No Lasting Burial (13 page)

Shimon
bar Yonah stared over the water after the gulls, his face still warm from that
rush of heat. Hardly breathing, he glanced back at the stranger. Yeshua lowered
his hand, and then his head, his hair falling over his eyes, lank and damp with
lake water. He was panting, his hands clutching the basket now as though it
might somehow keep him standing.

Zebadyah
recovered himself first. “Witchcraft,” he gasped. “This is witchcraft! The man
has a demon.
Shedim
. Bar Yonah! Yohanna! Get
away from him!” He stepped back. “Stones! Sons of Kfar
Nahum, sons of Beth Tsaida, bring stones!”

“Wait!”
Bar Nahemyah cried.

Yeshua
began laughing, a quiet, desperate laughter that carried in the stillness left
by the departing gulls. Zebadyah looked on in horror. “Stones,” Yeshua said,
shaking his head. “Stones. So I haven’t left Natzeret
after all. Stone me, stone me then. Suffer me not to live.” Without looking at
the priest, he turned and walked toward the derelict boats.

But
the stranger still carried the basket of fish.
Shimon’s
fish, fish to
feed his town and kin. “What are you doing?” Shimon called after him, his heart
beating in sudden alarm. When the stranger didn’t answer, he cursed. “Yakob,
Yohanna, get the rest of these fish up from the tide!”

He
strode after the man from Natzeret, stumbling a little, the wind suddenly
fierce at his back, threatening to knock him over onto his belly. He heard
Rahel call out his name, and the priest also. He did not stop. The grasses at
the tideline bent in waves before the sea wind. Behind him, a rush of talk and
shouting as those on the shore demanded to know what was going on, who this
stranger was, whether possessed or prophetic. He ignored them. He ignored them
all, a sudden fire in his heart. No. This stranger was not going to invite
boat
people
to eat his fish. Fish from his sea, his father’s
sea.

Bar
Nahemyah ran up alongside him, and the town’s two Shimons went striding up from
the sea together, one with a shofar about his neck, the other with fishing
gloves tucked into his coat.

“Who
is he, this man?” Bar Nahemyah said quickly. “He who speaks
like a holy one? He sent those gulls away as easily as a boy might throw
a rock.”

“I
don’t care who he is. I don’t trust him.” Shimon lifted his voice. “Bar Yosef!
Those fish came into shore in my boat, my nets. Whatever wonder has been done
here, these fish are to feed
my
family!”

But
Yeshua didn’t turn. Didn’t answer. He just walked
along the line of the boats with that basket. He seemed to have forgotten that
he held it. He looked at the boat people, and his face grew haggard with grief.
Shimon hurried after, his alarm louder within him. He tried not to look at the
people by the boats, tried just to barrel after the stranger, but the horrors
there were such that he could not keep his eyes averted. Nor
could Bar Nahemyah.

There
were men and women both among the splintering and rotting boats, some lying
beneath them, some sitting against the sides of the
old hulls. Few were entirely clothed. One woman lay on her back, her eyes
lifeless though her breasts rose and fell with her breathing. Her cheeks were
hollowed; her rags had been torn from her hips, leaving her legs naked and
bruised. They lay apart, where probably one of the other vagrants, or many, had
thrust them open; she had not closed them. Perhaps she had not moved for hours.

Shimon
and Bar Nahemyah hurried past.

By
the next boat, a naked man sat by a pile of broken bones, bones too long to be
those of a gull or a crane or a goat of the hills. He lacked the gray look of
the other boat people, his face flushed with color as though freshly fed, and
his eyes glinted as he noticed Shimon. Shimon’s body went cold; there was
something in that man’s eyes that he had never seen in a man’s eyes before, and
it made him fear. A fear of the gut, a fear of the hunted.

To
those who slept and breathed and died beneath the boats, more emaciated even
than he and his mother and brother, any flesh might be food, anything with meat
and bone might be sustenance.

Yeshua
bar Yosef stopped walking at last and, setting the basket down by his feet, he
knelt by two women who sat listlessly against the hull of an overturned boat.
One’s face was drained of life, her eyes sunken, her breathing ragged. The
other—barely more than a girl—watched the first. Her eyes were moist. She held
a sharp rock in her hand, dried blood at its tip. She lifted it warily.

“Don’t
be afraid,
talitha
,” Yeshua said softly.

Talitha
. Aramaic for “little girl.” As a man might
call his daughter or his child-sister. The word and the tenderness in it
struck Shimon. Why was he claiming kinship with her?

“I
will not hurt her,” Yeshua said. “I will not … not
do that. I only want to help.”

The
girl just watched him silently.

The
dying woman beside her stank of urine and sweat; Shimon and Bar Nahemyah hung
back. But the stranger knelt by her as though he had no fear that she might
touch him. The girl beside her took her hand and gripped it fiercely, and the
woman lifted her head slightly and looked at Yeshua. Her face was so covered in
grime that it was impossible to tell whether she was old or young, but the
shape of her nose and the hue of her skin were Greek, not Hebrew, though the
young woman beside her was one of the People. Shimon gazed at the dying woman
in dread. She seemed barely human to him. There were footsteps soft in the
grasses around them, and glancing up, he saw boat people standing on the other
side of the derelict, staring at the basket of fish with desperate eyes. Bar
Nahemyah curled his fingers aroundthe hilt of his knife, and the gaunt men
approached no nearer.

Yeshua
reached for the woman. Her companion’s breath hissed
softly, but the girl did not move. Only watched him.

“Don’t
touch
her, bar Yosef!” Shimon cried.

“Why?”
Yeshua’s shoulders quivered. His eyes were dark again with that anger with
which he had hurled the gulls out over the sea. “Because
everyone else refuses to?”

He
parted the woman’s rags, baring her breasts and her ribs, which stood out in
stark violence against her skin. Shimon drew back another step, and Bar
Nahemyah closed his eyes as though against a sudden rush of memories.

“Oh,”
Yeshua whispered.

“We
starve and die.” The woman’s voice was dry and slow, as though she rarely used
it. Her eyes seemed out of focus. “They’ve been … eating the bodies. And
the dead come up from the water. We are forgotten.”

“You
are not,” Yeshua said, his voice hoarse with emotion. He covered her again with
her rags. She made no move to help him or hinder him, as though her body were
no longer a part of her, no longer her concern. Her hands lay beside her like
wrinkled, dead things. The young woman who sat with her took her right hand and
squeezed it, her face pale. She hadn’t put down the sharp rock.

Yeshua
watched the dying woman a moment, then seated himself
beside her, not touching her, just sitting with her.

Beside
Shimon, Bar Nahemyah whispered, “Bar Yonah, the women of our People all look
that way, in the alleys of Yerushalayim, the city of our fathers. So many women leaning against walls, breathing, barely alive.
Starving. Our own People.
They look just like her. And they will go on looking that way until we shove
the Romans into the sea.”

“We’ve
shoved enough into the sea,” Shimon said bitterly, thinking of that terrible,
beached corpse. He bent slowly and lifted the basket of fish. He could take it
back down to the shore, get away from these starving
beggars. The other boat people watched him. Yet he hesitated. Beside him, Bar
Nahemyah stepped back and leaned against another boat. Shimon gazed at the
woman, unable to look away. She was covered in her rags now, but the sight of
her ribs seemed burned into his mind. It was his own nightmare: that the sea
might one year yield no fish at all, until his mother and his useless brother
were only skin stretched over bone, like this woman.

“Bar
Yosef,” he whispered.

Yeshua
did not look up.

“Bar
Yosef, she is not of the People.”

No
answer.

“Are
you going to just sit there?”

Yeshua
took a slow breath. “I am in pain, Cephas.”

Shimon
looked at him, startled.

“Great pain. Not just these
…” He touched a bruise on his arm and winced. “This,” he said, lifting his
fingers to his right ear. “It doesn’t matter if I wake or if I sleep. Always,
always I hear screaming. You and your fathers and your sons yet unborn, all of
you screaming, all of you … hurting. Sometimes it is so bad I can only
stand, stand completely still, like a … like a rock, Cephas, like a rock,
for hours and hours and hours.” His hands began to shake. “And I don’t know why,
why none of you hear it, why not one of you hears it, why only I, only I am
alone, I and the father and the father weeping in the desert. In the … She
is screaming, this woman here, screaming, both of them, and no one hears. No
one hears,” he whispered. “If I can comfort just her, just one of you, just
one
,
maybe it will stop, maybe the screaming will finally stop.”

“She’s
only a boat woman,” Shimon said. His voice subdued.

“What
does it matter,” Yeshua said wearily. “The father made her and I heard him, I
heard him, Cephas, weeping in the desert, and you cannot tell me, you cannot,
that he doesn’t care. You cannot tell me that.” He lifted his face, and his
eyes were bloodshot. “I have hungered and thirsted out in the desert, and I
have been driven by stones, and I have been alone. So alone.
No one should ever, ever be alone, Cephas. She doesn’t have to die alone.”

Yeshua
lowered his head. All around him, Shimon could hear the boat people whispering,
“Fish, fish …” Shimon clenched his teeth. But Yeshua said nothing more. He
was sitting
shiva
with that woman. Sitting in silence, mourning her own death with her.

The
woman’s breath rasped. Shimon realized she didn’t have
long, and this
shiva
would be short. He shook his head and stepped away,
taking the basket with him. He would not stay to watch her die—that would be
too much like his nightmares—and he would leave this man to his madness. There
were fish to gut, to fry, to eat and store. A long day.
Yet as he walked back down the line of boats with the gaze of the boat people
on his back, guilt sat heavy in his chest.

Why
should he feel that? These were not his kin.

When
he‘d been a child and the fish were plentiful and the boat people less near to
starvation, some of the fishers had made a custom of tossing a few glistening
musht out of their boats onto the sand as they came in to shore. Seeing the
beggars fight over the few small fish, some of the fishers had laughed. Still
others tossed none at all, but fended the vagrants away from their nets, with
the blunt ends of fishing spears if need be.

His
father had been one of those.

Shimon’s
belly growled, and he glanced down at the fish, some
of them still opening and closing their mouths. Some of them
motionless. The scent of them. His hunger woke
like a beast within him. He shuddered; perhaps the whole town was turning into
boat people.

He
reached the last of the derelicts and leaned against it, breathing hard. He
closed his eyes a moment but opened them immediately because in that brief
darkness, he’d seen dead faces rising from the water again, dead fingers
reaching to grasp him.

Shimon
gave the boat a hard kick, needing some way to assuage the storm within him.
The long-disused hull gave a little before his foot, and there was a startled
cry from under the boat.

Shimon
froze.

“Who
is that?” he shouted.

This
time there was no cry, no sound even of soft breathing. No one slipped out
through the tight gap between the gunwale of the tipped boat and the ground.

“Come
out!” Shimon dropped the basket to the grass at his feet. “I know it’s you.”

Again, no answer.

Shimon
took the gunwale in his hands and lifted, gasping at the strain. For a moment
the boat didn’t move, but then he managed to heave it slowly up and tip it,
letting it fall back onto its keel with a crash that brought cries from a few
of the boat people behind him.

The
young man beneath the boat … was Koach.

Koach
had begun to dream of horses.

Even
now there was a bulge in the left side of his shirt, where his mother had sewn
for him that hidden inner pocket. He had concealed a wood-carving there, small
enough to hold in his palm. A horse, strong and sleek as Barabba’s, carved of
cedar. He had dreamed sometimes of Barabba’s stern face and the flashing hooves
of his steed, but he had also dreamed of the scene Tamar had told him of:
Barabba riding furiously from their town, his horse faster than wind or bird. A
horse might carry him away from here, he and Tamar
together, to some place that did not hate them.

Often,
he rode horses in his dreams.

He
had taken to visiting the boats on the shore where they were harbored by day.
He studied how they were made, and learned which ones were damaged, which ones
had fittings that had cracked or were under strain. He spent weeks at this,
climbing beneath the overturned boats and reaching up and learning with his
fingers. He went early and returned early, feeling his mother’s eyes on him as
he left the house and fearful of being caught by the town’s other youths, now
that Bar Nahemyah had been swept away from the town.

He
began carving fittings for boats, leaving them, one at a time, on the doorstep
of the
nagar
’s shop attached to Benayahu’s house. He did this many
times. One day, as he approached the door, Benayahu opened it and gave Koach a
hard look, then glanced at the fitting Koach held.

“You
have a skilled hand.”

Koach
sucked in his breath and tensed to run, fearing the man’s anger at his
presumption and his gift, already feeling the blows to come. Benayahustood
in the door a moment more, his silence full with thought. Then he turned
and went inside, leaving the door open. An invitation,
or a reprieve. Koach wondered which. He gathered what courage he could, then
strode to the door and ducked into the shop, into a dim interior rich with the smell
of cedar curing.

Benayahu
was there. smoothing a long plank by the flickering
light of an oil lamp. The shop had a window but it was boarded up so tightly
that barely even a chink of sun made it through. He was a man who had lost too
much to the dead.

He
didn’t look up to acknowledge Koach, but with his foot he slid a block of wood
and a knife across the floor toward him.

For
several beats of his heart, Koach was all but overwhelmed with an urge to take
Benayahu’s hammer in his one hand and drive it into the man’s brow, such was his fury at this man who left bruises on
Tamar’s body. The man had turned his back to Koach, bent over his work.

Koach
forced himself to breathe calmly. He was here to be near Tamar, to find some
way to help her. Striking her father and getting himself stoned would not help.
His face hard, Koach sat on the floor. He set the block between his knees and
got to work.

From
that day, Koach had assisted Benayahu with his carpentry. He had found a use at
last, a wall to build between himself and the name Hebel. And he was good at
it. He didn’t know how many fishermen in the town realized it, but within the
year his craftsmanship had appeared on half the boats on their shore.

Benayahu
was a strange man, silent and moody like Koach’s own brother, his eyes often
dark with guilt and violence barely restrained. He rarely said a word, just
gestured to show what he wanted Koach to do. Sometimes he took a tool out of
Koach’s hand, without touching him, and showed Koach how to use it correctly. There
was no affection in his face at those times, only a cold determination. The man
had no son, and no other apprentices in his shop.
Except for his daughter, he lived alone, and he must have lived with the
certainty that when he died, his skill would die with him.

Sometimes,
after he put his tools away, the aging
nagar
went to stand by one wall
of the shop, where thick Hebrew letters had been carved into the stone. It was
a name, a woman’s. The
nagar
would just stare at the letters. Then he
would turn and pass through the inner door into his house, leaving Koach in the
shop. The lock would slide shut with a hard, bronze clack. Koach would stand
there, his hand clenched, shaking with helpless anger. Because
those were the evenings that ended with Tamar being beaten.

At
first, Koach tried to think of some way to speak with Benayahu about his
daughter, but he could not find that way. He had also hoped for a chance to
speak with Tamar herself, but he caught few glimpses of her by day. The door
between the shop and the house was kept shut, and Benayahu did not invite him
in. Nor did the man leave his shop; each day he brought a waterskin in with him
before Koach even arrived. Once, only once, Koach glanced up to see the door
open the smallest crack, and Tamar peering in at him. In the next moment,
Benayahu struck the side of his head. Tamar’s eyes widened and she shut the
door swiftly.

“Look
at my daughter again and I'll throw you in the sea with the dead,
hebel
boy," the
nagar
said, his voice quiet and cold. Those were almost
the only words he had spoken to Koach since the first day.

Koach
lowered his head, nodded. He unclenched his left hand, rage hot in his heart. His face ringing.

The
beatings had become worse, so that some nights Tamar did not come to the
rooftop but only lay shaking in her bedding in the atrium, where Koach could
barely see her.

They
could not shout to each other from rooftop to rooftop, but over the nights of
that year, they made for each other a secret language of signs and gestures,
and with movements of their hands they sang silently to each other of love and
need. His need to be useful to one other person, to be
loved
by one other. Her need to be free of her father’s
house. A hand pressed to the breast meant:
My heart. You touch my
heart.
A flapping motion with one hand meant:
How I wish we might fly
away like birds.
Fingers pressed to the lips meant:
I wish you could
kiss me.

Having
found no way to speak to her father, Koach began to dream, by night and by day,
of carrying her away from that house, as Samson or some mighty one of centuries
past would have done. But he was not Samson, nor mighty; his
very name was a lie.

By
day in the shop, he’d glance down at the fittings he was carving, his thoughts
feverishly intense. He lacked strength, but he had skill. The
nagar
had
seen that; others might also. There were Greek towns across the sea where there
was no Law and no priest. He didn’t know how the Greeks would look on a
cripple, but surely they needed skilled woodworkers. If Tamar would fly away
with him, perhaps there was some place, somewhere he could carry her to.

At
last, a night came when he stood on his roof, shrugged the concealing wool from
his shoulders, and, gazing across at her body, beautiful as the curve of the
moon, and at her eyes that were so strangely calm after her pain, he decided he
would tell her what he intended to do.

They
would meet by the boats, but they would go on foot, the long walk around the
shore. He couldn’t row a boat, and the town had no horses.