No Lasting Burial (24 page)

He lifted the menorah high. “Into the synagogue!” he shouted. “All of you!”

His cry broke the stupor that had fallen on the boat people as sharply as a branch might crack beneath the blow of a man’s heel. The vagrants rushed past him, stumbling up the steps and through the door, into the holy place at the heart of the town from which they’d so long been banned. Last, Yakob brought in the woman and laid her on the floor below the cabinet that held the scroll of Torah. Even as he glanced up from her, his eyes full of the intent to join his father, Zebadyah swung the door shut.

Zebadyah ran from the synagogue steps out into the open, wielding the light and hope of his People, like the knife-wielding
kanna’im
in the south, the grieving priests. Alone in that open space before the steps, he took his stand, thrusting the fiery menorah into the faces of the pursuing dead, their eyes glowing in the flames. His ears were full of the shrieks and moans of that other night, that terrible night, that night he had never woken from. Again he heard the whisper in his heart,
Run, little priest. Run. You are not Ezra or Moshe or Aharon. You cannot face this. You will be eaten
. That quiet whisper of the
shedim
waiting to take his heart and hollow it out and live inside its cold shell.

“Not this time,” he growled.

The dead shied back before the stabbing flames, but only barely; and now the corpses closed in on either side. There were nine of them, their jaws snapping as they tried to press in on flame and priest. Though Zebadyah darted to the left and to the right, one man with a stick of candles, even a holy one, could not hold them all. He fell back but stopped when he heard the door of the synagogue thrown open behind him. Clenching his teeth, he swung the menorah in an arc of flame. Grasping hands, the growls of the dead—

“Father!”

Yakob at the door.

Run, little priest, run. You will be eaten, eaten, eaten—

To silence the drumbeat of his heart and the knife-sharp cutting of that whisper into his spirit, Zebadyah raised his voice in a desert scream of desert song, words invoking the strength and refuge of a desert God, ancient and severe, in whose presence all unclean things, whether mortal or immortal, withered like grass:

His arms are mighty,

He shatters the foe!

He is my tent

My refuge,

My rock and fortress …

He trains my hands for battle,

And my fingers for war!

He drove the menorah into a corpse’s face. It spat and hissed as it fell back, and then cold hands, so cold, grasped his extended right arm, and suddenly he was on his back gazing up at the stars in their sky and the dark shapes of the dead bending over him. Fingers dug into his flesh, into his arm, his shoulder. Then the touch of a cold face and the pain of teeth, more violent and sharp than he could have imagined or feared, peeling away his skin, tearing away a part of him, a part of his
body
. This was his death, his death … In a scream of agony Zebadyah cried out the life-prayer and death-prayer of his People, hoping that God, however distant, would hear his last words:
Sh’ma Yisrael adonai eloheinu …

Kana blew a long call on the shofar, desperate and loud. Then he dropped it from his lips and leapt into the crowd of dead at the synagogue steps, his sica flashing in the dark. He saw the priest tugged beneath the corpses and he howled in his rage, as he had once heard Barabba howl on the dusty pass of Adummim, the Red Way, the Way of Blood, when a pack of dead lurching out of the rocks took one of his most trusted warriors. Tonight Zebadyah had not hidden beneath any boat on the shore, leaving Shimon bar Nahemyah to stand in his place at the door of the synagogue. Instead, tonight the priest had stood in Kana’s place, while Kana paced brooding on the slope of the hill of tombs. Hearing the moans, he had unsheathed his sica and run into the town, run fast until his sides burned. And yet he was too late.

As he drove his knife under the chin and up into the skull of one of the growling dead, he heard a cry from his left.

“Father! Abba!
Abba!
”

He knew the voice; without sparing a glance, he shouted, “Get him out of there!”

Another of the dead grasped at him; Kana caught the corpse’s arm in a hard grip and pulled it in close—a wild glimpse of teeth—and he drove the knife in, then pulled it free just as swiftly, slamming his hip into the corpse to shove it aside and out of the way. Even as it fell, he had chosen his next target; he grasped the thing’s arm to pull it near, but the soggy remnant of its sleeve came away in his hand, and he staggered back from the force of his pull. The thing turned on him, hissing. Its hands gripped Kana’s shoulders, a grip fierce and cold, cold even through his cloak. With a shout, he drove the sica up through its chin and saw the thing’s face go slack.

Others behind grasped at his shoulders, his hair. He dropped, had a confused glimpse of unsandalled feet all around him, pale and heavy with stench, as he let himself fall to the ground to roll away and back to his knees. A hop up to his feet, and Kana crouched with his sica ready. The corpses lunged at him, bending to grasp him, and then he was whirling and ducking and slicing in the dance of the fennec, the fox in the desert, the dance Barabba—damn his heart—had taught him in caves far from the sea, in ravines where the dry dust still carried the footprints of dead that had passed through years before. Fingers cold and damp brushed his shoulders, his arms, even his face, but none found a grip. He moved as quickly as the wind, for none know where the wind has come from or where it will go, they only feel the strength and the swiftness of its passing. On this wind there was a blade, with a bite sharper than winter or hunger itself. And when Kana slid the point and then the curved, cruel length into unclean flesh, he shouted, a hoarse bark like the fennec. Exultant, fierce, the cry at the kill, for he was alive and another was not. He danced, and another was still.

Memories crowded upon him as he spun and cut. That day of ambush on the high Adummim last summer; the sweat and heat of his long night’s battle at the synagogue door fifteen years ago; the scream of Ahava, his beloved, dying as the teeth of the dead tore at her; his encounter with a dead child in the alleys of Yerushalayim, its empty eyes and wild hiss, a tattered doll still clutched in its hand. Kana shoved the memories away, hard; he had no time for them. Every bone, every beat of his heart, every breath had to be focused on this moment, on the slide and shriek of his Roman knife, on the lurching, groping movements of the enemy he faced. On killing.

The call of the shofar rang in Shimon’s ears, a blast of sound like the roar of some beast, except deeper and clearer than any beast’s cry in all the world.

Following its call, Shimon stumbled into the space before the synagogue, gasping for breath. Yeshua was there already, walking toward the knot of dead about Kana, and for an instant, Shimon stopped, breathless, seeing the other Hebrew dance among the dead, seeing his face and the efficiency of his movements, as though he were a Roman trained to kill. In that moment Shimon glimpsed what it must have been like in the wilds about Yerushalayim with Barabba the Outlaw. He wondered if this was what Yehuda tribe would become, in this generation or the next, or the one after. Caught between the Romans and the dead, both intent on devouring the People. Driven to the sica and the fever of killing, until they visited distant fishing villages and taught even the youths there to kill—as Barabba had sought to do.

Then Shimon saw Yakob pulling his father free of the corpses, and he let out a cry. Stooping, he took up a small stone from the street and ran at the dead.

But Yeshua was there before him. He walked into the dead and his face and figure shone as though Shimon were gazing at a sun; he put his hand up before his eyes to shield them from the harsh light. Bars of fire flared across his vision. There was pressure against his chest, and he stumbled back with a shout.

Then the light was gone, and he was blinking against a blaze of color, his heart pounding. He made out Yakob drawing the priest up onto the steps, and Kana crouched with his knife in his right hand and his face red as though baked by the sun’s heat.

And Yeshua.

The stranger stood with his arms out, the dead silent and still on the earth about his feet. Not one of them moved or twitched. Not one of them rose to its feet. Not one moaned in that hunger, cold and empty as the dark between the stars.

Shimon’s heart was a storm on the sea. All these years, the dead had been his nightmare, his horror. And this man—this stranger he’d feared and hated—had just
walked
into the corpses and they had withered before the heat of his presence like leaves in a drought. All that he feared and all that he had known was as nothing to this man. Shimon fell to his knees on the hard earth.

“
Rabboni
,” he whispered.
Rabboni
: My teacher, my master.

“On your feet, Cephas,” Yeshua said quietly, without looking at him.

Everything in him shaken, Shimon rose and followed Yeshua toward the synagogue steps, where Yakob held his father’s head in his lap. Kana stood near, his head bowed, his sica held at his side, the blade dark with gore.

The priest’s shoulder and part of his neck had been torn open like cloth, and ragged strings of sinew and muscle had been pulled out of him. Shimon saw the glint of white bone. Blood had pulsed out over Zebadyah’s chest and belly, dark and slick, running over his skin like olive oil. Yakob had stripped to his loincloth and was pressing the woolen tunic he’d worn to his father’s wound.

“Zebadyah,” Yeshua whispered, sitting down beside Yakob.

“He’s dying.” Yakob’s voice was choked.

Zebadyah opened his eyes. His face was gray. “Yakob,” he gasped.

“I am here, abba.”

“Is Bat Eleazar safe?”

Yakob cast a glance at the
navi
and Shimon, and these were not the calm eyes of the fisherman Shimon knew. There was panic there. Shimon only nodded, his heart wrenched with pain for his friend.

“She is safe, father.” Yakob’s face crumpled.

The priest’s eyes glazed. “Tell her. Tell her that I love her still. As I did when I first saw her. That no man … that no man has ever been so jealous of a … a brother. That I hope her sons live long and good lives. Tell her that I am … that I am sorry.”

Yakob bit his lip.

Yeshua crouched beside him, his own face twisted in sorrow. As Shimon stood near, the stranger set his hand on Zebadyah’s chest, as though blessing him. “You are not what I thought you were,” Yeshua said softly. “
Shalom, kohen
of Israel. Whatever it is, this thing that burns in your memory, your shame, it is melted away like water.”

Shimon stared at Yeshua. The stranger did not speak as he had earlier that day. His voice carried a quiet, clear authority.

Zebadyah’s face tightened. “Only God can forgive or forget … evils,” he panted. “Take your … hand … from my chest, Bar Yosef.”

“Abba,” Yakob whispered, pleading. “This man might heal you. He healed grandfather.”

“No, Yakob.
No.
Not worth … I will die clean. If I must face … face our God at last, I will do it clean. I do not know whether this man’s healing … whether it is a sign from El Shaddai, or some witchcraft … but I know that he has come … he has come to our town and the
shedim
have … have come up with him.” He gripped his son’s hand; his own shook. “I have made mistakes, terrible mistakes,” he rasped. “But I have lived to keep my town clean … and … and faithful and
safe
, and I will die so.”

The light had gone from Yeshua’s face. His eyes were troubled. “So be it,” he said softly. He rose slowly to his feet.

Yakob pulled Zebadyah close against his breast, his father’s blood running over his hands.

“Keep our People faithful,” Zebadyah whispered. “And safe. Follow no stranger. For me, Yakob. Ezra. Remember … Ezra.… Until the true
navi
comes.”

Then he shuddered, and his face went slack. His chest rose and fell, shallow, for a few moments. Then stilled.

Shimon stood silent. Yakob’s face was wet with tears. He clutched his father’s corpse to his chest.

Kana crouched beside him, his sica still unsheathed in his hand. “Do you want me to do it?” The words came out gruffly.

Yakob shook his head quickly, and squeezed his eyes shut, his breath shuddering.

“I understand.” Kana took Yakob’s hand in his and opened his fingers gently. Then he pressed the hilt of the sica into Yakob’s hand. “It’s cleanest if you place the point beneath the chin and thrust up,” he said quietly.

The look Yakob turned on him was a stab to Kana’s heart. A look as though Yakob were gazing at a Roman, at a killer of his kin, at a man utterly strange and alien to their People. Swallowing, Kana closed the other man’s fingers around the hilt and stood, turning away, leaving father and son alone. Staring down at the silent dead, he traced his thumb over the thin cuts on his arm, his lips moving. Counting.

“You were right,” Yeshua said to Shimon. “I came to you too late. I hesitated at the door, and it … it is all wrong.”

After that the night went thick and sluggish; they each moved as if in the midst of a fever. Yakob sat with his father’s head cooling in his lap. After a while he took his hands from his father’s face and was careful not to touch the skin that had lost its warmth, lest he be unclean. His pain was written on his face as dark and irrevocable as the words of God on the scroll of Torah.

When Yohanna returned to the synagogue after warning all those in Kfar Nahum to shut their doors and not open them, no matter what they might hear, he found his brother and his father like that. He stood over them, stricken.

Yakob lifted his head. “I waited for you, brother.”

Yakob’s tears had been silent, but Yohanna let out a long, low wail, as though something had been ripped out of his heart and he could not believe it.

As Yohanna wept, he and his brother lifted their father from the steps and carried him away into the dark. An empty shelf waited beside their mother’s in a tomb on the hill.

Shimon walked to his house, found Rahel and Koach there, and embraced each of them fiercely. Then he took up a small shovel from the stack of tools he kept by the outer door and left without a word.

He began to carry the dead out behind the town—not to the old midden, but to a stretch of dirt near it, where he dug fiercely at the hard earth. To his surprise, some of the boat people, using rags torn from their own bodies for gloves, helped carry the corpses out to this fresh grave, helped him lay the bodies within it. The vagrants’ eyes shone faintly in the starlight. Then, when the dead lay in the ground in a silent heap, they shoved the dirt back in over them and packed it down. They gathered stones, the heaviest they could find, and covered the grave, as the Hebrews had done long ago when their people had only just left the desert and were still uncattled and living in tents. They made a cairn over all those dead, a cairn taller than a man, perhaps the largest that had ever been made in the land, or the largest that ever would.

When the last of the rocks had been set atop the cairn, Shimon leaned his back against it, breathing hard, and several of the boat people leaned against it too. He listened to the waves. After a few moments, gruffly, he asked their names. Obed, Philippos, and Xanthippos. One Hebrew, two who were Greek.

He would remember their names.

When the moon came up high over the water, Kana found the
navi
standing near the edge of the sea, gazing at the water, troubled. Kana was so weary he could barely stand; he had been checking to make sure no dead had broken into any of the abandoned and empty houses to remain a lurking threat that might fall upon the living later. He’d found none, but it had been dark and uneasy work.

Yeshua kept his gaze on the sea. He spoke softly as Kana approached. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. About the Romans. When they walk by and strike you across your face.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kana said bitterly.

“Kana, there … there may be … a way to face a man, an enemy, living or dead, without a knife in your hand. There may be. When a Roman strikes you across your face, turn your other cheek.”

“My other …?”

Kana’s eyes widened.

When a Roman struck a Hebrew across the face, he did so with his left hand, and always with the back of the hand. To turn the other cheek to him … that would be a challenge; the Roman would have to strike with his right hand, or at least with his open palm. To do so would be to acknowledge that he was striking an equal. Then the Roman would owe a debt of honor to the man he’d struck, the man who was
not
his inferior and who had as much right to strike him and yet had chosen not to.

For one dizzying moment, Kana stared out over the waves in the dark and glimpsed what such a resistance could do.

What if a hundred, five hundred, a
thousand
were to behave so? The rulers of the land could not feed them
all
to the dead in the ghoul pits. The Romans needed men to work, women to warm their beds. If every man and woman in every town were simply to turn the cheek, or to do any of a dozen such acts, acts that involved neither cowering nor lashing out, but simply
insisting
that they and the Roman facing them were akin … could such a thing work? Or would the Romans not burn this land to ash, to keep such an insurrection from spreading across their world?

“God,” he whispered, a prayer that was one word, one gasp.

“Don’t you have eyes to see?” Yeshua said, his face sad. “Ears to hear?”

Kana’s own words, turned toward him. Their original meaning had been peeled away, like that dying woman’s rags by the boat, to reveal stark ribs and emaciation beneath, something that could not be unseen or avoided or forgotten. It seemed to him suddenly that he had lived his life fleeing from one violence to the next. He remembered the pale corpses dropped into the water like so many stones. He remembered the heat of the dust on the Red Way. And more than that, he recalled a girl sleeping, a Roman girl in a Roman bed. Recalled his own hand shaking in the dark, his palm slick with sweat about the hilt of his knife as he stood over her.

For a moment, he could only breathe.

“We are all screaming,” Yeshua said. “We are all suffering. We are all kin. We must … we must gaze in our enemies’ eyes and … and see our kin gazing back at us.”

Kana didn’t answer. He tossed his sica into the sand. It was all too much. Too much, too much. He bowed his head and struggled to shut his memories away.

He lifted his head when he heard footsteps in the sand. Koach was coming down the shore toward them, a ragged figure with one sleeve torn away and his other arm limp at his side. He stopped a few feet from Kana.

“You’re back,” he said tonelessly.

“I’m back,” Kana said.

Koach glanced at Yeshua, then at the cairn. The boy had changed. He was still short and his right arm was still useless, but he
stood
differently. There was a hardness in his face that was not cruelty. Kana tried to recall where he had seen such a face before. He only knew that whatever man young Koach was growing into, he’d be a man others could trust. And Koach was not likely, Kana thought, ever again to need his protection against others in the town.

“Is it true?” Koach said after a moment. “Bar Yesse is dead?”

Kana’s lips became a thin line. “It’s true.”

Koach gazed at the cairn a moment, then at the stone houses behind, and something flickered in those hard eyes.

“Then I will grieve for him,” he said.

For a while the three of them stood together in a world without any speech but the crashing voice of the sea. Koach watched the shimmer of moon on the water and gazed at the horizon where sea and sky faded into endless dark. He thought of his fantasy of rowing Tamar, one-handed, over that sea in a boat. Of finding some far village that would not mind a cripple and a fatherless woman making a home beside them. A child’s fantasy. He could not have given her that. He had not given her freedom. Only a release from her pain.

His thoughts were broken by a distant moan. Glancing up, he could see the corpse approaching over the shingle from the north, dragging one leg behind it. In the moonlight he could see that its bad leg was bare of cloth; it had been torn savagely just above the knee, as by an animal. Near the hip was a great gash, straight and sharp, as though the man had tried to cut his bitten leg away before he died, but had failed to complete the task—fainting perhaps from horror, or loss of blood, or the onset of the fever that brings the walking death. Koach sucked in his breath. A footstep warned him a moment before Shimon stood beside him; the boat people stayed by the cairn, watching.

Watching it approach.

Koach knew this corpse.

It was Benayahu.

Koach felt a sickness of fear moving like cold, sluggish water through his body, yet flame burned on the surface of the water. The corpse’s face was Benayahu’s face. The same cheekbones, the same fleshy lips, the same scar by his eye. This man he’d hated, this man in whose shop he’d worked.

This man who’d beaten Tamar.

Part of him wanted to run out to that corpse and deliver some blow, some swift vengeance for the woman he’d lost.

And part of him wanted to bend over and be sick in the grass.

The
reek
of it.

Koach stooped to take up the sica Kana had thrown to the ground; one needed two hands to wield it as Kana did, but only one to stab with it.

“No, Koach, no.” Yeshua pressed a hand to Koach’s chest, stopping him. His eyes seemed very dark, pools that might swallow up stars, or pools out of which stars could be born. Before Koach or Kana or any of the others could argue, Yeshua stepped out over the sand to stand in Benayahu’s way.

He put out his hand and the corpse halted as though pressed to a wall of stone. Its mouth opened and closed soundlessly. The air shimmered with heat.

“This is what I had to remember,” Yeshua called to the others. “I am sure of it, almost sure. We must see the living and the dead as our father sees them, even if that sight burns us away like … like candles, because nothing else, nothing, will ever suffice. Our father, he sees all of us who are here and all of our children unborn and all of our fathers and their fathers and
their
fathers, all one People, in every moment that has been written or will be written, and we must leave not one behind and starving, not one of our People living or dead, not … not if we can do otherwise.”