too overwhelmed, too bewildered, for the coals of anger in his chest to flicker into fresh heat. He just stared. Those who had been broken now sat hale and whole, and he knew the singing he’d heard had come from this house.

Facing the others, Yeshua was drawn and pale as after great labor. He was talking in a low murmur; Shimon couldn’t make out the words. The stranger looked completely intent on those sitting near him, and didn’t glance up as Shimon looked on, bewildered.

This man stood in his house, in his
house
, with more than two dozen unexpected guests. He looked about for Rahel, but couldn’t see her; she was not among the seated guests. She was not at the firepit, though there was evidence of a meal. A
vast
meal.

His belly growled so fiercely that some of the guests glanced up at him.

There had been a feast here, a feast of strangers. He stood outside their circle, unsure how to act, everything in him a wash of confusion and fatigue. He glanced about, saw that the rug was drawn across the door to Rahel’s small room along the outer wall of the house. Had she gone to bed, with so many strangers in her house? Nothing here made any sense.

Too weary and his emotions in too great a turmoil to deal with the strange
navi
or the people pressed all about him, or even to throw them from his house, Shimon went to find his mother. Stepping into her room, he let the rug over the door fall back behind him to block out the sight and some of the noise from their atrium. There was a little light, very faint, from between the slats of the boarded-up window, and by it Shimon saw that Rahel lay in her bedding with her small hands clasped at her breast, her fingers curled around a tattered shawl. His father’s
tallit
. Shimon’s throat tightened. In this dim light, though he had seen them many times before, his mother’s hands looked suddenly wrinkled and aged.

“Amma,” he whispered.

She glanced up, and he saw that she had been crying. A day ago, when he had been numb, it might have wearied him rather than distressed him. Now he ached for her, and hurried to sit beside her, setting his hand on her shoulder.

“Amma, what is it?”

She just shook her head.

“Amma—”

“All our people,” she whispered.

His face hardened. “I will get them out of the house, amma. And that—that man from Natzeret. I’ll throw him to the dirt.”

“No.” She smiled up at him and took his hand in hers. They
looked
frail, but her grip was strong. “It’s not that, my Shimon. It’s only that I didn’t know. I didn’t know our town was so broken, so many of us ruined. How bad it had become. Your father—” Her voice caught. “He would have wept to see this, Shimon. He
believed
in Kfar Nahum. He believed not even the Romans, not even the dead out of the hills, could do this to us. Could
ever
do this to us.”

“What happened, amma?” Shimon took a breath. “There are people out there who were ill, a few who were maimed. Now they … What happened?”

Her gaze strayed to her arm. Shimon followed that glance, but saw nothing there. Just her olive skin.

“The dead are coming back up,” she said.

“Yes.” His own voice caught.

“They’re coming for
him
. Have you seen his eyes, my son? He burns with life. So much that it spills out of him and touches the rest of us. It’s like fire, and the
shedim
are moths, Shimon. He’s drawing them out of the sea, just by being here.”

“Then we have to get rid of him.” Shimon’s voice was cold, colder than he would have thought possible. He thought of the stones he could lift from the street outside. Thought of the bruises that purpled the man’s face and arms. Perhaps this was why he had been driven out into the desert, so that the dead might follow him where he went and leave the living alone.

“No,” Rahel said. “I have no fever.”

“Amma?”

“I have no fever, Shimon. I thought—at first I thought it might come back. But it didn’t.”

He sat back on his heels. “What
happened
?”

Fever?
Something
had happened. And Rahel was—different. Lost in thought. Lying here in her bedding as though utterly exhausted. That wasn’t like her. And Koach—he was different, too. His insides went cold with dread.

“It’s not important,” Rahel whispered. “He’s what’s important. He’s anointed, Shimon. Our
navi
, our messiah, our anointed one. I have to tell Zebadyah bar Yesse tomorrow; he has been so afraid. I have to tell him. This stranger—he
is
the one we’ve waited for.” She closed her eyes. “Fifteen years. I’ve waited fifteen years.”

Shimon kept silent. He sensed that she needed to speak, needed badly to speak.

“I prayed, Shimon. That night your father died. As I held little Koach in my arms. I begged God, in the silence of my heart, I begged him to send the anointed one, that I would see him with my own eyes. I told God,
My boys need me. And everything out there is burning and dying. I can hear it. I can smell it. Let me see Kfar Nahum healed before I die. Let me see my two sons together and strong.
” Her eyes glistened. “When I opened my eyes this day and saw him there, I knew. I
knew
. I had suffered enough, enough even for El-Shaddai Our God. He had chosen to answer my prayer, little Shimon. He would not let me die until I saw that man. With my own eyes.”

“Amma,” he murmured, but said nothing else.

She squeezed his hand. “You can break a family or a People even as you can break an arm or a clay bowl. Everything had broken, that winter. When the Romans came. They broke the doors of the synagogue. They took—whatever they wanted, Shimon, whatever they wanted. To fill the tax debt. They broke us.” A hiss in her voice. “They took some of the boats, all the food, all the fine clothes. They hurt our girls. Yonah your father … he hid me.” Her eyes softened. “He was so brave, your father. He hid me out in the
kokhim
, among the dead. The one place the Romans didn’t think to look for anything of value, and the one place no one else in Kfar Nahum thought to hide anything. I was so scared, Shimon. It was dark, and all about me the bodies and bones of our dead. Yonah brought food and water when he could, but I had to ration it so carefully. He couldn’t always come, and he didn’t trust anyone else to. We were all afraid, everyone.

“Most of the time I sat huddled against the wall of the bone chamber, just praying. My belly was so full with your brother. I didn’t want to move or do anything but sleep. And I was hungry, so hungry.” Her voice trembled. “I was terrified that something would go wrong. That I would lose the baby. I did rise once, and I explored the tomb with my hands, because I couldn’t bear not knowing what was there. There was the great chamber, and the tunnels leading out from it, and the shelves where our dead are slid into the living rock.. I touched a few of them, Shimon. I … I had to. I had to know they were still.”

He touched her hair gently. “It’s all right, amma. It is long past.”

“Long past.” She smiled weakly. “Nothing stays buried, my little one. Maybe nothing stays broken, either. I hope that’s so.”

Her little one. It had been years since she had called him that.

She hadn’t called him that since Koach was born.

Since before his father died.

Shimon blinked and swallowed against a tightness in his throat.

“I heard them carousing. The shouts, the screams. I could hear it all, all the pain of the women I knew, the men. And I couldn’t do anything.” Her hands shook. “I couldn’t even cry for them, Shimon, because my labor took me, and all I could do was breathe, just
breathe
, between the pangs. Breathe and hear. Such horrible screams.” She closed her eyes. “Even the moaning of the dead wasn’t worse than that.” She drew in a breath. “For all I knew, Yonah was dying while I fought to push Koach out of my body. Oh, Shimon, I wanted to die. And I wanted to live. I cursed your father, biting my lip to hold in the screams. He wasn’t there with me. I hated him, for a few brief moments.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know if he lived, or if you did, or if I would live, only that I had to
push
that baby out into the world. Even if there was nothing left out there, nothing but the dead. They moaned all around the tomb, and my heart—I have never felt fear like that. Or rage. Or—”

Her hands trembled.

“And then I had two sons,” she whispered, and fell silent.

All his adult life, Shimon had stood with his back to the memory of that winter. That memory had stalked him at every waking hour, until its cold fingers touched his very shoulder, and when he lay down to sleep it sprang on him like a lion on a gazelle. Now, in his mind, he turned and looked into the cold eyes of his pursuer.

He remembered waiting on the shore, unable either to shout or to flee as the boat came in. With its scrape against the sand, his father’s body had staggered into the gunwale and toppled over to lie half in the water, half on the moist land. Shimon had stared in fascinated terror at this human shape that looked so much like Yonah, the fisher, who in the last year had taught him to carve an oar, to gut a fish, to tack a boat against the wind.

He remembered his father’s face turning to him, the eyes lifeless, the low hiss in the dark. Remembered scrambling away over the sand and loose shingle, stumbling, getting back up, falling again. Remembered kicking up sand, frantic to regain his feet, the corpse bending over him, dried blood on its hand. His father’s blood.

And he remembered his mother’s scream, a cry raw with fury and pain and grief, as she leapt between Shimon and his father.

Then Rahel had stood painfully straight, her tunic dark at her thighs with the blood of the day after childbirth, her hair sweaty across her face. Both hands whitened about the haft of a fishing spear. The iron point had gone through his dead father’s eye and into his skull and there it was sheathed. His father’s limbs hung limp. He no longer moved or moaned, but the spear held him up, so that he appeared to be standing there beside his wife, gazing at her with those eyes that had looked out, unseeing, on the water and that had looked across the sand, unseeing, at his child.

With a low wail, Rahel wrenched the hook free; it left his father’s body with a quiet squelching sound not unlike the spilling of innards from a fish’s belly. Yonah’s body toppled to the sand and he lay still. The wound was dark in his brow, a wound that didn’t bleed. Rahel stood over him, breathing hard, the fishing spear held at her side. The hand that gripped it shook violently.

A wind came in off the sea, and her hair blew across her face, hiding her anguish from her son. Shimon felt the chill of the wind on his brow, which was damp with sweat.