No Lasting Burial (25 page)

The corpse took no step forward, but it interrupted Yeshua with a low, quavering moan—such an agony of hunger. Koach barely held back from covering his ears. He stared at this corpse of the man who had been his enemy, though perhaps that man had never known it.

The sica was half-sheathed in the sand, yet Koach did not touch its hilt, and Kana did not reach for it, not yet.

“What are you going to do?” Kana called.

That haunted, desert look returned to Yeshua’s eyes. “Try and find the man who was starving, the man the father lost.”

The corpse leaned forward as though into a high wind. Its jaw worked as though it were chewing open-mouthed. It hissed at the living.

Yeshua straightened, his voice thickening with grief. “Benayahu, I see you. I know what you have done. I know what you did to your daughter. I can hear them all now, all the voices, all the words that before were lost in the moaning.” His eyes shone with unshed tears. “I hear her, and I hear you. I hear Koach there behind me, and Kana, and Cephas, and all of them, all of them, and it hurts. It hurts.” He sucked in a breath, and took another step toward the corpse. “And I know that somewhere in that rotting flesh you wear, somewhere deep, even now, your self-hatred and despair eats at you. I hear it loud as wind, as locusts in the crops. You can devour a hundred of your kin, a thousand, to fill that emptiness that not even your beating of your daughter could fill. And it will never be enough. I tell you the truth. Benayahu, it will
never
be enough.”

The corpse growled, its eyes staring sightlessly ahead, and tried to slouch forward a step.

“No,” Yeshua said. Koach could hear the tears in his voice, and even his mother’s voice had never sounded like that, never sounded that hoarse with sorrow, that raw with pain. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Yeshua said, pleading. “There’s a choice. Everything we do is a choice. Everything. I
know
this. I hear us all, all, in my … in my
head
,” he choked, “how could I not know this? I will not let you walk into that town, Benayahu. Nor any other corpse that may come. I promise. I promise. Not one. I can send you away.” The heat made the air ripple like water, and the corpse staggered back one step.

They all did. Koach held a hand before his face.

“You can turn around,” Yeshua said, his voice quivering. “You can walk away in that corpse you wear. No one will drive a blade into your head. I promise it. But you will not feed again on your kin. Not ever. If you leave, you will walk this earth always, hungering, thirsting, unsatisfied, in a misery whose origin you cannot even remember, until that body has crumbled away at last and is only soil, only that, only the dust it was in the beginning. And yet … and yet you will
still
suffer, famished, in an eternity without sleep, though no other will ever do you harm. If that is what you choose, Benayahu, my kin.” Yeshua turned his hand, presenting the palm to the corpse, as though to invite it near. The heat abated, though the night was still warm, too warm for the shore of the sea. “Or let it go. All of it: the hunger, that body you wear, your fear and bitterness. Let it go.” His voice dropped to nearly a whisper. “I hear your pain. And it is
my
pain. I am standing in the door, Benayahu, and I am burning, I am burning.” Tears on his face. “The door of my father’s house. And it hurts. God, it hurts. Take my hand. I’ll help. I’ll help you step through. We can’t flinch away. Our father in heaven still loves you, Benayahu. He still finds you beautiful … as the day he made you. You think he won’t welcome you, but he will, he will. Do you know what is on the other side of this door? His house … his
house
has so many … so many rooms, Benayahu. I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t see it. I
see
it. I see what he sees, and I am weeping, weeping like him.” He touched his face. “These are his tears. That house where there is finally, finally no … no screaming. So many rooms. One even for you. And you can’t even imagine it. It’s that beautiful. So beautiful.”

The corpse’s head swiveled from Yeshua to the others. It
screeched
, making Koach start, his heart violent in his chest. He found himself staring at Benayahu’s bloodied teeth in terrible fascination. All day Koach had grieved; now he was intensely grateful that Tamar was not walking the shore in just such a reeking corpse as this. Trapped like this, hungering like this, her mouth full of blood. He felt ill, unsteady on his feet.

“No,” Yeshua said. “You look at me, Benayahu. At me. And choose. Please. Everyone chooses. Please.”

The corpse faced Yeshua, and stood still. Something very strange began to happen. When he lay in his bedding later that night, Koach would not be entirely sure he had really seen it, had not imagined it. The life, the spirit, the person that Benayahu had been—all of that came back into the corpse’s eyes. It came the way a great fish rises from the deep, murky and indistinct at first, and then gradually nearer until it was clear as a flash of sunlight on scales. Koach looked away swiftly, for all of Benayahu was in the corpse’s eyes—all that he had ever loved or feared or craved, every moment of pain or regret. Koach didn’t want to see that much of the man he’d hated, or that much of
any
man, all in one shattering instant. He kept his eyes averted.

Yeshua’s face and hands began to burn with light, the way the sea does when it reflects the sun’s fire. As Moseh’s face must have when he lowered his hands from his eyes and gazed upon God at Har Sinai. As though all this shore was covered with God, with the fire of his presence, and only Yeshua could see it. The rest of them saw it reflected on his skin, and felt it in the heat that now scorched hot as the desert in the month of the lion. In a moment, all the sweat had been burned away from Koach’s face, leaving behind only the taste of salt on his lips.

Yeshua’s hand trembled as he held it out. “Please, Benayahu.”

Benayahu staggered toward him, dragging one foot. His jaw slack. He reached for Yeshua, and his fingers, tentative as an old man’s, touched the stranger’s palm. The corpse’s eyes filled with regret and pain so fierce, it hurt to look at them.

The corpse let out a slow sigh, a last exhalation like the world coming undone. Then its eyes emptied. Its knees gave way, and Yeshua caught the dead man in his arms and held him, the weight carrying him to his knees. He lay the body down on the wet sand.

Without knowing why, Koach found himself by Yeshua’s shoulder. He stood over the corpse, the last of Tamar’s kin. But he also remembered the misery in this corpse’s eyes. And the way the
nagar
had stood staring at his wife’s name on the wall of his shop. His hate was doused, for the pain in the man’s eyes had been such that it could only inspire sorrow and regret, a regret deeper than the sea. Slowly, his throat tight, Koach leaned over the body. With his left hand he closed Benayahu’s eyes.

“I’m sorry, Tamar,” he whispered. “I didn’t help you, and now you are gone, and your father, too. I’m sorry.”

Beside him, the light faded from Yeshua’s face as quickly as it had come. He fell to the side, but Koach caught him against his hip, breaking the fall. In a moment Shimon and Kana were there, helping him lower Yeshua gently to the sand.

Silent tears. Yeshua blinked them back. “Abba,” he whispered. “The door is open. And the light, the light, the light …”

“
Navi
, are you all right?” Shimon asked hoarsely. He and Koach exchanged a wide-eyed glance.

“I looked into his eyes,” Yeshua whispered, the tears running from the corners of his eyes down to his temples, tracing a path in the day’s dirt and sweat on his face. “And he looked into mine. And I could see, oh I could see. Myself, reflected in his eyes. I remembered.” The smallest shake of his head, his eyes glassy with pain and wonder. “I could breathe out a billion stars. All that life and beauty. Everything so beautiful—and so fragile. Everything dying and being born. And the sky, always getting bigger, always bigger. Too small to hold all the things I love. Cephas, I remembered.” His hands were shaking, and Shimon caught one, squeezed it. Kana took the other, and cushioned Yeshua’s head on his arm.

“It’s slipping away now,” Yeshua breathed. “All the suns and all the worlds and all their peoples. A moment ago, I could see them. See all of them. For just a moment—” He closed his eyes, but the tears still escaped him. His hands still shook as the men of Kfar Nahum held him.

“It’s gone,” he whispered. “I am Yeshua bar Yosef, a son of man, the
nagar
, of Natzeret on the hill.”

The night was aging and Shimon staggered when he reached the doorstep of his own house; he hadn’t slept since the day before this past one. Through bleary, bloodshot eyes, he peered down at the object that awaited him on the stone step, small and white in the starlight. He took it up in his hand; when he saw what he held, a shiver ran through his entire body and his entire heart. He didn’t know how long he crouched there, holding the object, but his legs felt stiff when at last he lowered himself and sat on the step.

It was a fish carved from driftwood. A tail but no fins. A small, empty eye, just a circle carved into the wood. A simple thing carved by a child. Shimon held the small, precious thing in his hands and his cheeks were wet with tears. Glancing up, he found through the blur of his vision Bar Cheleph leaning against the house across the street, watching him.

“I took that from him, Bar Yonah,” he said. “Years back.” His eyes were dark with memory, his voice slow as though burdened with sleep. “He called me brother, tonight. That is his.”

Shimon stared at him, mutely.

Bar Cheleph folded his hands uneasily behind his back. “I troubled your house. I regret it.”

Shimon closed his hand around the small fish and rose, turning to his door.

“I’ll watch your house tonight,” Bar Cheleph called out quickly.

Shimon stopped, his fingertips just brushing the wood of his door.

“More dead might come. I’ll keep watch.”

Without turning, Shimon said, “You want to atone for striking my brother. He may forgive you; I don’t. I don’t need your atonement, Bar Cheleph.” And he opened his door and stepped within, shutting it behind him.

Slowly, holding her breath, Rahel walked out onto the sand, hearing bits of driftwood and the bones of fish crack beneath her naked feet. The world gray with the approaching dawn. Her husband’s old prayer shawl was rough against her arm where she had tucked it into her sleeve. She kept her gaze on the man ahead of her, a man whose clothes were tattered, his face and arms dark with bruises. She had come down to the water to mourn a dead priest and a long-dead husband, and to be alone with the sea, but she found Yeshua there before her.

He stood where the land ended with the breakers wetting his feet, his arms extended, his hair tangled from a night walking in the wind without sleep, and without comb or basin to wash in. Though her sons had returned to the house in the late hours, and Yakob with them, as though he were unwilling to go back to a house now bereft of his father—Yeshua had not. All through the hours of the dark, he had been out here. Glancing to the left and the right, Rahel saw a few others here on the shore. Kana sat with his back to the cairn. Bar Cheleph stood leaning on an oar, a little way down the shore from Yeshua; Yohanna was at his side, a hand on his shoulder, his lips moving with words too quiet for Rahel to hear. Yesse sat cross-legged on the sand a few strides from them, his face desolate.

Even as Rahel drew near, Yeshua began calling out in high, quavering wails as if he were God calling some new world into being. The old desert God of their fathers. The God Rahel had always revered and resented and feared. Yeshua’s arms were lifted as though he were prepared to part the sea as Moseh the Lawgiver had done. Then she gasped. Forms were rising from the water at his call, shapes of men dark against the morning in the east, at least ten or twelve. Corpses streamed water from their lank hair and the rotted remnants of their clothing as they staggered out of the waves, strands of seaweed caught about their limbs and trailing behind. Their arms rose from the sea, reaching for the man they saw before them.

“Amma!”

A cry behind her. Glancing back, she saw Shimon, his hair wild about his face, his eyes bloodshot from anguish and lack of sleep. Behind him, Yakob, looking scarcely better after the dark hours mourning his father. Both of them were in the dirtied garments they had worn the night before last, out at sea, when they had pulled up the nets full of fish. Some distance behind, slower, Koach stepped through the tideline grasses. All her boys, and Zebadyah’s. One of them must have wakened to find her gone from the house; she had strained to lift the bar over the door but had done it quietly enough, and had stepped out softly, her grief so deep that she had forgotten her sandals. But after the deaths of the past day and night, an unexplained absence might well be an occasion for panic.

“Amma!” Shimon called. “Get back!”

Yakob called out, “
Rabboni! Rabboni
!”

The man from Natzeret let out another piercing cry. The dead were walking out of the waves now, their mouths opening to moan, water pouring out from between their dead teeth. Rahel’s heart pounded with anger more than with fear—always, these dead rose to take from her those she cherished—and she might have approached nearer, either to stand by the strange
navi
or to scream her grief at the restless dead, but at that moment her sons reached her. Shimon’s hand settled heavily on her shoulder.

Yeshua stepped out into the water and took the first corpse by the arm, gazing into its eyes and whispering something none of those on the shore could hear. Then Rahel saw what her sons had seen the night before. She saw the rush of life back into the eyes of the dead, its last, exhaled breath, and then its fall back into the water. That was a shock to Rahel’s spirit greater than the rising of the corpses had been—that a man could whisper some word that would give rest so complete and final. She gazed at Yeshua in wonder, as he strode knee-deep along the surf, gripping each of the corpses, one after the next, as though they were his brothers and he was welcoming them home after a night of casting the nets. One seized his throat in its long fingers and pulled him near to bite, but he simply placed the heel of his hand against its head and pushed, holding it back long enough to catch and hold its gaze.

“Amma?” Shimon reached her side, breathless. “Are you all right?”

Rahel couldn’t look away from the falling of the dead. “I dreamed this,” she whispered. “Last night. A figure, all in white. White fire. Corpses falling like old leaves. I couldn’t see his face.”

“His robes are brown,” Shimon said.

“Yet it was he in my dream.”

“Amma!” Koach reached them, panting.

“I am all right, Koach, Shimon.”

The corpses lay still as dead fish in the surf. And Yeshua stood there, water to his thighs, gazing down at them. If only all of this had been a dream—not only this night but all the nights previous, all the past fifteen years. All the moaning of the dead. Yet as Koach stepped close, she smiled faintly. No. She would not give up the past fifteen years with her sons. Not though her husband and his brother had been torn out of her life, if not out of her heart.

“He needs us,” Rahel said quietly. “Come on.”

Yeshua knelt a moment by a fallen corpse that lay half out of the surf, then lowered his hand to its face, closing its eyes. Those eyelids must have long since gone stiff and cold, yet at his touch they slid closed as easily as though the corpse had died only a moment before. The thought of that touch, that unclean flesh, made Shimon shiver; yet the corpse, now that it lay still, with its eyes closed rather than staring in endless hunger, seemed …
clean
. Like one who had lain down the burdens of the night and given himself to sleep, and who might wake before sundown to cook fish over the coals and ready the boat again. It was strange, so strange. He repressed an urge to approach the corpse, to kneel by Yeshua and gaze at it, see if it was truly at rest.

“I must get out on that water,” Yeshua said.

“What?” Shimon gasped.

“There will be too many to face on the sand, too many, too many, yet they must come up. They must all come up.” Yeshua’s voice was cold and calm. His face might have been one of Koach’s wood carvings. “I must get out there, Cephas.”

“On the water? It’s the Sabbath.”

“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

Shimon swallowed. “There’s dark weather coming.”

“The darkest.” Yeshua’s eyes were hard. “And when the dead come up with it, I must be there to meet them. Will you row me out?”

Shimon hesitated, glancing at the bodies at the water’s edge.

Yeshua stepped near, lowering his voice so that only Shimon could hear. “Years ago, something reached into your town and tore out its heart. The
shedim
have roamed that hollow space it left, and their moans have filled your ears. And you hear it, I know you do, in your mind, even now, even as I do. But we can end it. We can
end it
. You’ve shivered in the wind … too long. Let your faith be as a rock, Cephas, to shield you. Let it be as the Ramat ha-Golan, like mountains that can … that can challenge the sky. I tell you, I tell you, on such a rock as that I will build a new town, and a gathering to live in it such as this land has never seen. And not even the shrieking wind of Sheol will prevail against it.”

Yeshua’s words stirred him; a hard glint came to Shimon’s eyes. Whatever revelation had come to the stranger with the light and the heat as he faced the corpses, it had burned away much of his uncertainty, his dread. Yeshua’s face was still bruised, his words still rapid and breathless, but he spoke with a fierce confidence and a demand for help to which there could be only one answer.

Shimon glanced at his father’s boat. “I will take you out there,” he said.

Yeshua gripped Shimon’s arm below the shoulder and squeezed so hard, it hurt.

“We can end it,” he said again.

Then he let go and strode back down to the water’s edge.

“Come on,” Shimon muttered, and ran down the shore toward that other line of boats, those still seaworthy. Yakob stood, hesitating a moment, staring after Yeshua. Then he ran after Shimon, shells and other sea debris cracking beneath his sandals.

Rahel watched Yeshua walk down the line of the sea. He was different this morning, Yeshua. Harder, colder. All his formidable energy channeled into one fierce purpose, as though every breath he took before launching out on that sea was a breath taken at high cost.

Rahel stared at the bodies of the dead. With the fingers of her right hand she reached into her left sleeve and touched the old, woolen shawl she had tucked away there. Yonah’s
tallit
. It brought her a smile of both remembered happiness and remembered grief. All those years ago, she had grieved alone. Most of the women she could have called friend or sister had died that night, violated and beaten by the Roman mercenaries and then eaten by the dead. Having none to turn to for comfort, Rahel had taken to carrying her husband’s
tallit
with her while she cooked and while she slept, while she nursed her crippled child. It was all she had left of him besides their children, and for a while, the cloth still carried his scent. It was many months before she could bring herself to wash it, and she did so only after the scent was too faint for her to detect it and after she had forgotten what that scent had been like. She had waited until her infant was sleeping and Shimon was gone from the house, then had wept as she washed the shawl in her basin, scrubbing it until the water was browned with the months of oil and dirt, then wringing it out and scrubbing it again. When it was clean and beautiful (though less so to her eyes than it had been), she had draped it over its peg to dry, and then sat for most of a Roman hour by the basin, staring at the dirtied water. In her heart she had felt that the last of her husband’s scent and the last of him was in that water, and she could not bring herself to pour it out. She thought of asking Shimon to spill that water out over the sand or over the sea when she could not see it done. But she had decided at last that it had to be her, and, asking Shimon to watch the baby after he came home, Rahel had carried the basin down to the sea.

Now she gazed on the bodies of the dead, wondering who they were, and whether men or women in Kfar Nahum had grieved at their death. Their faces had been eaten away by time and the sea and the hunger of fish. She couldn’t even tell if they had been Hebrew. One of them might even have been a woman she had laughed with by the cistern. She couldn’t know.

The back of her neck warned her she was being watched, and a glance behind showed her Koach’s waif, the young woman who had been silent and then had sung. She was picking her way carefully through the grasses. The sight startled Rahel, and she realized suddenly that the girl must have slept the night in her house. She should have been angered, but strangely she felt only pity and a sense of kinship, though this bewildered her. She and that girl—they had both been touched by the
navi
. Both of them had been given back something lost, something resigned. Both of them had been, by that act, torn away from their old lives. Now they stood in the empty place, the place of waiting, where the waves eat the world and yet the world remains. She didn’t know what was going to happen.

While Yesse stood some way up the tideline and watched, his face drawn with grief, the men drew Shimon’s boat toward the water, the scrape of it against the shingle an oddly comforting sound, an ancient sound, one the People had heard night after night upon this shore for generations—the sound of their men leaving behind land and bed and security and setting out on the fragile surface of a terrible deep. The boat slid quickly, its bow toward the surf, for Yeshua lent a hand, and Bar Cheleph did also, though Shimon gave him a look of furious warning, a look that said as clearly as a shout:
Get your hands off my father’s boat.

Rahel reached the boat just as the men brought it down to the surf. She took the gunwale in her hands and sprang in, almost as though she were a young girl again. She winced when her feet struck the bottom of the boat, jarring her hip.

Shimon gasped and motioned for the others to stop. They let go of the gunwale and stared at Rahel.

“Amma! What are you doing?”

“Going with you,” she said, her teeth clenched against the pain. She seated herself between the oar benches, using one of the nets for a cushion, her back to the hard wood of the hull.

“No, you are not.”

Rahel met his gaze, her own as hard as winter. “What began with a spear through your father’s brow—I want to see it ended.”

Leaning against the gunwale, Shimon exchanged uncertain looks with the other men. Yeshua was staring intently at the sea, seeming hardly to have heard. Then Bar Cheleph spoke, his brow damp with sweat. “I am coming, too.”

“
You
,” Shimon said, “are not welcome in my father’s boat.”

Bar Cheleph smiled faintly. “I am the adopted brother of Yakob and Yohanna. I would have been casting the nets with you long before, if I had any bravery at all. But …” He looked down. “I had dreams. The same dream, each night. I’m out on the water, and we’re casting the nets, and in the dream I always bring
them
up.”

Shimon gave him a startled look. He knew such dreams all too well.

Bar Cheleph whispered, “I never knew if my father and mother were among those who were tossed in.”

Kana looked away. Yeshua stood gazing at the waves.

Shimon hesitated, the incoming sea nearly reaching his toes. “You are blessed,” he said after a moment. “Never to have seen your father risen, like that.”

“Not knowing is worse.” Bar Cheleph looked out over the chop of the water. “Not knowing if he found rest. Or if he is hungering.”

“He found rest.” Shimon’s tone was harsh. “Fathers don’t pursue their children across the sand to eat them. Whatever is down there, it is not him. Nor your mother either.”

Yakob nodded to Bar Cheleph, his face drawn. “I put your father in a tomb last night, and mine. Our father had two Yakobs. Never forget that.”

Bar Cheleph’s eyes moistened. He whispered a word of gratitude, so quiet it almost couldn’t be heard.