No Lasting Burial (3 page)

Rahel
was already awake when Shimon returned; he heard her breath catch when his
shape filled the opening to the tomb. Then heard her relax
when he called, “Amma,” softly. For a moment he hesitated, glanced over
his shoulder at a night filled with stars and the sound of the sea and the glow
of flame, the houses of his father’s town burning far below at the edge of the
water. Distant moaning, screams. Fewer
now. Anything might be happening in the world outside the tomb. The
Romans and the people of the town might be spearing the last of the dead, or
the dead might be eating the last of the living. No way to know.

He
felt vulnerable and exposed. He ducked into the tomb. Went to his mother and
knelt by her, held the waterskin to her lips and listened as she drank. She did
so in small swallows, and took a long time. Then her fingers touched his hand
weakly, and he pulled the skin away, set it aside.

“Your
father,” she said hoarsely. “Where is he?”

“I
don’t know.” He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell her about the blood he’d
seen on Yonah’s hand, the raggedness of his father’s breathing. His throat
closed against the words. To speak it would be to make it real, to make his
fears become truth.

Rahel
shut her eyes tightly and clutched her infant closer to her, and a tiny, almost
inaudible sound of misery came from her throat. Shimon closed his eyes too, not
wanting to see her pain, not knowing what to do.

After
a while, Rahel whispered in the dark:

Though the fig
tree does not flower,

And no grapes
are on the vines,

The olives give
no oil

And the fields
no barley

The flock does
not come home to the fold

Nor the herd
home from the field,

Yet I will cry
out in joy.

Her
voice trembled, yet she did not allow the silence of the tomb to swallow her
song. The song of Habakkuk, a
navi
of their People in years past, one of
those blessed or cursed with the gift of seeing things that usually only God
saw. A song he’d made at a time of war.

I will cry out
in joy,

I will take joy
in my God.

God is my
strength;

He makes my feet
like the deer’s;

He makes me walk
in high places.

“How
can you sing that?” Shimon said suddenly. “How can you?” His hands were
shaking. “Everyone’s dying. I saw—They’re being torn
apart
.”

Rahel
looked at him in the dark. “Oh, Shimon, Shimon. I am
alive, I am alive, I am alive, and my sons are alive.”

And
she began whispering the words again. Shimon turned his back, overwhelmed with
the night’s horror. He glanced up, saw the round openings in the tomb wall into
which the ancestral dead had been slid feet first onto their shelves in the
dark and the silence. There were corpses there, many. His
father’s father and his wife, and their parents, and theirs. And many of
their brothers and sisters whose faces had been forgotten but whose names
remained, chipped into the stone beneath their places of rest. He reached up to
the lowest of these shelves, ran his fingers across the deep Hebrew letters,
worn by time yet still readable if there were only enough light. His hand still
shook a little at the memory of the corpse walking down the hill, at the memory
of its cry of hunger, yet the silent dead on their shelves above him and all
around him did not frighten him. Their silence and their presence was strangely comforting. Death had visited the People again
and again over the long weeping of the centuries, yet the People lived.

“Would
you like to hold him, Shimon?”

His
mother was lifting the small baby in her hands, holding him out.

“It’s
all right,” Rahel said, seeing him hesitate.

Swallowing,
Shimon took the boy in his arms as gently as he might a sacred scroll, terribly
aware of his brother’s fragility. Yet as Shimon felt the small weight of his
brother’s body, the warmth of him, something blossomed open inside his heart.
Settling the boy into the crook of his arm, he freed one hand and touched the
child’s face, first the tiny brow, then the soft cheeks, feeling his brother’s
warm vitality in the dark. His throat tightened and he wished to squeeze his
brother to his chest, but he didn’t for he feared hurting him. After the
horrors he had seen this night, this warm body in his arms was a miracle, as
though God had reached through the door of the cave and touched the world, in
this one place, at this one moment.

He
ran two fingers over the boy’s hair, which was fine and sparse. Then he touched
the boy’s left arm, marveling at its smallness. He found the boy’s hand and
felt the small fingers close around his; he drew in his breath. That firm grip,
and the soft glint of the eyes in the dark. Shimon wished his father was here,
that he might hand him the baby and see the two of them together, but also he
was glad that it was he who held the child and who got to look into the little
boy’s eyes. Those eyes were as bright with life as though they were God’s eyes,
looking out of that tiny face at a darkened world.

Solemnly,
Shimon touched the boy’s right arm, and gasped. That other arm was so thin, and
the boy didn’t move it at Shimon’s touch. The arm hung limp at the baby’s side.

“Amma,”
Shimon whispered in the dark.

She
looked at him. Shimon saw her eyes and the faint glow of distant fire on one
side of her face.

“He’s
broken,” Shimon whispered.

“Hand
him back to me, Shimon.” No urgency or surprise in her voice.

Gently,
his hands shaking from the fear that he would drop the boy or break him
further, Shimon handed his brother back. Their mother held the baby to her
breast, and Shimon looked away. A sense of crushing disappointment settled over
him, a fierce pressure on his heart. To have a new life, a new hope offered in
one moment and then torn away in the next, to find that his brother, like
everything else this night, was maimed and broken—

“He
is your brother,” Rahel said quietly. The baby made no sound of suckling, just
soft breathing; perhaps he was falling asleep, pressed to the warmth of his
mother, his whole world her living flesh, unknowing of any dead outside or of
any hunger but his own. “Whether he is broken or not, he is your brother. Shimon,
never forget that.”

Shimon
didn’t move; he just stared into the dark.

“Shimon?”

A
moment later: “Shimon?”

He
glanced at his mother. She had suffered this night. Though his insides burned
with wrath, he leaned over her and pressed his lips to the baby’s head, felt
the softness of the infant’s skin. He did not even hear the distant cries in
the houses burning by the sea. Rahel turned the baby toward him, and after a
hesitation Shimon felt for his brother’s heartbeat. Found it, so much faster than his own, and in all the lethal night there was no other
sound.

Dawn
found the last men and women of Kfar Nahum laying the bodies of the dead
outside the town in long rows, both Hebrew and Roman, and shrouding them in
white linens. When the linens ran out they used blankets, or coats, or whatever
they could find. Most of the legionaries had perished, and those that hadn’t
had fled into the hills—that left many, many dead. The charred and broken
houses of the town reeked of them.

A
few of the living women took ashes that were still warm from the ruins of the
houses and the Roman tents, and put the ashes in their hair. Then they knelt by
the corpses and keened, as other women had done before them on many
battlefields and in many burned cities throughout the long centuries of their
time in this land. Zebadyah the priest ignored them at first, searching the
dead for the face of his father. As he passed, men and woman lowered their
heads in weary reverence, but Zebadyah turned his gaze away from them. There
was sand in his graying hair and his white robe had been torn and soiled by his
flight when the Romans broke the door of his synagogue and by the long night
hours he had waited hidden beneath one of the boats out above the tideline.
There, with the boat’s keel for his roof, Zebadyah had covered his ears against
the screams of his people and the wailing of the dead in their hunger. He
recalled, as in a nightmare, a whisper in his ear out of the air, when the
Romans first began pulling people from their homes:
Go. Go quick. Hide
.
And the same whisper as he hid beneath the boat:
Stay here.
Now shame
smothered his heart.

His
father Yesse had suffered during the night; one of the others among the
grieving had told him of it, his voice shaken, as soon as Zebadyah had walked
into town from the shore. In the hours of their drunkenness before the dead
came lurching out of the hills, and while Zebadyah trembled beneath the boat,
the mercenaries had stripped and beaten and mocked his father, for no better
reason than that he was old and weak and Hebrew. The legionaries had dragged
him from his house. This was a man with white hair and a long beard, who had
served in his youth as a priest and who stood ready still to serve as one, if
he should ever be called again to the
lev ha-olam
, the heart of the
world, the Temple in distant Yerushalayim. Yesse had outlived two wives and had
survived the deaths of three of his five sons, who had drowned in a storm at
sea. He was revered by the town, and Zebadyah, the oldest
of his two living heirs, brought fish for him and sat with him each evening as
he ate. The drunken legionaries pulled this old man from his house and made him
dance in the open ground before the synagogue, and then at swordpoint they
forced him to strip away his garments and stand naked. He wept as they made
crude jokes about his circumcision, as they asked him if he found he could
still give pleasure to women, or whether he had lost some piece of his manhood
and grown so white-haired searching to find it again. Perhaps they would have
humiliated him further, but at that moment the moans had broken out, and the
famished dead from the hills had fallen on them with their lethal hunger.

When
Zebadyah found old Yesse at last, groaning in pain and grief where he sat
against the side of a stone house near the edge of the town, the elder rebuked
his son. “Tend to the People first,” he rasped, “and let God tend to me,
Zebadyah.”

Zebadyah
carried his father to the synagogue, feeling by instinct rather than conscious
thought that it was the town’s safest place, though he grieved to see the door
broken from its hinges, blood smeared across the letters from the Law that his
father’s father had carved, with great labor, into the lintel and doorposts. He
could hear the other survivors groaning within. The usually dim, cool interior
was now lit with candles and stuffy from the smoke and the heat of the bodies
smothered together beneath the low roof. The tiny flames shone strangely on the
polished cedar of the cupboard against the east wall where the Torah was kept.
The menorah had been knocked over and lay flat on its table and the shofar that
used to be beside it was missing, but at the time Zebadyah hardly noticed.

Yakob
and Yohanna were already there, with Leah bat Natan and several other women,
carrying waterskins among the suffering and the feverish, or pressing wet
cloths to hot faces. When Zebadyah’s sons saw him, they hurried to lay out
bedding for Yesse.

“There
are many here who are unclean, father,” Yakob whispered as Zebadyah laid his
father down. His eyes showed their whites. By
unclean
he meant
touched
by the dead
.
Bitten
.

Zebadyah
nodded wearily, whispering words of praise in his heart that his sons were both
alive, however haggard they might look.

“Was
grandfather bitten?”

“I
am fine, boy.” Yesse opened his eyes.

“He
is fine,” Zebadyah repeated numbly. He sat for a moment, just to catch his
breath. Gray-eyed Yohanna, his face become overnight that of a man and not a boy, crouched beside Yesse and lowered the waterskin to his
grandfather’s parched lips.

Zebadyah
heard a raised voice behind him and glanced over his shoulder. He saw Benayahu,
the town’s
nagar
, the wood-worker, repairer of houses and boats, with
his back to the synagogue wall. His face twisted in rage and horror. “Snatched
her,” he was crying. “Snatched her from my hands. My wife. They took her from my hands, they
ate
her!”
Beside him stood a boy whose dirt-darkened face was streaked with pale rivers
left by his tears, and the boy—who was not Benayahu’s—held the
nagar
’s
yearling daughter in his arms, asleep.

But
Benayahu did not glance up at either the boy or his child. He had torn away the
right sleeve of his tunic and he held the ragged, rolled-up cloth tightly to
his upper arm. Zebadyah didn’t know if the bandage covered a bite or a wound
from a Roman blade, but at this moment he did not have the strength either to
care or to fear.

The
priest worked his mouth a moment, to get enough spit to speak clearly. He
looked to his sons’ gaunt faces. “Where are Yonah and Rahel? And
their boy?”

“We
haven’t seen them, father,” Yakob said.

Zebadyah
squeezed his eyes shut. If they were not here …

He
forced his head up, looked around at the refugees of their town. More than
forty lay on the clothes and blankets that had been tossed across the
synagogue’s stone floor for bedding, some of them shaking, some of them still.
Some with horrible wounds, and their kin huddled over them, praying or giving
them water or pressing wool against their limbs or their bellies to staunch the
bleeding. Feverish faces in the candlelight—all these men and women waiting for
death and for what nightmare might come after. A few of the unbitten stood
solitary or sat against the wall, their heads down. None of them would ever
sleep well again, ever trust the night again or the strength of their doors. A
few looked his way, but Zebadyah lowered his eyes. He had hidden during the
night while they suffered. He hadn’t known the dead would come. He had hidden
from the
living
. The Romans. But he hadn’t been
here—that was the accusation he believed he’d see if he faced them. He hadn’t
been here. He, their priest.

He
realized Yakob was speaking to him. Perhaps had been for a
while. His son’s words rushed toward him from some distance like a flash
flood down a river channel.

“—never got in the synagogue. It was Bar
Nahemyah, father. He held the door against them during the night, and the
corpses piled about his feet.”

He
glanced up at his son, whose face was drawn. He tried to understand. Bar
Nahemyah—but he was only a youth, hardly older than Yohanna.

“Then
he took some of the others and left. Yohanna and I stayed because people
started bringing their wounded here, and they needed water and help.”

“Have
to find them,” Zebadyah muttered, rising to his feet.

Yakob
caught his arm to steady him, but he shrugged away his son’s grip and the look
he turned on his son must have been grim and desperate and near madness, for
Yakob stepped back quickly.

“The
old altar,” Zebadyah rasped. “Past the grain caches, between
the tanner’s house and the ruin of the old wall. That
one. Burn an
olah
there, while I find Yonah.”

“We
have no goats, no doves, father,” Yakob said hesitantly. The altar hadn’t been
used since the days of the Makkaba; instead, Zebadyah went to Yerushalayim once
a year to atone for the sins of the town, buying a goat to sacrifice from the
market in the great city.

He
muttered, “Perhaps God will accept a few fish. This one
time.”

He
bent quickly to grip Yesse’s shoulder and whisper, “My sons will look after
you.” Breathing raggedly, Yesse didn’t open his eyes, and after a few beats of
his heart Zebadyah left him and staggered toward the door of the synagogue.

He
stumbled on through the death-reek of the town, seeking his brother Yonah. He
stepped through the broken doors of houses and peered into emptied, unlit rooms
with bloodstained walls. At the door of one house he heard low growls and he
ducked away quickly, shaking.

He
even strode out among the legionaries’ tents beyond the north end of the town,
but searching there he found at first only dead Romans and dead women and
corpses whose heads had been split by Roman blades. Too many of the bodies were
known to him. He saw Asher lying dead across the body of his wife, where he had
perhaps died defending her from either the living or the dead. He saw
Nahemyah’s two sisters, their bellies torn open, entrails spilled messily about
them where the dead had feasted. Their eyes glassy with
death. But Zebadyah noticed one of the women’s fingers twitching. He
gasped and hurried by.

Nowhere
did he see Yonah, or Yonah’s wife or his son. Yet it was unthinkable to him
that Yonah had perished. Yonah the iron-hearted, Yonah the furious. He recalled
the rage in his brother’s eyes that autumn as he cast the tax collector the
Romans had sent into a house at the edge of town, a house empty except for the
corpse that had wandered inside and been trapped. The man had shrieked and
pounded on the door from the dark interior, and Yonah had not flinched, though
Zebadyah’s own palms had gone slick with sweat. He tried to remember that tax
collector’s name, and in a moment it came to him: Matityahu, a Hebrew from the
Greek city of Many Birds to the west.

Reaching
the end of the Roman tents and finding still no sign of his kin, Zebadyah
glanced back and was struck to the heart by the sight of his smoking town and
the shore and the wide, wide sea. For a moment he couldn’t breathe. When he was
a boy, he used to stand on this shore beside his father, near this very place,
once a week, welcoming the Sabbath Bride with song, with shouting and praise
and the slapping of his hands against his thighs. The Bride would tread lightly
over the water with the dusk from the eastern shore, hurrying toward them from
God’s house in the heavens to bring rest to God’s People.

When he was a boy.

Now
beside the beauty of the waves his town lay crumbled and reduced to charred
stone, like a withered old corpse seated beside a lovely woman, a woman who has
not yet consented to bury him, though she can no longer feed him bread or fish.

Zebadyah
closed his eyes and pressed a fist to his breast, as though he must hold in the
anguish or it would burst him open. “What evil have we done, O God?” he moaned.
“How have we broken your Law?” His voice gathered strength, as it had so many
times as he prayed on the synagogue steps. “Lord and judge of the earth, for
what do we stand judged? Was it our violence against Matityahu, who was Hebrew
as we are? Was it that we took goods from the heathen traders, the pig-eaters,
that we defiled our town? Was it for the Grief of Ezra? For
what, Adonai?” He sank to his knees, the hard earth. “Why? Why have you
made a wasteland of us?”

At
that moment he heard a cry. A hoarse voice, a small voice, a
child’s, calling out for help. Zebadyah opened his eyes and looked to
the tents.

There
it was again.

Staggering
to his feet, the priest followed the sound. After a moment, he stopped, called
out: “Where are you?”

The
cry that answered was inarticulate and without words, but it led Zebadyah to a
great tent crimson as the insides of the eaten. The
centurion’s tent. It was cut open on one side, doubtless by the slash of
the centurion’s sword as he made his escape from the dead lurching through the
tent’s door.

Inside,
Zebadyah found a corpse with a cloven head and heard gasping breath from
beneath the centurion’s overturned desk, a heavy thing of no wood the priest
could recognize, one of those ostentations the Roman military brought with them
on their galleys from other shores across the world.

Pinned
beneath the desk was a boy of eight years, his eyes glassy in a gray face.
Zebadyah knew the child, for he had circumcised him and given him the name his
father Cheleph had chosen for him:
Yakob
, a name Zebadyah’s own eldest
son shared. But Zebadyah had not seen the boy’s parents at the synagogue.

“Yakob,”
he breathed. He bent quickly to feel for the boy’s pulse. It was fast but
steady. “Oh, Yakob.”

The
boy’s gaze wandered a moment, then met his.

Zebadyah
felt weary as the land itself. “I am going to get you out of here.” He drew in
a quick breath and got his hands under the edge of the desk and pulled, prying
it off the boy. It was much heavier than he’d expected. He strained against it,
gasped a prayer, heaved again. A surge of strength
surprised him; it had been years since he had set his hand to an oar or heaved
up a net from the clinging water. But he would
not
leave this boy to die
in a heathen tent. The boy made no move to wriggle out as Zebadyah raised the
desk, but the priest pulled at it until he had the desk high enough to thrust
it to the side with his hip and shove it away, thudding into the dirt.