No Lasting Burial (7 page)

Shimon’s
first nights at sea exhausted him. After he and Zebadyah’s sons pulled the boat
up to the tideline, gutted their fish by the pre-dawn light, and stumbled back
into the town with their catch, it was all he could do to embrace Yakob at the
door of his house and offer a tired grunt of thanks—though if he’d been able to
summon more words, he would have called him
brother
. Then he’d enter
with a weary nod toward his mother and her infant, tumble into his bedding in
the olive’s shade in the atrium, and snore until long after the noon heat. He
had been out on the sea with his father a few times, but it had never been like
this—
his
hand casting the nets, and no midnight nap while his father
fished. You didn’t nap when you were one of the men in the boat, when it was your
hand that must keep the tiller or the oars if a storm came up.

On
one of these first mornings, he stepped through the heavy cedar door of his
father’s house and heard his infant brother shrieking. Not a
hunger cry but a pain cry, a thin, desperate wailing that tore through his
body, making his blood run cold. There was a hoarse note in the cries,
as though the boy had been wailing for a while.

His
heart sped up. Where was his mother? Was she all right? Why hadn’t she come at
her infant’s cry? He burst through into the atrium, not even pausing to toss
away his coat or peel off his gloves that reeked of fish and were slippery with
oil.

And
he stopped, shocked.

Rahel
knelt on a rug she had unrolled across the atrium’s dirt floor, a rug that had
belonged to one of Yonah’s kin, now dead. She was holding her baby tightly to
her, her own eyes squeezed shut; she must not have heard Shimon come in, not
over the baby’s screams. A stone knife lay discarded by her left knee, and in
the early dawn light blood shone on the blade. Her hands were bloody, too.

Shimon
took it all in at a glance, and realized it was his brother’s eighth day. The
stone knife—stone, not iron—was used for circumcision. He didn’t know where
Rahel had found the knife or from where she’d taken it.

“Where’s
Zebadyah bar Yesse?” he asked hoarsely.

Rahel
gave a start, glanced up at him, her eyes red from weeping.

Not
knowing what else to do, Shimon came and sat by her. The baby’s cries were
deafening.

“He
thinks my child is unclean.” Rahel’s voice quivered. “Do you think I’d trust
him with a knife?”

Shimon
knelt by her. Without speaking, he took his infant brother and held him, that
small, squalling, misshapen thing that had brought such anxiety into their
house. Rahel put her face in her hands, shaking silently, staining her face
with blood.

The
baby kept wailing. Shimon swallowed. For days he had tried not to look at his
brother. Now he couldn’t look away. Uncomfortably, he held him, uncertain of
what to do. The boy’s wound had been cleaned and bandaged.

After
a few moments, Rahel drew a shuddering breath and rose unsteadily to her feet.
She left, then came back with a cloth and pushed one corner of it, which she’d
dampened, into the baby’s small mouth. One hand pressed to her left breast as though
it pained her. For a few moments the baby still shrieked, then his mouth closed
around the cloth and he sucked at it vigorously, making small, muffled
whimpers.

“He
is Koach. Koach bar Yonah,” she said.

“Koach?”

“Koach.” Her face was
wet with tears. Tears for her child’s pain, tears for her own. Tears reddened
by the blood on her face.

On
the eighth day of a boy’s life, he is circumcised and gifted with a name and a
blessing that tell him what he will be. This was always a rite performed by the
priest, but today, by the morning’s light in her own house, Rahel had laid the
boy on this rug and taken up the knife and had done it herself.

She
had named him Koach.

The word for “strong.”

Silently,
Shimon and Rahel knelt beside each other, gazing down at that small, anguished
face. A bent child, but the only child Rahel would ever have again. The three
of them were the only family they had left.

Gently,
Rahel drew her fingertips along the curve of the boy’s cheek. “You will grow
strong,” she promised him. “Strong.” Her voice low and
fierce with that tone that only mothers use, the tone that over the cruel years
of history has made even emperors kneel before those who birthed them, has made
even kings seek the embrace of their mothers’ arms.

The
man was Barabba the Outlaw, the Roman-killer, and he rode one morning out of
the hills and out of the wilderness and walked his horse through the streets of
Kfar Nahum as though he owned the town. His beard was dark and there were small
twigs in it as though, like a prophet of old, he had neither time nor attention
to spare it. His face was brown with dust. From the right side of his saddle
hung two heads with their hair cut in the Roman style, and to the left side
he’d roped three more heads, these torn with strips of flesh missing as though
they’d been savaged by beasts. Each with a puncture wound in its brow. Their faces those of the unclean dead, the dead that hunger.

Men
and women drew back into their doors as Barabba passed, not wanting to be near
the unburied heads. Barabba himself was a forbidding figure, a giant on a black
horse larger than any they had ever seen. It was as though God had turned a
bear into a man and sent him into their narrow streets. Every town in the land
had heard of this man, even ruined towns. In the dead-haunted hills above the
Tumbling Water, this man and others like him, men who knew the use of curved
blades and of poisons, waited in caves or lurked by the high pass called the
Red Way. They set themselves against the living and the dead alike.
Bar Abba
,
their leader called himself, “son of a father,” to hide his kin and his home
from the Romans. None knew where he had come from, but they said he had not
seen his brothers, his sisters, his mother in long
years. They said he had never been seen to weep. Or laugh. That he had once
ridden his horse into a Roman centurion’s house and killed the man with a blow
of his steed’s hoof, then swept his wife and daughter up into the saddle—and
that they had later been sold from the block in Yoppa, to be slaves in far
provinces across the sea. They said that he had once left a Greek idolater
flayed alive and hanging from the gates of Beth Anya as a warning to any who
might defile the holy places of their People. That he had abducted a levite who had informed the Romans about his movements, and
had taken the man up to a cave in the hills and forced him to eat a poisoned
loaf.

In
the cities of stone several days to the south, some hoped in him. Some feared
him. But in Kfar Nahum’s crumbling houses, he had been only a story. Until this day.

Barabba
didn’t speak until he had reached the open space before Kfar Nahum’s synagogue,
a massive basalt edifice. The synagogue was the only building in this town that
was still well-kept; the others had fallen into a
dilapidation and a weariness that conveyed the town’s poverty as starkly
as the gaunt faces and thin, brittle-looking arms of its inhabitants. But if Kfar
Nahum’s poverty affected Barabba, he revealed no sign of it. He looked at the
faces of those who had gathered, but without pity.

Before
the polished steps of the synagogue—polished only because aging Zebadyah made
the washing of them his religious duty each day, a duty performed with his own
hands and his own cloth and water he had carried up from the sea himself, for
the only slave he had owned had died on that night he refused to
remember—before those clean, white steps, Barabba sat his saddle and glowered
at the crowd that was gathering, men and women who had slipped from their doors
to follow his horse—at a safe distance—through the streets. In fact, by the
time the hoofbeats fell still, most of the people who still lived and breathed
in Kfar Nahum stood in that public space or filled the alleys that emptied into
it. Their faces were pale; they couldn’t look away from the corpse-heads that
hung from the stranger’s saddle, moving a little as the horse breathed.

Koach
stood there with Rahel, apart from the others, occasionally lifting his one
good hand to scratch at his cheek, at the first fuzz of beard on his young
face. Shimon stood near, blinking in the sun, called from his rest after a
night at sea by the hoofbeats and the shouts in the town. Yet Shimon stood with
his back to his younger brother. Koach used to try to draw his attention, to
help him clumsily with small tasks. Now he knew better.

Small
and weighing less than a milk-goat, Koach was unobtrusive at his mother’s side,
yet he felt how the others standing in this open space looked away from him or
past him, as though despite his size he were so obvious and so visible that it
took great labor
not
to see him.

All
but a few, like Bar Cheleph, who watched him in open hostility, his eyes hot
with the capacity for violence; once, Koach had been set upon and beaten in the
street. Vividly he recalled Bar Cheleph forcing his hand open, tearing a small
carving from his fingers and tossing it into the grass. Vividly he recalled the
blows falling on his back. To many of the ragged survivors in Kfar Nahum, Koach
was an unwelcome reminder of the night of tombs, and all their grief. Of
sorrows they’d rather bury and forget.
Hebel
, the men called him,
“useless.” Rahel had sewn his right sleeve longer than the left to help him
conceal his deformed right hand, and she had padded the sleeve with wool to
hide the thinness of his withered right arm, yet it made no difference.

He
cast a resentful glance at that synagogue door, with its old Hebrew letters
carved into the lintel and the doorposts—words of the Law. He was barred from
entering; he should have stood before the men of Kfar Nahum and recited from
the Torah, a year since. But the priest would not allow him his
bar ‘onshin
.

Koach
stared up at the stranger with sudden heat in his eyes. Barabba was so
different from him—a strong man on a giant horse, with muscled arms and a
scarred, cold face. No one would ever deny
him
anything; he would never
be helpless or useless.

Barabba
turned his horse slowly and made a disgusted sound in his throat. “I came here
looking for men!” His voice was low but strangely clipped. His was not a
Galilean accent, but it had none of the softness of the Greek in it either. “I
came looking for men, but all your faces are pale and your mouths gape like
fish. Tell me this is Kfar Nahum, the town of Yonah bar Yesse.”

“This
is
the town of Yonah bar Yesse,” a tired voice said from the door of the
synagogue.

Zebadyah
stood there, his
tallit
over his head, having just come from his prayers
within. He stepped out and stood in the whiteness of the sun and the whiteness
of the synagogue steps, the whiteness of a world long since drained of color.

“Good!
This is what I’ve come to say.” Barabba leaned a little from his saddle,
addressing the priest, though all the others could see his face and hear his
voice, which carried. “If there are true men of Yehuda tribe in this town, they
are needed. Each year there are more dead in the
hills, and they are in the cities now, too. And what’s more—” His voice rose
hot with hate. “There are Romans! Always more of those, too.
They mock our ways, they starve us, they spit in the face of our God. Beth Anya
would not pay their pig-tax, so the Romans broke the doors of their synagogue
and burned their Torah. In our Yerushalayim they’ve hung Roman eagles of gold
and silver on the walls of the Temple. Graven
images
, in the places
where we
worship
! While you in the north sleep, Rome has come into our
house like a thief, to take our bread and defile our women and hang their foul
gods on our walls.”

Koach
heard the stirring of the men and women of Kfar Nahum, indrawn breaths and
muttered curses. A few hands flickered in the sign against the evil eye. The
corpse-heads at Barabba’s saddle stared sightlessly.

“For
two generations the Romans have done so with us,” Zebadyah said quietly. “Why
ride all the way here to tell us what we already know?”

“Because it is getting worse.” Barabba stroked
his horse’s neck, then dropped his hand to his side.
“I know your kind in the south, priest. Pharisees. Appeasers. Most of our People cower and shrink back from
Romans who pass in the street, but you—the Romans own you already.”

With
a quick move of his wrist, he unhooked one of the heads—one of the unclean
heads—from the right of his saddle and hurled it into the center of the square.
It rolled a moment, then stopped with its dead gazing
up, as if to accuse God in his sky of crimes of violence that its lips had
never been able to reveal in words—only in a long moan of anguish silenced by
Barabba’s knife.

Everyone
drew back.

Koach
swallowed against the tightness of his throat. The dead.
The dead that were in the water, the dead that were in the past, the dead no
one talked about.

But
this severed head was here, and terribly close, and could not be ignored.

“Look
at it.” Barabba’s voice was a whip crack in the dawn air. “
Look at it!
Can
you appease
that
? When our People returned out of exile—the only one of
the twelve tribes to come back, the only one true to our Covenant—we found our
land crawling with these. Teeming like ants. Because the heathen have never
cared for our land as we do. Have never cared for the dead as
we do. But we took back our land, built walls against the dead, lit the sacred fire in a new Temple. We carried out the Law
until no moan could be heard in our land. We did that, because we are a People
whose faith cannot be bent and whose teeth cannot be drawn. We are a People of
lions.” He turned in his saddle, his gaze sweeping the crowd. “Well, that is
how we have always been. Exile in Susa did not tame us. The Greeks did not beat
us. And now, now, will you let the
Romans
take your teeth? The Romans
are good at stilling the dead—that’s what I hear the children of Israel say,
wherever I ride. There have never been men with swords like those the Romans
breed or hire. They may walk on us and ravish us and starve us, but they keep
our land safe. That is what I hear. But our Roman masters, they take our teeth,
our claws. Until we are sheep. And
then what? What then? What happens one day when the Romans tire of us,
or are busy defending some other shore? Will we sit about like a flock of
sheep, waiting to be eaten by the dead?”

“God
will send us a
navi
to deliver us,” one of the younger men called out. “A messiah!” After a moment, Koach realized that was Bar
Cheleph’s voice.

“
Navi
!” Barabba turned
his horse about and walked it toward Bar Cheleph, staring him down. “We make
our own
navi
, our own messiah. God waits too long; let God affirm whom
we anoint, or speak from heaven with his own voice if he dissents. Follow me,
men of Kfar Nahum. We will make this land Hebrew again.”

“What
can you do?” That was Shimon bar Nahemyah’s voice. He stepped forward to face
Barabba. “The Romans are strong. What can you do, Barabba?”

“A
strong man can still die with a knife in his back. Even a
Roman.” He leaned nearer. “There are many of us—in the south. Not so
many in the north. But there, about the Mount of Olives, we harry the Romans
wherever we find them. Another year, boy, and we will make the Romans
beg
to leave Israel.”

They
held each other’s gazes, each measuring the other.

“What
is your name?”

“Shimon
bar Nahemyah.”

“Ride
with me, Bar Nahemyah. I see the shofar about your throat. It’s time for the
ram’s horn to be heard in our cities again. I tire of the braying of Roman
trumpets and the din of Roman drums.”

Bar
Nahemyah watched him a moment; the others watched him. Shimon frowned. Bar
Nahemyah’s yearning was naked in his face. In a moment, perhaps his old rage
would return, that rage with which he had once faced
the dead at the synagogue door. He still wore that night’s shofar about his
throat, having refused to relinquish it to the priest after the battle with the
dead fourteen years before.

“You
were hiding,” he had accused Zebadyah in the days that followed, when they met
at the door of the synagogue.

The
priest had looked stricken. “It is not my sin that I am here to discuss,” he
said hoarsely, “but yours. The dead unburied, the dead you threw in the sea.”

“The
Romans came, and you hid. The dead came, and you hid. You weren’t there at the
synagogue. You didn’t blow the shofar when it was needed,” Bar Nahemyah had
told the priest coldly. “
I
will carry the safety of this town, and do
what needs to be done.”

And
he had left the synagogue steps that day and had never again stepped within it,
not even for the Sabbath. Bar Nahemyah had no surviving kin, no wife, no children. It was said that Bar Nahemyah lived and ate
alone in the atrium of his father’s empty house, with only his bitterness and
anger for company. And in Kfar Nahum, only he and Koach did not go to meet God
with the other men.

The
thought that he might leave the town struck Koach with sudden fear. Unlike his
own brother Shimon, Shimon bar Nahemyah had never been ashamed to speak with
him, had never looked away from him.

Bar
Nahemyah never looked away from anyone.

It
was he who had driven away Bar Cheleph and the other young men who had knocked
Koach to the ground, that one hot morning. Often Bar Nahemyah would pace the
unkept streets of Kfar Nahum, his eyes fierce, the lines of his body taut like
a ship running before the storm. Years ago, some had left Kfar Nahum, fleeing
to other towns along the shore, but any who encountered Bar Nahemyah as they
slipped from their houses stopped, looked down, and quietly went back within
their doors and unpacked. There was a fury in Bar Nahemyah’s face that none
could ignore. While he,
he
, remained in Kfar
Nahum, who else would dare abandon it?

“I
want to,” Bar Nahemyah said at last. “I want to come with you. My heart demands
it. But my head hears the screaming of our People in your smooth words.”