No Lasting Burial (15 page)

The
windows of the house of Shimon’s heart clacked shut, and rage boiled within
like trapped summer heat. At this moment, he saw no kinship to his father in
the priest’s face. Zebadyah bar Yesse seemed old, shrunken, his fingers crooked
and curled as though he were fighting to grasp sand. And this man, this weak,
frightened man, who had once dared to strike his mother, now dared tell
him
how he should manage his nets.

“I
am Shimon bar Yonah,” he said. “I do what I please. This is my father’s town.
That is my father’s boat. These are my father’s fish.” His voice hardened. “You
… are not my father. Get out of my way.”

Zebadyah’s
face flushed as though he’d been struck. He took a step back. “Shimon …”

“Get
out of my way, old man,” he said.

“Ezra,”
Zebadyah said hoarsely. “Remember Ezra. I tremble, Bar Yonah. There are fish,
but all this can be taken away in a few beats of the heart. The waters wear
away the stones. You are Yonah’s son, and the town will look to
you
. Do
not listen to that witch!”

Shimon
shoved by the priest and walked on, ignoring everything but the blood in his
ears and the rage in his heart. Finally, he threw the basket into the sand by
one of the vagrants in disgust and turned away as the emaciated man reached
into the basket with terribly thin hands.

Shimon
stumbled to the last boat in the line, a boat with its hull stove in and no one
sheltering beneath it. He sat down against it, closing his eyes. He could hear
his own heartbeat. He breathed raggedly. The sun was growing hotter in the sky,
and the insides of his eyelids were red and bright.

After
a while he smelled fried musht and felt a cool cloth pressed to his head. “I
brought you a musht.” It was Yohanna’s voice.

He
opened his eyes against a blaze of light and then shaded them with his hand,
wincing. He could hear the smacking of lips and the moans of the boat people
all around him, as the fish both filled and tormented their long-empty bellies.
Yohanna was crouching beside him. He handed Shimon the cloth, then passed him a
sheaf that had one musht in it.

Yohanna
smiled faintly. “They’re cooking these, down by the water.”

Shimon
took it, felt the heat against his hand through the lake-weed. The fish must
have just been lifted from the coals and wrapped moments before. His belly
snarled within him as all of his hunger woke. He lifted the fish to his mouth,
tore into the hot flesh with his teeth. It burned his lips.

He
didn’t talk until he’d finished the fish, and Yohanna just crouched nearby,
watching his face.

“I
spoke harshly to your father,” Shimon said.

“I
know.” Yohanna took a slow breath. “He can be a hard man to speak with.”

Shimon
grunted.

After
a silence, he said, “That man. What is wrong with him? He treats the boat
people like they are his kin.”

Yohanna’s
eyes widened. “Kin,” he whispered. “‘We are all kin.’ God of
Hosts, Shimon. That’s where I’ve seen him. I
knew
I’d seen him.”

He
frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“The stranger. I saw him once.
With Ha Matbil.”

Yeshua
paced the edge of the tide, heading up the shore away from the nets and the
people gathered about them. His shoulders were tense, his eyes dark. The wind
tugged his hair across his bruised face. The bruises did not bother Bar
Nahemyah; he’d seen enough men stoned in the south to know that a man finds
rocks hurled at him not when he offends God but when he offends other men.

Yeshua
had a long, restless stride, and Bar Nahemyah had to strain to keep pace with
the man.

“I
let her die alone. I shouldn’t have let her die like that. How could I let her
die like that?” Yeshua stopped to look out over the water, but his tone was as
restless and haunted as his stride had been. “I heard this town’s hunger in the
night, I heard it. I heard all of you. Night and day and
night again in the desert. And the father … I heard the father
weeping, weeping for you.” He glanced at his hands, his face raw with grief. “I
cried out, and the fish … but for what? You are still screaming.”

Visions. The man was
having visions. Bar Nahemyah trembled. Since the night of Ahava’s death, the
night he’d held his beloved’s body shattered and bloodied in his arms, Bar
Nahemyah’s yearning for a
navi
, a messiah to save their ravened land,
had hardened into cold steel within him. Now that steel was hard and desperate
and strong. The yearning for one who would be another Makkaba, riding against
those who wounded their People, but who would be a
navi
also, one who
saw visions in the desert or struck water from a rock. Some
God-sent mighty one out of the stories of his fathers.

Barabba
had not been that man.

“The
fish and the birds heed you,” Bar Nahemyah called to Yeshua. “You are the
navi
,
aren’t you?”

The
stranger turned. “You think I’m a prophet, Zebadyah thinks I’m a witch.”  Bar Nahemyah forced himself not to look away
from the intensity in his gaze. “You should worry less about what I am,” Yeshua
said, “and more about what I will do.” He glanced back toward the nets. “What
can’t I remember?” He paused. For a few heartbeats, there was only the sigh of
the water and the distant calls of the banished gulls. “Those
corpses in the water. I can hear them even now. How did they get there?”

“The
Romans—”

“The Romans.” Yeshua’s face
tightened. “The Romans! The Romans didn’t starve those
women by the boats. The Romans didn’t throw those dead in the sea and forget
them.”

“No.”
Guilt settled cold and heavy in his belly. “I did that.”

 Yeshua stopped and looked at him. Bar Nahemyah
found his voice suddenly hoarse. “Help me make amends,
navi
. Israel is
unclean. I would cut the rot out of its body. Barabba would cut off the whole
limb, but that cannot be the way. You … you
care
. For every one of
our People, even those under the boats. I saw that.”

“No.”
Yeshua’s voice was choked. “You mistake me for the Makkaba, or for your Outlaw.
I don’t know what I am, I don’t know, I don’t know, but I am not that.”

Bar
Nahemyah lifted his head, and he felt the first twinge
of doubt. But he was on his knees, the hope in him too sharp to permit any
turning back. “Place your hand on my head,
navi
. I will be the first to
follow you. Say one word, but one word, and I will lift this shofar to my lips
and sound a blast that every Roman in our land will hear. Don’t you have eyes
to see? Ears to hear? You said you have heard the
screaming of our People!”

“I
have heard.” The pain in his eyes was terrible to see. “I hear them even now. Even now. The part of me that grew up a child in my mother’s
house suffers exile. The part of me that walked out of the desert suffers the
exile of all men and women, living and dead.” He paused. “I have to get through
the door. Where I have to go, what I have to do, it is on the other side of
that door. That burning door. That burning, burning,
burning …”

Bar
Nahemyah gasped.

Yeshua’s
hands and face appeared to blaze with light. Bar Nahemyah felt the heat of it
on his own skin, as though he were in the presence of mighty Eliya himself, who
had burned the heathen priests from the land and summoned chariots of flame. His hands shook.

Then
the heat and the light were gone.

Yeshua
lowered himself to the sand and sat with his arms about his knees, his face
stricken. “Can’t step through,” he whispered.

Bar
Nahemyah was shocked to see tears on the man’s face.

“Please,”
he said. “I know you are hearing what God hears. That is what the
navi
does. And it terrifies you, and it
should.
I understand your anguish.
The things I have seen,
navi
. Things that make me want to cut out my
eyes. I have seen Roman eagles on the walls of the Temple, on the walls of the
lev
ha-olam
, the heart of the world. Children sitting with
their backs to its gate with their ribs showing. I have seen Herod
Antipas’s hired dogs arrest craftsmen who couldn’t pay their last coin to
Caesar, and have them tossed into pits of the dead to be eaten. I saw a woman
crawl to Barabba’s feet and die there in the dust after pleading with him to
free our land. She died …” He swallowed. “She died from bleeding to death,
navi
.
She died because those desert men the Romans hire to do their killing when
they’ve wearied of it had cut away her breasts. They cut out her sheath, then
her tongue. And when she begged for help, she could do so only with her eyes.

“That
was a Hebrew woman. That was one of my tribe. I saw her and others, strong men
and weak, die begging God to send a
navi,
a messiah. I saw—” Bar
Nahemyah choked a little. His voice went hoarse. “The earth is drenched in the
blood of our People.
Our
People, ground into the dirt by Roman heels.
Our wounded, screaming People.”

Yeshua
looked up at him wearily. “If you think to add more screaming, you are no son
of Abraham nor of our father who watches us from
above. You are someone else’s son, not his.” An edge of anger
in his voice. “This land has always been taken in violence, but it has … it has never been held so. Our fathers did not hold and keep this land safe
by violence against either the living or the dead, but by the Law.”

“The Law!” Bar Nahemyah
cried. He would
not
let this man hide, like Zebadyah, behind the Law.
“The Law says a man may take an eye for an eye!”

 “What will you do, Kana,” Yeshua said slowly,
“when you and the Romans have no eyes left?”

Kana.

Bar Nahemyah stopped, watching the man,
holding the name in his mind.

“Kana,”
he breathed. The Hebrew word for
zealous
. “Kana.
I will take that name.”

“I
think it is your name already,” Yeshua said. “But put away this thirst for
death, put it away, please; death will find us all soon enough.”

“I
don’t understand you,” Kana cried. “Are you a coward? Do you want us, all of
us, all Hebrew men, to stand with our knives sheathed while Romans walk by and
strike us across our faces, knock us to the dirt and take what they will? And
you … you who hear … whatever it is you hear … you who speak with a
voice of … of prophecy … what will you do? With your
baskets of fish? What, will you feed men in the morning who will be dead by evening?”

“I
… I don’t know what the dusk will bring.” Yeshua brushed the bruises on his
arm with his fingertips. “I don’t know. Only the father knows that.”

With
the woman from the boats leaning hard on him, Koach approached the small fire
Bar Cheleph had kindled in the sand near the tideline. He had dragged driftwood
and weeds and grasses to toss into it, and now sat solitary on a log and dug
out a few hot coals with a stick to make a smaller firepit, one for cooking. A
basket of fish waited in the sand by his hip.

When
Koach seated the silent woman across the firepit from him, Bar Cheleph said
without looking up: “I made this fire, Hebel. Find another.”

“You
can’t hit me, Bar Cheleph.” There was no quiver in his voice. “Not here, where
my brother and kin can see.”

Bar
Cheleph bared his teeth at Koach, but said nothing. He began laying the fish
across the coals.

At
the scent of the fish roasting, oils bubbling out from the slit in their
gullets, Koach’s mouth watered. The silent woman, too, stared at the fish.

“You
hide behind Shimon bar Yonah as though you are his woman,” Bar Cheleph said in
a low voice.

Koach
bit back his anger and took up a small stick, stabbing one of the fish. Letting
out his breath slowly, he turned and lifted the fish to the woman’s lips. Her
eyes, still reddened from weeping, glanced at him gratefully as she bit in. Koach
found the sight sensual, and disquieting: her head leaning forward, her small
teeth cutting into the fish, her gaze lifted to his. He was suddenly aware of
the woman’s body beneath his father’s coat, her curves. He swallowed.

She
stared back at him a long moment before lowering her eyes. He took a breath.
Shaken, he understood. Bereft of her last companion, hungry and alone, she was
offering herself for the assurance of food. In the next moment she must have
glimpsed his awareness of this, for her eyes dilated briefly—with fear, not
with desire.

“You
don’t have to do that,” he said, his throat dry. “The fish is a gift.”

The
fear in her eyes grew. Perhaps she had never been offered a gift before. Not
being able to offer something herself, not knowing what he might want in
return, or whether it would be something she had to give—this had to be
terrifying to her.

Koach
saw all that in her eyes, in one of those flashes of insight that very young
men sometimes have.

“No,”
he said again. “I just want to see you eat.”

Bar
Cheleph grunted. “Take her up the shore and rut with her, Hebel. Might be the
only woman you ever get. That is”—he smiled, his eyes cold—“if you
can
rut.”

On
any other day, Koach would have fallen silent and hung his head. But not this day. He rose to his feet, his good fist
clenched at his side. All the fury and helplessness of the past year—of his
whole life—rushed up at once, like a wave of the sea driving a boat before it.
“My hand makes fittings,” he shouted. “Fittings for the
boats! So that they can get out on the water. So that the town won’t starve. I am
useful
! What do
your
hands do?”

For
a moment, Bar Cheleph kept his eyes on the coals. His face tightened, and Koach
knew his words had cut deep, too. Bar Cheleph worked hard at mending nets,
always worked hard at them, because his right hip didn’t work the way it
should, not since that Roman officer had thrown a hard cedar desk onto him in
his rushed escape from the dead. Bar Cheleph could not stand easily in a boat,
and he did not go out with his adopted brothers and Shimon to wrestle with the
sea. Yet his arms were thick with muscle, and he had succeeded in not being
hebel
.
Barely.

Now
Bar Cheleph looked up, and his eyes were hot with hate. For a moment Koach was
sure he meant to stand and strike him. He tensed. Then there was a footstep
behind him, and a new voice, a sharp voice: “Will you always trouble my sons,
Bar Cheleph?”

Koach
glanced up even as Bar Cheleph whirled.

Rahel
stood behind him, leaning on a stick she’d plucked up from the sand, her eyes
cold as winter.

Bar
Cheleph’s face darkened, even as Koach felt a rush of shame. Was he so
hebel
that he needed his mother to protect him?

“You’ve
made the fire,” Rahel said. “They need you at the nets, do they not?”

Bar
Cheleph hesitated, grunted, “They do,” and got unsteadily to his feet. He gave
Rahel another dark look, then slid past her and hobbled down the shore. Rahel
made a small noise in her throat and seated herself on the log where the
priest’s foster son had sat a moment before.

For
a while they were silent. Rahel, her son looking down at the
coals, and the unknown woman timidly biting at her fish. At last, his
mother said, “Why do you share food with her?”

“She’s
hungry.”

Rahel’s
eyes were cold and keen. “And what about Bat Benayahu?”

Koach’s
breath caught.

“I
am your mother. Do you really think I sleep deeply enough that my son can slip
out to the boats without me knowing it?”

Koach
took a moment to breathe. Then said, “I meant to give her my
pledge.”

“I
approve. Though Benayahu might not.” Rahel turned to the silent woman. “Go. Now.”

The
woman started to shrink back, but Koach caught her arm in a fierce grip. “No.
Stay, please.”

“Son!”

“I
offered her food and water, and that is father’s coat.”

Rahel’s
lips pressed together. “That hospitality was your brother’s to give, not
yours.”

Koach
looked aside at the silent woman as she nibbled on that fish. The fire was warm
on his back and its warmth got inside him. He wished suddenly that he could
know her name. His thoughts were loud within him:
I have fed her, protected
her.

I
provided for someone.

For a woman.

For another person.
Even a boat person.

To
her, to this woman, I am not
hebel.

Keeping
her eyes averted from Rahel—as though to show that she offered no challenge to
her protector’s mother—the woman finished her fish, dropped the bones into the
fire, and licked her fingers, as though years of hunger had taught her to waste
not even the oils.

A
shell of resolution hardened over Koach’s heart, like ice over water. He felt
the wooden horse, solid and reassuring, against his side: a thing he had made,
a thing that was more than just a dream of some magnificent steed that would
carry him and a woman he loved far from this place. At that moment he decided
he would bring the carving to Tamar. He would find some moment when the
nagar
was away and bring this gift to her door. He would ask her why she hadn’t come,
and find his answer in her eyes.

“I
am a man in our house also,” he told his mother. “Always you are protecting me,
telling me when to hide within the house, when not to step outside our door. I
can’t row. I can’t help with the nets or the casting. But I can carve fittings,
I can cook a fish, I can do
something
.”

A long silence.

“You
are like your father, little Koach.” There was no accusation in his mother’s
voice, only sorrow. Koach glanced at her, and for just a moment, there was a
woman in her face he didn’t know—not his mother, with her stern hold on the
life and future of her family, with her determination and the hard steel of her
love for him—but a woman vulnerable and alone, a woman who did not unclothe her
heart for anyone. This woman gazed out of Rahel’s eyes for the briefest of
moments, then was veiled again.

“So
much like him,” Rahel said, and there was pride and grief in her voice. “More than your brother. He is more like
my
father.”
She smiled faintly. “I wish you could have known your father. Yonah was a man
who did as he pleased. But he also had two strong arms, and the love of all the
fishers of Kfar Nahum.” She bit her lip slightly, as though struggling to hold
back words. Then she said, simply, “She is a stranger. Be careful, my son.”

Rahel
stood slowly, favoring her left hip. She glanced over Koach’s head and her eyes
widened. Koach saw the glow of reflected flames in her eyes.

“No,”
she whispered. “Oh, Bar Yesse, no.”

Koach
looked quickly over his shoulder. He could see dark smoke roiling over the
grasses of the tideline and the dull red flicker of flames in the midday sun.

One
of the overturned boats was burning, one of the relics of their fathers. A gust
of wind blew the dark smoke toward the town itself. Against it stood a figure
in white, a torch in his hand, the air wavering around him in the heat.

Then
he heard the roar of his brother’s voice, and men and women were leaping up
from the cookfires and the nets with loud voices. Koach found himself on his
feet, but Rahel was quicker; she was already running across the sand.