Quarantine (27 page)

two rocks, too high and too far from the top for any climber to

retrieve.

Jesus pressed his fingers tighter in his ears. He was petulant

with triumph and alarm, like a boy who'd smashed an egg,

frightened of his mother, not the hen. He would not listen to

his tempters' shouted words. He hummed to himself so that no

more sound or any of the beaten voices from above could

penetrate his armour.

Night arrived with its sullen wing to double-shade their tents

and caves. Jesus slept; he was unconscious for a while, but when

he dreamed he dreamed of Musa, no one else. Stroking Musa's

eyelids with his thumb. Musa's face marked on the surface of

the moon. Musa sitting in the kingdom of the lord, naked and

uncircumcized, his great lap open to the angels' gaze. Musa in

a market-place, but selling fasts instead ofleather bags, with Jesus

his first customer.

Musa's salesmanship was irresistible. Of course it was. Jesus

could not make the man seem dull, even in his dreams. This

devil was not ignorant, a huckster with no subtlety. He was a

craftsman worthy of his task. He was a trader and a salesman,

after all, and practised in making virtues out of sins. He could

sell the mildew and the bruises on his blemished fruit. Their

blackened peels are honey-sweet, he'd say. Taste them - pay

first - and you will see.

No, for Jesus, the merchant Musa and the devil were the same,

in dreams and out. Close cousins anyway, far-travelled, patient,

shrewd, unshockable, refined. For every camel-load of merchandise that Musa had exchanged for goods abroad he would have packed a little knowledge in his panniers as well; the whereabouts

of some blue, distant town, the predilections of some king, a

new philosophy, a freshly coined word, telepathy, the allocation

of the stars. He'd have the trick of holding conversations with

his customers on subjects as various as that year's lemon crop,

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the uses of bern and balsam oils, and whether it was proper for

a sadducee to eat an egg that had been laid on the sabbath.

('Proper to eat it, wrong to cook it, I would say. Raw eggs are

good enough for sadducees. ') All his conversations would be

sharp. His knowledge was a gleaming weapon, a spear with

wings, with which to prick and wound his quarry. Musa would

not flee from arguments, or duck his head at words he could not

understand. What he didn't know he would invent, and his

inventions would be more quenching than the truth. He was a

strong adversary for god.

So here in dreams was Musa at his stall, selling fasts to pious

Jews, always intending that they should be trapped by their own

vanity in some damp cave, on some sheer precipice, with not

an ant to keep them company, and only devils' water there to

wet their eyes and tongues. Here was Musa calling on the holy

wisdoms of Moses, Ezra and Mordecai whose fasts had been

sustained divinely. Here was Musa with his hand on Jesus's, the

merchant's mouth a short breath from the client's ear, his forked

tongue hidden by his swollen cheeks, and whispering, 'I challenge

you. To battle me. For forty days.'

Again, more dreams. He came, this time to Jesus in his cave.

He held a carpet viper in one hand, and a desert mouse in the

other. 'These creatures are your cousins, Gaily. They're like you.

They go without their food and drink for forty days or more in

this same scrub, three months, four months,' he said. 'If there's

no food or drink, they simply switch their bodies off and wait

until the rains. That's what you have to do. It's easy. Of course,

the pity is that one of them can always break its fast, to eat the

other one . . . Guess which. Let's see.' He put the viper with

the mouse.

Another time the merchant was a priest, his great round head

topped off with a linen hat. Bells and pomegranates hung from

his blue robe. There were brooches made of sardonyx, a golden

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purse, a purple cape. His sermon was that fasters who had earned

his blessing could expect the greatest of rewards. He could not

promise paradise to mice or snakes. But pious jews? Their prizes

were unlimited. With Musa at their side, they would be calm

throughout their quarantine and comfortable, he promised them,

leaning his weight against the temple door. They would have

peace of mind. All the distractions and appetites of public life

would be driven off like scrub dogs, and clarity of spirit would

come sniffing at their ankles, begging to be lifted up and stroked.

'Towards the end - the last ten days, perhaps - your soul will

fly out of your body like a lark,' he said. 'Believe me, you will

pass into the fabric of the sky, until you sit amongst the angels

at their table. Keep your elbows in. You'll break your fast with

rapture beans and golden goblets filled with nectar. And then

they'll call you for your final prize - an audience with god. If

you will only place your trust in me.'

The final dream. They were in the Galilee. Musa in the

market-place, with Jesus and his family, and all the villagers.

'Let's have a volunteer, to taste the black skin of my quarantine,'

he said. 'You.' He prodded jesus on the chest, with his imperfect

staff. 'Try fasting now. Try forty days. You'll find forgiveness if

you've upset god. Your oddities . . . ' he smiled conspiratorially

at all the Galileans, ' . . . will be subdued, turned to a profit even.

See how deep the nights become, how bright the stars, the longer

that you keep away from food and drink. Come, Gaily. Bring

your brothers, bring your friends. Broken hearts will be repaired.

Bald men will grow fine heads ofhair . . . Please have your coins

ready when you come.'

This last nightmare was what Jesus woke up to a dozen times,

in the darkness of the middle night. He had expected to dream

of chicken and melon, mutton stew, lamb cooked above a

vine-wood fire, not Mus a preaching fasts. Jesus was at his weakest

when he woke. His spirit was destroyed by sleep. He could not

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recall a single prayer to summon help, or shake away this final

dream. His elbows and his knees cracked like seed pods; his

bones were noisy ravens laughing at his flesh, tok-tok tok-tok.

His body throbbed with cold. These were his moments of defeat.

He'd been a fool to throw his clothes away. He'd been a fool to

leave the Galilee. He'd been a fool to leap out ofhis bed to pray.

He'd been a very stupid man to invest so much in fasting. His

quarantine was little more than bogus goods, false gold, a leaking

pot, sold to him by a man who had the devil's tongue. He was

not any closer to his god, for all his sacrifice, than he had been

when he was six. Surely someone in the Galilee - his priest, a

neighbour possibly, someone who knew the hermit scriptures

better than himself- could have taken him aside before he left

his home and offered some instruction on the torments that he

faced ifhe came to the wilderness alone. Where was the rhapsody?

What joy was there in all the suffering? Where was the dignity

of death?

No one had said how painful it would be, how first, there

would be headaches and bad breath, weakness, fainting; or how

the coating on the upper surface of his tongue would thicken

day by day; or how his tongue would soon become stuck to the

upper part ofhis mouth, held in place by gluey strings ofhunger,

so that he would mutter to himself or say his prayers as if his

palate had been cleft at birth; or how his gums would bleed and

his teeth become as loose as date stones.

No one had warned him how quickly he would lose his will

to move about, how even lifting up his arms to wipe away the

sweat - so much of that, at first, and then none at all - would

become a punishing task; how he'd postpone the effort and let

the sweat drip off his brow without regard to cleanliness; how

cruelly his body would begin to eat itself as his muscles and his

liver and his kidneys fought for fuel like squalid, desert boys

battling for a piece of wood; how his legs would swell with pus;

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how his skin would tear and how the wounds would be too

weak to dress themselves with scabs. No one had said, there will

be stomach pains and cramps, demanding to be rubbed and

soothed like dogs.

He hated dawn. At least at night, he could imagine he was

whole. But in the cave's dim light by day, he looked down at

his arms and legs and saw how he was turning black in patches

where his muscles and his joints were leaking blood. He'd become

a leper, a hyena, one of those mottled slaves from the rivers

beyond Egypt, flayed brown and pink by some hard master.

They wouldn't let him in the temple grounds like that.

Jesus rubbed his joints and warmed his fingers in his mouth.

He could reduce these pains. But there were other, shocking

pains that could not be rubbed away, the pains of sadness and

despair. This was the greatest failing of them all. Someone, surely,

could have said, Stay with your parents in the Galilee. For if you

go into the wilderness to fast, not just your body but your spirit

will, against all faith, begin to bleed. Your spirit will shed its

weight as well, its frame will ache, its eyes will dim. You'd be a

fool to think your spirit is beyond the reach of thirst and hunger.

Nothing is.

They had not even said, Go to the desert if you must, and

fast. But do take care. For god is not alone up there, if god is

there at all. But there are animals; and the devil is the fiercest of

them all.

Perhaps it was a blessing that Jesus's spirit fell apart before his

body did, because if it had remained intact as he grew thin and

weak on fasting, he might have tried to escape the folly of his

unbending quarantine. He might have decided that he ought to

take the middle course, the one chosen by the other quarantiners

that he'd followed up the scree a few days previously. They were

wise and timid, and broke their fasts each day at dusk. He might

have climbed the precipice each evening, walked up through

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the foot-marked pans of soft clay along the valley beds to the

perching row of caves, and got in line amongst the poppies for

his share of their food. He could have begged for clothes. Or he

might at least have seen the sense in this one compromise - by

all means to have gone without dry food, but to have kept his

throat and body oiled during the forty days with a little water

from their cistern, for water is the staff oflife and god's great gift

to the world.

What vanity to think a total fast can rid a man of sin, or put

a man at god's right hand, he might have told himselfifhis spirit

and good sense had not been so subdued. Go from this cave, go

home, go now - be penitent, be purified, and sin no more.

It was too late. He had no strength to climb the precipice.

Jesus had become a creature of the dark, a fugitive from pleasure,

comfort, beauty, light. He sat inside the cave, his hands lapping

round his genitals for coolness, or running round the three

symbols for the name of god which he had scratched, it seemed

a thousand years before, into the rock, or massaging his legs and

arms. His face was bleached beneath the dust. His hair was

knotted clay. His pupils had grown large and slow, in their

attempts to catch and keep the light. He was confused and

fumbling. The few sunbeams that came into his cave each morning made him sneeze and itch. My eyes can't take the light, he told himself That is a sign that I am meant to stay right here.