No Lasting Burial (4 page)

Breathing
hard, he bent over the boy again. Yakob bar Cheleph was naked but for a thin
night-tunic, and he had soiled his legs during the night, for his under-clothes
were gone. With a bit of nausea, Zebadyah wondered suddenly if the boy had been
raped by the centurion, and the desk thrown against him on purpose, in hopes
that the dead would bend over it and feed on the boy while the Roman escaped.
This had not happened, clearly; the corpses must have followed the centurion
out. The desk had lain across the boy’s chest, and he was bruised there, badly.
Running his fingers quickly over the boy’s chest, Zebadyah didn’t feel any ribs
broken. Yet when he got his arms under the child and lifted him, the boy cried
out and nearly fainted.

“Father,”
the boy gasped as Zebadyah regained his feet with the child in his arms,
“father—”

“He’s
gone, boy,” Zebadyah said. His voice hoarse. “He’s
gone.”

The
boy shook; even to be held must have been a torment, his body was so bruised.
Zebadyah blinked, forbidding his tears, and held the boy gently to his chest.
The boy’s eyes were glazed with pain and shock, the need in them louder in
Zebadyah’s heart than the roar of his own shame. Zebadyah looked to the door of
the tent, where a wind from the sea tugged at the canvas. At that moment, he
made a vow, and he made it without sacrifice and without ritual. He made it as
a man, not a priest—the first time he had ever approached the God of his
fathers so nakedly. He vowed to raise the boy with his own two sons. Little
could Zebadyah do to repair the shattered houses and shattered lives of his
town—he had not even been there to protect his own father—but he could shelter
this one small boy. Surely he could do that.

The
dead must be buried: that was the one most important condition of their
Covenant with God. Generations before, the Makkaba had left so many fallen in
empty places in the hills with their eyes open to the sky. Furious to drive out
both the Greeks and those Hebrews who wished to be like the Greeks, the Makkaba
had rushed from battlefield to battlefield, striking hard like the hammer after
which he was named, not pausing either for burial or for tending the wounded.
Kfar Nahum had paid the price of that neglect of the Law during the night. Many
of their people now were bitten and feverish. Those few still on their feet
would invite no new disaster. By midmorning, Zebadyah led some forty of the
survivors of Kfar Nahum in carrying the dead up the slope to the tombs. All the dead, not only those who were Hebrew.

The
tombs nearest the town were long since filled with their ancestors; farther up
the hill were those of the living families, with some shelves occupied and some
vacant and waiting. And highest on the hill, three new
kokhim
that had
been dug in the past few years at Yonah bar Yesse’s request, in anticipation of
good harvests from the sea and growth for Kfar Nahum. “Who is born, dies,”
Yonah had said with a cold smile. “Will we have no houses waiting for them?”

Zebadyah
and the others brought the hastily shrouded dead to these new and empty
kokhim
and there they set the Hebrew corpses on shelves,
and in heaps against the wall they lay the corpses of the legionaries, some of
them still in their armor. Though most of the tombs stood open to the air, that
God might look in and see the dead and sing them to restful, unwaking sleep,
each of the caves holding these dead would be sealed behind a great stone.
These dead, whether Hebrew or Roman, would lie forever in the dark.

Zebadyah
bent and took up a handful of dirt, dry and grainy, and rubbed it on his hands.
He was grim. His father would live, but many down in the synagogue would not.
And those who did—
how
would they live, after what had happened? Most of
the town’s women were dead, because most of them had been forced to the Roman
tents before the dead came, and the dead had reached the tents first.

He
glanced down the slope, found the winter-bared sycamore that stood by the
entrance to his own family tomb. In it, his wife, taken by
death while bearing his sixth child, the one who hadn’t lived. The girl. This morning he felt no pang, staring down at her
tomb. Only dull relief. She had been spared the
brutality of the Romans and the coming of the dead. She had been spared this
day.

Yakob
bar Zebadyah stepped from one of the
kokhim
to get another body to bear
within, saw where his father was looking, and walked over to stand beside him,
his own face drawn with weariness and fear. He had left Yohanna in the
synagogue tending Yesse and Bar Cheleph; of their kin, only he and his father
were here on the hill.

“She
was a good woman,” Zebadyah said to him after a few moments. “She lived by the
Law. Never a Greek garment in our house, never an uncleanness
on her lips. I loved her.”

They
stood by each other, in silence.

Not
heeding the priest and his son, the other men worked quickly, carrying bodies
into the hill. They shelved the dead, then hurried back out into the pale sun,
not pausing even to chisel or scratch the words of Ezra into the stone beneath
the burial shelves, as was usually done:
For you God are holy and we who are
flesh lie before you; who can stand before your face?

A
gust of wind across the hill, and Zebadyah stiffened against it, his lips
closed tightly. Only when the wind died away did he speak. “God has withdrawn
from us, Yakob.” He gestured at Kfar Nahum below them by the bleak sea. “Look
at the town. Our houses are built like Greek houses. Look at the women
grieving, look at their dresses. Look at the decorative designs along the hem,
designs that are not Hebrew.” He thought of those he’d never see again, and of
his brother, whose body he hadn’t found. His heart grew small and cold. “God
has turned his face. We were unworthy of his protection. The Grief of Ezra, my
son.”

Yakob
only looked at his father with eyes that had seen too much suffering in one
night to know or care how that suffering might be interpreted. But Zebadyah
bent over one of the bodies, gripping beneath its arms to lift it, his anguish
violent in his breast.

The Grief of Ezra.

That
was what their People called the words of Ezra the Scribe, who centuries past
had led the People home over the desert from their captivity beneath the walls
of Shushan and the other cities among the mountain forests and wide plains of
the east. Returning to the holy land after long exile, they had found their
fathers’ country ravaged by the hungry dead. They’d hastened to rebuild the
long-crumbled wall about the great city, Yerushalayim, and those towers whose
names their fathers had sung to them when they were young—names beautiful as
the names of rivers: the tower of Meah, the tower of Chananel.

Every
man toiling at the stones kept his spear beside him, where he could grasp it
quickly if the dead lurched out of the olives on the mountain and came at them.
When the dead came, hissing in the dark, many men who sealed the gaps in the
wall with their bodies and their spears died, torn apart by hands that were
without warmth, devoured by bodies in which there beat no heart. And as
darkness ate the sky or as dawn bled into the heavens above the eastern ridge,
more dead would stumble down from the high olive groves. Always
more dead.

At
sunset on the nineteenth day while the wall was still low and half-finished in
some places, Ezra the Scribe stood before the People with his back to the
stones and demanded of them that they stand and look out at the corpses.
Our
land that God gave to our fathers is defiled
¸ he cried,
and you can
smell the reek of it. Yet after all the evil that our fathers did, God has
delivered us, patient as a father, and given us back our city. Yet even this
day we do not keep his Law. Many of you have taken heathen daughters to your
beds, and dress in the clothing of the east, and burn gifts of berries or small
fruit to the gods who are not ours. And now we may be devoured. And this day,
this night, will we still fail our God, until he turns his back again and no
remnant of our People remains on the earth, and there is never again a return
home? For God is holy and we are flesh before him.

Then
Ezra gave his fatal command, that the strange wives must be cast outside the
wall and given no home within the city.
We must wall out what is unclean
,
he shouted.
We must be clean and Hebrew again. Or this very night we will be
eaten, and perish.

Some
of the men in the city refused, and some were slain. Ezra’s speech had filled
those at the walls with fear—the men who had gazed night and day into the eyes
of the dead, men who’d taken up their spears and fought for the wall with their
lives. At Ezra’s word, many of these turned against their brothers in the city,
tore their wives from their arms, and threw them over the low wall. Some of the
women beat on the stones of the wall and screamed the names of their husbands.
Others ran in search of crevasses in the rock or shrubs under which they might
hide from the corpses that already lurched toward them.

While
the dead ate, some of the men threw down their spears, set their backs to the
wall, and covered their faces, shaking. Others toiled furiously at the stone
and mortar, but did not look to the ground below. Ezra alone stood on the
unfinished wall that night, watching by starlight and by the light of a torch
he held as the screeching dead devoured the women. It was said afterward that
he did not look away or blink or cover his ears against the screams and the
cries for help. That he watched silently without tears as the women the men of
his People had loved were caught and eaten, one after another, shrieking as
they died.

Only
when dawn came and there were at last no screams but only the moaning of the
shedim
through the mouths of the old dead and the new dead—the heathen wives risen in hunger, with horrible wounds that did not
bleed—only then did Ezra come down from the now-finished wall. As he walked
through the streets of Yerushalayim, such was the horror in his face that any who looked on him fell stricken to the ground, and died.

Ezra
did not halt. Passing through the gates of their ancient city, he walked out
alone into the wilderness above the Tumbling Water, speaking to no one. And he
was never seen by the living again.

That
was how Yesse his father had told the story.

Now,
after the night of the dead, the Grief of Ezra held a new horror for Zebadyah.

“We
must wall out what is unclean,” he said quietly as he and his son carried
another corpse into one of the crowded tombs. The reek was in their clothes
now, in their hair. Though they both wore heavy fishing gloves and though the
dead were shrouded to protect the living against any accidental touch, both men
stank of rot. Zebadyah imagined that even if he were to swim in the sea, as the
Greeks did, he would not be free of that smell. “We must wall out every heathen
influence, every heathen word, every
thing
in
our homes that was made by heathen hands and brought from outside, anything
that may have tempted God to look away when the dead came last night. We must
scrub every bit of rot from our doorsteps and our walls. We must bury and seal
away these dead. We must be clean again. Until the
navi
comes. We must be Hebrew and faithful, so that God’s gaze will be drawn
to us again. To bless us, not to curse us. God gives
and God takes away.” He glanced at his son, whose face was pale with horror,
and said, “Blessed be the name of our God.”

“
Selah
,”
Yakob whispered.
Always
. His face was still
gaunt with shock, his motions stiff as the two of them carried another body in.
This one was a beardless mercenary in Roman gear, one of the heathen polluting
their land. He had paid for that, and Kfar Nahum had paid with him.

After
they threw the body down among the corpses in the chamber, Zebadyah put his arm
around his son and drew him close, held him as Yakob shook with silent cries. Just held him. The others bringing in bodies stepped around
them without speaking.

At
the sound of song, Zebadyah and his son stirred and stepped from the tomb into
the chill air. The surviving women of the town—thirteen of them—had formed a
line before the tombs and were singing the Words of Going that were as old as the
People, words of lament for those who were lost and could not be recovered.
That cold morning, their traditions and their memories were all they had left.
No help had come from Threshing beyond the hill or from Rich Garden or Tower
south along the shore, though a few from Kfar Nahum had fled to those towns
during the night.

After
the women fell silent, Zebadyah lifted his own voice. His eyes were dry, his
back stiff and straight. In his deep baritone, joined after a few moments by
the other men, he sang the cries of Iyobh whom God had tested, words of grief
that in the long years of exile and then return had become the words of their
People, the essential song of a tribe whose first duty was to endure:

Man
that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble.

He
comes forth like a flower, he is cut down.

Yet
there is hope for a tree, if it be cut;

At
the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs.

But
man dies, and wastes away;

Yes,
man gives up his breath.

The
waters wear away the stones:

Washing
away the things that grow out of the earth,

All the hopes of man.

Then
they closed the tombs.

Even
as the last of the great stones slammed into place, as some of the People knelt
in their grief and others turned their faces again toward the town below, a
strange and unexpected sound rang out, echoing against the slope of the hill
and out over the sea. A horn call clear and deep as the voice
of God himself.

The
men and women glanced at each other’s faces in wonder.

The call of the shofar.