No Lasting Burial (14 page)

The
boat tipped and the sky opened hot and blue above him. Koach blinked up at his
brother’s face.

“What
are you doing here?” There was nothing polite in Shimon’s voice, and something
in Koach hardened when he saw the contempt and frustration in his brother’s
face.

Koach
was lying in the sand beneath the boat, wrapped in a heavy water-coat that had
been their father’s. Rahel had woven Shimon his own coat for the cold nights on
the sea and had given this one to Koach, the only protection he had from his
dead father. But it was too large for him, and often he felt small and
childlike in it.

Koach
rose, an ungainly move that involved pushing himself up with his good, left arm
and then hopping to his feet.

“I’ll
go home.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.

“Why
are you out here?” Shimon said again.

“I
was waiting.” He didn’t meet Shimon’s eyes, concealing the wound in his heart.

He
had slipped down to the boats after dark, after his brother had gone out to sea
and his mother had given herself to sleep. He had waited, and
waited
,
until the day crept beneath the gunwale of the overturned boat and it was too
late to slip quietly back. Then he could only lie there while gulls called
somewhere above the wooden roof of the boat’s keel, their lonely, forlorn cries
giving voice to the fears of his heart. And when the shore had echoed with the
startled shouts of the town’s men, he had lain still
and silent beneath the boat, touched by no curiosity.

She
hadn’t come to him.

Perhaps
she’d realized that the young man she’d been dreaming with could never cast a
net for her, never catch fish, never bring home food
for the fire.

Now
he’d been discovered, and his face was dark with shame. A boy with no
bar
‘onshin
, no betrothed, with dreams he hadn’t earned. A boy who had thought,
for one year of longing and desperation, that he could be a man.

“Waiting
for what?” Shimon demanded, towering over him, as he always did.

The
look Koach turned on him was resentful. “What do you care?” Koach cried.

“
You
.” Shimon started
to step away but then turned back, every line in his body tense.

“Bar
Yonah,” a quiet voice said, and with a shock, Koach recognized Bar Nahemyah—Bar
Nahemyah who’d been gone so long—walking toward them through the boats.

“Stay
out of this,” Shimon said. To Koach he said, his voice quiet and cold, “Every
night I risk my life and my neck for you, to feed you,
and I cannot even keep you safe in my own house! Get out of here. You shouldn’t
be here.
Raca
—you have never been anything but a dead weight, something
I have to look after, house, clothe, protect—and you
give
nothing
back. There’s no place for you here, among the boats. Run
home.”

Koach
couldn’t bear to see any more of that old disappointment in his brother’s eyes.
As he backed away, he saw the stranger rise to his feet, a few boats down, a
look of pain in his bruised face. Slouched against the hull behind him sat a
woman as gray as a corpse and a young woman beside her, her shoulders shaking.
Koach stared at the girl; she was weeping without sound, the way Tamar did.

“You’re
always ashamed of me,” Koach said. He didn’t look at his brother. He just
blinked quickly and then walked away from them all. He heard his brother call
his name.

“Give
him a moment, Bar Yonah.” Bar Nahemyah’s voice.

Koach
walked on unchallenged until he was a little way up into the tall tideline
grasses, pale blades that brushed his cheeks in the chill wind.

He
was not crying.

He
didn’t cry anymore.

This
moisture on his face was only drops of the sea carried to him by the wind.

Only that.

For
a while he gazed bleakly at the cracking, battered houses ahead. He could walk
up there now, to Benayahu’s shop, as on any other day. He could pretend nothing
had happened, draw his shame about him like a coat, growing smaller and smaller
inside it. Or he could stand at the door of the house and call for her. But
that would shame and endanger her, and himself. And
what could she say, what could she tell him that he didn’t already know?

The
voices behind him grew louder, more heated. “Your brother,” the stranger was
shouting. “That was your brother, your brother, your own brother. And you call
him
hebel
and
raca
? How can you … how can you do that? My own
brothers … my own …” His voice choked, and it took him a moment to
speak again. “What is
wrong
with you? Do you even know how blessed, how
blessed you are, that you
have
a brother, you have kin in your own
house, your own roof, people who sit with you to eat …”

Koach
glanced over his shoulder, saw the stranger gesture
wildly toward the shore. Following the gesture, Koach realized for the first
time what was happening there. He walked back through the grasses, aghast. All those fish. All those nets spilled open on the sand. All those
people
, the fisher’s wives and their older kin and
even a few from Kfar Nahum itself, men who worked in small shops and not in
boats. All of them gathering up the fish. Koach
stared down at that crowd of baskets and bins, speechless.

“None
of you stand
near
each other,” the stranger was shouting as Koach
approached, “not even brothers! And all your boats … all
your boats on the water, none of them calling out to the others. Just
silence, that silence over the water …”

Koach
listened. The aloneness in the stranger’s voice was familiar to him.

“If
you were one of us,” Shimon said, “you’d understand—”

“I
want
to understand!”

“—but
you aren’t one of us.”

“I
know!” the stranger cried. “I am unhomed! They threw me out. I came back from
the desert and told them what I’d heard,
what I’d heard,
what I still
hear, what I keep hearing, and what woke me weeping in the night, the truth,
the truth, I told them the truth, and they threw me out.” The stranger’s voice
was quiet and nearly choked with pain, yet his words carried. “And I ran,
Cephas. I ran. All the way here. And I am exhausted
and I am hungry and I am afraid …”

He
was interrupted by a loud, prolonged rasp, something unlike any other sound
Koach had ever heard. An alarming sound. He turned to
look. It was the woman with the gray face, the woman sitting against the
cracked and beaten hull. Her breast fell once more and then did not rise. Koach
saw the light leave her eyes. One moment her eyes were those of a living woman.
The next, they were empty. It was like looking to see your reflection in a bowl
that has no water in it, no mirror.

She
was gone.

The wind in the grass.

The
stranger gazed at her body with horror. “No,” he whispered.

Even
Shimon seemed shaken, as though the
malakh ha-mavet
, the angel of death,
had brushed his shoulder as it passed.

“No.”
The stranger went pale. “I told her she didn’t need to die alone.”

Shimon
murmured, “Bar Yosef …”

“No,”
Yeshua cried. “No! All of you screaming and screaming and screaming
and none
of you hearing
! Do not
talk
to me, Cephas! Just do something about
it! Please!”

The
stranger bent and lifted the basket of fish from the sand, and thrust it into
Shimon’s arms. The broad-shouldered fisherman staggered back until he caught
his balance.

“
Help
me,” the stranger pleaded.

“Bar
Yosef, our own families starve.”

“No,
no one will … no one will starve, no one. There
will be so
many
fish.” He sounded as though tears might come. “
Please
,
Cephas. Feed these women and these men, Hebrew or Greek or whatever you see,
just
feed them.
Please.”

The
man backed away, his face still stricken with horror. Then he turned and all
but ran through the grasses, away from the boats, his pace desperate, the wind tearing at his hair.

“Wait!”
Bar Nahemyah called. He ran after the stranger.

Shimon
stood shaken, staring after them, still holding the basket. As though the
woman’s death rasp was still too loud in his ears, in his heart. Koach could
see the horrified recognition in his brother’s eyes: the boat people weren’t
supposed to be like
that
. Like people. Like men
and women who might weep for each other and then die hungry and alone.

Shimon
exhaled slowly. “You and I, we will talk later,” he muttered, then walked
slowly away down the line of boats, the basket in his hands, with some of the
boat people shuffling after him or stumbling to their feet as he neared them.

With
his brother gone, Koach only felt empty. He was
hebel
again, useless as
a bit of a driftwood washed up among these grasses.

Numbly,
he approached the two women, one alive, one dead. The younger woman glanced up
at his approach with grieving, tired eyes. A sharpened rock slipped from her
hand to the sandy dirt, as though she simply didn’t care anymore. Her face was
wet with tears, but her crying was silent and she barely trembled with it.
After a moment, she leaned her head on the dead woman’s shoulder.

Here
was yet another person who was entirely alone, with none to comfort her in her
suffering. Another outcast, like himself. Like Tamar.

Without
thinking about it, he shrugged off his father’s coat. One-handed, he draped it
clumsily about the woman’s shoulders, then patted it
down. His brother would likely be furious at this use of the coat, but Koach
didn’t care. He took the woman’s arm and tried to lift her to her feet. After a
moment, she stood, letting him help her. Some of her hair fell across her face,
dirty and tangled. She kept her eyes lowered.

“What’s
your name?” Koach asked softly.

She
shook her head weakly.

He
frowned. “I am Koach bar Yonah.”

She
touched her fingertips to her throat in response. The sound she made was caught
somewhere between a grunt and a exhalation.

“You
can’t speak,” Koach whispered. He felt a small thrill of fear. Zebadyah the
priest taught that when a man or a woman could not speak, it was because the
shedim
had slipped down their throat into their body, and they could only moan, or
make no sound at all, like the dead that walked. But this young woman did not
seem that way to Koach. She seemed small, and frightened, and so stricken with
hunger and grief that she could hardly stand. And she had remained by her dying
friend, so she loved.

Koach
tried to think of some comfort for her. He glanced down at the corpse. “The
priest will make sure there’s a cairn for her. He won’t leave her unburied …” He trailed off; the woman was still keeping her face hidden, and he realized
that it must be terrible for her that her grief was this naked. He considered
leaving her there, but his cheeks darkened with shame. He had left Tamar in her
father’s home for a year, not knowing what to do, and she was still trapped
there. He couldn’t leave this woman alone in her anguish too.

He
glanced down the shore, and caught his breath. For a moment he just stood with
the woman beside him, staring down at all the people from the town and all the
fish being gathered into baskets. Some men were dragging boats up toward him,
and a few were settling logs of driftwood over small, improvised firepits far
above the incoming tide. Bar Cheleph sat at the nearest fire, but Koach didn’t
even shiver at the sight of the man who’d once beaten him into the grass. He
was too swept away by the sight of all those fish and all those people. A gust
of wind brought the scent to him, and hunger groaned violent in his belly. He
saw the stranger his brother had been talking with, striding out now along the
shore with Bar Nahemyah following him. He saw his mother walking among the
firepits, pausing to speak with the town’s other women. He saw Yesse, the
priest’s crippled father, seated by the nets, lifting fish in his hands and
shaking his head. Yesse was
hebel
, too, but was allowed to be, because
he was old and had served his tribe for many years. Someone must have carried
him out to the sands.

Koach’s
eyes stung with moisture. His own grief seemed suddenly small. The fish had
come back.

“Come
on,” he said, gripping the woman’s arm. He could feel the warmth of her body
through the sleeve of his father’s coat. “I’ll get you to a fire.”

The
woman cast him a quick glance before lowering her face again. Her eyes, shining
with tears, were Hebrew.

Koach
helped her down from the grasses onto the shore, her steps small and uncertain.
Sand fleas darted from beneath their feet. She was shaking.

“It
will be all right,” Koach whispered. “It will be all right.”

Afterward,
Shimon could never explain how he came to be walking among the derelict boats
with a basket of fish. Yeshua bar Yosef had spoken with such anguish and anger
that there had seemed no choice but to respond. Now Shimon moved with quick
steps along the boats, tossing fish into the sand. Everything inside him rushed
about, as though the stranger had let the wind into his body the way a man
might let wind into a house.

He
heard the priest’s rough voice.

“What
are you doing, Bar Yonah?”

Zebadyah
stepped between him and the next boat, pointing a gnarled finger at the basket
of fish. His eyes were cold. “These,” he said, “do not eat with us. They do not
grieve with us. They mutter Greek prayers by our sea, they take our food.
Sometimes they come up in the night and reach into unboarded windows, or tap at
our doors. You know this. What are you
doing
?”