No Lasting Burial (16 page)

Burn
the shelters under which the boat people took refuge, and they would have
nowhere to sleep, nowhere to stay. The unclean and the heathen would have to
leave. No longer would they lie like fish on the
shore, like so many meals, an invitation to the dead. They might try to take
shelter in the emptied, boarded-up houses of Kfar Nahum, but squatters had been
driven out before.

With
smoke billowing dark all about him and scratching his throat, Zebadyah strode
from one boat to the next, setting fire to each in turn. One of the boat
people, only one, came at him. It was a wizened man who might have been only
twenty, though his face was gnarled as tree bark and his hair gone white from
suffering. The man was yelling; Zebadyah thrust his improvised torch in his
face, and the man stumbled back, shielding his eyes.

The
others just watched the fire from either side of it, standing still as cairns,
their faces gray. The sight of them—so many hungering strangers, so many
lurkers about his town—chilled Zebadyah. They looked to him like the dead.

The
priest had never really stopped reliving that night. Even in the light of day,
he often heard and saw those dead about him, felt the clamminess of his palms
and the outbreak of cold sweat on his brow. So many times he’d had to stop and
stand, breathe for a few minutes, persuade himself that he stood in the cool of
his synagogue, his hand still poised over the scroll of Torah. He would gaze
down at the scroll and its letters and breathe, and realize that night was long
past.

Now
he fired another boat, roaring out a song in desert Hebrew, a song of Dawid
from centuries past. Never again would he stand by as strangers swarmed into
his town, leaving his people starving, dying.

“Stop!” His brother’s
son was pelting up the shore toward him, a few others behind him. “These are
our father’s boats!”

“Our
town will not become a midden for beggars and heathen!” Zebadyah shouted.
“Yonah would not want that.”

And,
turning, he put another wind-bleached hull to the torch.

“No!”
Shimon cried.

Yonah’s
son threw himself at the priest, his hand shoving hard against Zebadyah’s
shoulder, nearly knocking him to the grasses. In panic and fury, Zebadyah
thrust the torch at Shimon’s face. As Shimon staggered back, his hands over his
eyes, the priest heard a cry behind him. As Zebadyah turned, Yohanna his son
seized the torch just above his grip.

“You,”
Zebadyah gasped, the sight of his younger son like a
physical pain above his heart. Shoving the pain back, he backhanded Yohanna,
hard, across his face.

His
son sprawled into the sand.

“Craven boy!” Zebadyah stood
over him, livid. All the pain of the years tore its way out of him, making his
voice savage. “You abandoned our town! You went out to live with unwashed
heathen and bandits of the desert! No son of mine!
No son of mine!
”

While
Yohanna still lay dazed, Zebadyah stepped away from the boats, out onto the
sand where all could see him. He looked out at all their pale faces, his torch
held high, cracking and spitting. “Remember the Grief of Ezra! Remember Ezra
standing at the wall! Remember. We have no wall of stone or brick to keep out
the unclean, either living or dead. But by the Law of El-Shaddai, Mighty God,
we will make a wall of fire.”

They
stared back at him, some grim, some fearful, some bewildered. Yohanna rose
slowly to his feet, a bruise already darkening his right temple.

Zebadyah’s
own eyes were hard. In the silence he could hear, loud as thunder, the cracking
of wood beneath the devouring fire. The crackle of his torch.
The quiet, dry sound of one of the boat people weeping.
The sigh of the tide and the hiss of wind in the grass.
Shimon slid to his knees in the sand, his eyes still covered. He moaned in
pain. Zebadyah felt a stab of regret that was then eaten away by his anger:
that
Yonah
’s son, his
brother
’s son, should shelter these
vagrants and eaters of flesh.

“Bar
Yesse …”

He
stopped.

That
was
her
voice.

Rahel
bat Eleazar’s voice.

“Bar
Yesse …” She walked toward him across the shore, approaching from the
cookfires. He did not answer her. He gave the next boat to the hungry flames.

She
stepped past her kneeling son, her fingertips touching Shimon’s shoulder
briefly. “Bar Yesse,” she called, “these boats are all that’s left of so many
we’ve buried and so many we couldn’t. Bar Yesse …
Zebadyah
, please.”

He
watched the fire lick its way up the hull.

“Please,
Zebadyah,” she repeated softly.

He
had never heard her say his name before.

When
he faced her, her eyes held sorrow, sorrow deep as the sea,
and even … empathy. For him. Looking in the eyes
of this woman he’d wanted, this woman his brother had left behind, his shame
deepened. The torch he held seemed suddenly repulsive and out of place.

“Zebadyah,”
she said. She bit her lip. “He would not have wanted this.”

No
one else on the shore spoke.

He
hadn’t noticed before how much she had aged, how many lines there were about
her eyes, not until this moment—but she was all the more beautiful. The wind
caught her hair and blew it across her face like a dark veil, and he could not
bear her beauty.

“Bat
Eleazar,” he whispered.

When
he spoke up, there was a note of pleading in his voice. “Everything is broken
and unclean. Sons. Walls. Our whole land. Everything is broken.”

She
only gazed back at him. With those eyes.

The
torch fell from his fingers and the sand half-smothered its flames.

He
heard Yakob step near, felt his son’s arm around his shoulders. “Come, abba,”
Yakob said against the crack and roar of the flames behind them, “come, let us
get some fish. There are fish roasting, abba.” His voice was soft, and
Zebadyah’s shame deepened as he recognized it—it was the same tone he used with
crippled Yesse, when his own father was being difficult.

Worse
still was the pity in Rahel’s eyes.

“I
am old, son,” Zebadyah murmured. “I’ve grown old, as the Law is old.”

He
looked away from Rahel’s face, his eyes dry though his
heart was full of weeping. He let his oldest son lead him down the shore. All
around him, men sprang into action, as though awakened abruptly from sleep, and
ran to scoop water from the sea to fight the flames, but he didn’t spare them a
glance.

Shimon
kept his palms pressed to his eyes, gasping for air. That had
hurt
. God,
but that had
hurt
. But the sharp flecks of burning at his eyes did not
hurt as much as the sound of fire eating the boats.

More
than just old wood was burning.

He
wanted to leap to his feet, take up a waterskin or fill his coat with sand that
he could hurl over the flames to silence them. But even as he lowered his hands
and blinked against the pain, he saw that it was too late. The wood burned
quickly, and some of the boats already were mere piles of charred drift. He
stared at them, numbly.

A
hand gripped his shoulder. “Cephas,” a quiet voice said, behind him.

And
the sound of that voice was like a torch touched to the dry pine of his heart.
This was all Yeshua’s fault. He had come and upended
everything
. When
had strangers ever brought good to their town? Matityahu the
tax collector, who had trailed a Roman legion behind him. The swordsmen
the Romans hired. The Outlaw on his dark horse. All of
them had brought evil and dismay. Now there was this vagrant from the hills who
brought up the quick and the dead.

“If
you are of God and not a beggar or a witch, you who call up fish,” he said
without turning, his voice shaking with anger, “why were you not here ten years
ago, fifteen?” His words became a shout. “Why heal us only after we’re broken,
feed us only after we’ve starved? Prophet or messiah, where were you
then
?”

The
hand squeezed his shoulder. “I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t
know how to answer you. I can’t see the road I have to walk, the road ahead or
the road behind. It is dark and it is dark …” Yeshua’s voice was thick.
“The road is dark, and I don’t know what I am. Or what to
tell you. I am sorry.”

The
anger flowed from Shimon like water, leaving only weakness behind, and sobbing.
He shook, on his knees in the sand, with the sea at his back and the boats of
his People burning before him. He let the stranger hold his shoulder, and he
just shook and wept. The pent-up fury and despair of fifteen years rushed
through him like a school of fish with sharp teeth, chewing at him as they passed
though and over him, leaving him gasping in wordless pleas against the violence
of a world in which fathers sought to devour their children or in which some
children were born wrong and some children starved.

“I
am sorry, Cephas,” the stranger kept whispering, over and over. “I am sorry.”

Shimon
might have wept there for an hour, or a month, or a year, or a year of years,
for all he knew. But suddenly there were cries up by the houses of Beth Tsaida,
and then shouts from the men at the nets and the fires, and the slap of running
feet against the wet sand. Shimon looked away from the boats at last and saw
men and women standing against the cookfires, their faces terrified.

A
newcomer was running from the direction of Beth Tsaida, and he was Natan El,
one of the younger fishers, only a little older than Shimon himself. The man
stumbled, caught himself with one hand splayed against the sand, and got back
to his feet. Then he was bolting down the shore toward them, his legs pumping.
“The dead!” he cried. “The dead!”

Shimon
felt all the warmth leave his body.

“It’s
Benayahu!” Natan El cried. “Benayahu the
nagar
!
I saw him running north past the midden, bleeding from his hip. He said he saw
the dead! In his house! His house! In the town! He saw the dead in his house! The dead!”

Koach
didn’t hesitate. He cast the last fish from the coals to the feet of the silent
woman who was gazing at him with wide, terrified eyes, and he sprang to his
feet. Natan El was still scrambling down the sand toward them, screaming about
the dead in Benayahu’s house.

The
dead
.

There
was shouting all along the shore, Zebadyah demanding
to know what was going on, whether Natan El had actually
seen
the dead.
Yakob was already striding north along the shore, stooping as he went to lift a
large shell from the sea wrack left by the previous tide. The shell had been
broken, and it had a jagged edge. “We have to find Benayahu!” he cried. Other
men sprinted to catch up with him. To them it was already clear what had
happened: bleeding from his hip, Benayahu had fled Kfar Nahum, fled to the
hills perhaps, so that he would not be boarded up within his house for the
seven days of uncleanness, while the town waited to see if he would die and
then rise, moaning, to his feet.

But
Koach realized something else.

The
dead were in Benayahu’s house.

In
Tamar
’s house.

Koach
cried out her name and broke into a run. The silent woman gasped as he left her
by the fire. He’d forgotten her, forgotten Bar Cheleph and Bar Nahemyah, the
stranger, even the great sheaves of fish, forgotten his grief beneath the boat,
forgotten everything but the way Tamar’s shoulders had trembled as her father
beat her, and the hot shame in his chest as he watched and could not help.
Everything but the warmth of her lips pressing his.

He
ran.

Koach
found the door of the
nagar
’s house ajar. He touched it with his
fingertips, his heart pounding, and felt the grain of the wood. He pushed
slightly. Its hinge was well-oiled, unlike the door to his mother’s house, and
it swung open as silently as thoughts in the mind of God.

Some
instinct older than speech or fire warned Koach not to call out. He slipped
through the door. The atrium was empty, as was Benayahu’s room across it, but Tamar’s
room was concealed by a heavy rug drawn over the entrance. The stillness of the
house pressed on him, urging silence and slow movement. Hearing the roar of his
own blood in his ears, Koach stepped across the atrium beneath a pale sky,
leaving the door open behind him. As he neared Tamar’s room, his breath seemed
loud to him, and he held his hand over his lips. He could see that room in his
mind so clearly: the little heap of bedding, a bundle of clothing in the
corner, a small pot, a table for an oil lamp. The shadow of
Benayahu against the small light. The rise and fall of
his arm. Tamar’s silent shaking, her silent tears.

He
hesitated, then drew aside the rug.

The
air behind it was warm and heavy with the scent of recent death. He could see
her silhouette against the dim light. She stood on her bedding, with her back
to Koach and her face to the boarded-up window, her hair lank and unwashed
about her shoulders. Koach stood very still, his belly heaving at the smell. He
clamped his jaw shut against the nausea.

Tamar
was breathing, but far too slowly, as though she were asleep. He could see her
shoulders rise and fall. She was holding her hands behind her at the small of
her back—no, they were tied. Coarse fishing rope, the kind used for netting,
wound savagely about her wrists. In the dimness, Koach could make out the dark
line of it cutting into her skin.

Koach
could neither step through nor let the rug fall and walk away. He could not
move. His heart beat so fast from his run into the town—like that day Barabba
had hunted him and Tamar had pulled him into her father’s house, onto that very
bedding where she now stood, stinking like fish left to rot on the shore. Koach
kept looking at her wrists. He should step forward, he should unbind her. He
should hear her whispering to thank him for coming to help her, at last, after
the years of being beaten and broken with none to step between her and her
father. He should help her now.

But
his mind could not grasp the strangeness of this scene. This girl
who had kissed him, tied in her own house. Reeking.

He
heard a soft footstep behind him, at the outer door. A hoarse whisper:
“Koach?”

His mother’s voice.

The
corpse standing on the bedding turned its head slowly, its eyes glinting in the
dark. It hissed.

Gasping,
Koach lurched backward, tripped on the edge of the rug, and fell, tearing the
rug aside, letting in a flood of sunlight. Even as the floor knocked the breath
from him, he caught a nightmare glimpse of Tamar’s body stumbling toward him,
one foot caught in linens, her arms trapped behind her, the dull sheen of her
eyes.

Rahel
screamed. Her cry held not only fear for her son but anguish, as from some
night of grief years past yet horribly present.

The
next moments were confused, like things witnessed during a fever. For an
instant the dead girl was on top of him, her breath cold as winter on his
throat. Her teeth snapped near his skin, her body shaking with a low growl.
Then the weight of her was gone and he was rolling to the side and there was
another scream from his mother, a scream that cut into his heart.

Koach
scrambled to his feet and saw his mother and the girl grappling. They rolled on
the floor and his mother was on top of her and drove the heel of her hand down
against the corpse’s chin, driving her head back. The neck didn’t break, and
the corpse lunged up, snapping its teeth at her, its jaws closing on her hair.
Rahel gasped and fell back, pulling the corpse with her; there was a flash of
metal in the sun, a knife in Rahel’s hand, pulled from somewhere within her
clothes. She pressed her arm to the corpse’s throat, keeping it at bay while
she sawed swiftly through her hair near the scalp above her right ear. It bit
toward her hand and she jerked back, dropping the knife. It rattled across the
floor.

Breathing
in quick gasps, Rahel scooted backward away from the growling dead, kicking
wildly as it lunged and grasped at her. Then Koach grasped his mother’s arm.
With a strength that startled him, he pulled her to her feet, his body hot with
adrenaline. For an instant her gaze met his, her eyes wide. Then they
ran
.

They
rushed out together into the atrium, with the corpse right behind them.

“Tamar,
please
!” Koach cried, glancing over his shoulder.

She
was stumbling after them, snarling, her arms bound behind her, her hair wild
about her face, her eyes glazed with death.

Mother
and son ran to the outer door. Koach gasped her name under his breath, over and
over again: “
Tamar, Tamar, Tamar
—”

They
burst through the door out into the street, and turning Koach saw the girl
staggering after them, lurching across the threshold, her wrists still behind
her, her jaw distended in a snarl of hunger.

Rahel
stumbled, and Koach tore his hand from her grasp.

“
Koach
!”

“No,”
he gasped.

He
couldn’t leave Tamar like that.

Even
as he faced her, he heard running footsteps, a few shouts. Men
from the shore, and a few women. Bar Cheleph was there, and Yohanna. Their
faces were pale.

The
dead girl turned its head, taking in all the living, and then lurched toward
them. But it stumbled and sprawled on its face.

The
townspeople formed a wide semicircle, keeping back while the corpse thrashed in
the dirt. It lifted its head and its jaws gaped open, a low groan of hunger.

“Tamar,”
Koach whispered.

She
had torn her dress in her fall, and Koach could see glimpses of her body. He
recalled those nights on the rooftop, gazing at each other. His belly heaved
and he twisted to the side, falling to his knees and retching into the dirt
outside her father’s house.

He
knelt there, vomiting up everything he could and then vomiting up empty air,
uncaring if the body of his love reached him or not, everything coming apart
inside him. An arm around him and a murmur in his ear told him Rahel was with
him, but he didn’t turn to her. He just shook and shook and spewed out his
insides.

A
sandalled foot stepped past him. Koach glanced up in a haze,
saw Bar Cheleph limping toward the corpse where it twisted in the dirt, having
rolled onto its back. Bar Cheleph held a hooked fishing spear in his hand,
perhaps taken from one of the fishers gathered silently about them. Anger had
contorted his face. It was as if, seeing this dead girl bound in the dirt,
helpless to seize and devour, he saw a moment at last where he might release
his rage. His fury at his parents’ deaths, at his town’s, at
all that had been taken from his People by the living and the dead. He
lifted his foot and drove it into the corpse’s face with a feral cry and a
cracking of bone beneath his sandalled heel.

“These
things!” he shouted. “They eat up everything, everything we have, everyone we
love.” The crowd watched him and the dead girl, mute in their horror or in
their catharsis. Their eyes glazed with a particular kind of lust, a need to
see violence done. Koach got to his feet, breathing hard, just as Bar Cheleph
bent over the corpse and drove the spear down through its breast. The dead girl
spat and hissed, one side of her face crushed in, her
wrists trapped beneath her, her body twisting and writhing in the dirt. Her
head jerked up and her jaws snapped, but the fisherman was out of her reach.

Bar
Cheleph stared down at her face, his own contorted. He twisted the spear in her
body, his weight on it holding her pinned to the ground.

“Stop!” Koach cried.

Without
thinking, he threw himself at Bar Cheleph, slamming his small weight into the
man’s side and grabbing the spear with his hand to wrest it from him and pull
it free of Tamar’s corpse. Bar Cheleph gasped as the breath was driven from
him. He backhanded Koach savagely, knocking the boy to his knees. A sigh from
the gathered men and women, as though they were witnessing violence committed
in a drama, as the Greeks do.

“Leave
him alone!” Rahel cried, and struggled against two women who held her back.

It
took Koach a moment for his vision to clear. Then he saw Bar Cheleph looming
over him, his face cold. The corpse spat and twisted on the ground, trying to
get at either of them.

“Get
back to your mother, Hebel,” Bar Cheleph snarled.

But
now Koach’s body was hot with his own anger, and he was wild with his own
grief, which was no less than Bar Cheleph’s. Koach glanced at the dead girl’s
face and his eyes were dry.
Hebel
. Useless. He had not been able to help this lovely girl who
had kissed him, this girl who had protected him from the Outlaw, this girl who
had been kind to him. He had not saved her from her father’s blows. Nor from this.

Bar
Cheleph turned his back to the boy, wrenched free the spear, and drove it in
again. The corpse uttered no sound of pain, only frustrated, animal hunger. It
threw its small body from one side to the other, but could not free itself of
the spear, nor lift its arms to catch at the warm, enticing life above it.
Whether it could hear the drumbeat of a living heart or the ocean sound of Bar
Cheleph’s blood or the wind of his breathing—whatever it sensed that made it
yearn for meat and flesh—it could not reach him. The girl’s lips gaped wide and
it
screeched
, a sound that cut into all who
were listening like the crack of a Roman whip. And the screech went on and on,
a primal demand for life and food, a demand that could never be satisfied.

That
screech wrenched Koach into motion. Maybe he had been
hebel
, but he
could not allow himself to be useless to her now. Groping with his hand in the
dirt, he found a jagged stone a little larger than his hand.

Koach
got shakily to his feet. Bar Cheleph ignored him; he was merely the useless,
unclean boy that he had beaten aside. The man’s whole attention was on the
screeching corpse. Koach looked down through a blur of moisture at the stone he
held, something heavy and solid and final.

He
had to do this.

There
was no one else.

“Forgive
me,” he whispered.

Koach
bent quickly over the corpse, startling a cry from Bar Cheleph. Tamar’s body
lunged at him, her jaw gaping. With a cry, Koach drove the stone down into her
head. He screamed her name once, then fell silent but for a small, choked
sound.