No Lasting Burial (5 page)

Shimon
bar Nahemyah, the town’s
other
Shimon, held the horn to his lips, the
ram’s horn he had taken from the synagogue. In his other
hand, a heavy stone. His shoulders bore a fisher’s thick storm-coat,
snatched up from his house during the screaming cold night. Other young men
stood to his left and his right, their faces pale and shining with cold sweat.
Bar Nahemyah put all his breath and all his fury into the cry of the horn. He
blew the
t’qiah
, the challenge that meant:
God is here! This place is
his!
On how many battlefields of his ancestors and at the start of how many
holy feasts had that same call gathered the People in strength?

Letting
the horn fall to hang about his neck on its tough bullhide cord, Bar Nahemyah
lifted the stone, his hands shaking in his cold fury. He and the other youths
were a short walk up the shoreline from the last houses of Beth Tsaida, and
before them, in a great pit into which each day’s incoming tide poured
cleansing water, was the town midden, the feasting place of gulls, where the
poor left unwanted girl-babies before their eighth day and their naming, and
where food that had been defiled and could not be eaten was left for the birds.

It
was low tide, but there were no birds there now. Only the
dead, both the quiet dead and the ravenous. The bodies of bruised, naked
women lay across the heap, where the Roman revelers had tossed those who had
collapsed during the repetitive rapes of the night. Three of the wakeful dead
crouched over the women, tearing their flesh, their shoulders hunched, reminding Bar Nahemyah strangely of town elders
gathered about the scroll of Torah, heads bent, peering into it for some sign
of God’s purpose.

There
was an old man in the pit also, and though his face had been chewed away by the
dead, Bar Nahemyah thought it was Asa the tanner. He was clothed and there were
no bruises on his body from being beaten, no visible wounds except where the
dead had been at his face, their groping fingers digging out his eyes and their
teeth tearing away the soft meat of his cheeks. He had not been thrown there by
the Romans. Doubtless he had taken refuge beneath the refuse, witnessed the
women hurled into the pit over him, lain shaking with his eyes clenched shut,
hoping the Romans would not notice him there. Devoured from
within by his terror.

But
though the Romans must have hurried away quickly, shunning the midden after
tossing in those they’d used and killed, there were no places shunned by the
dead. The dead knew neither fear nor shame nor disgust at any stench. Only hunger. Perhaps Asa had screamed when he heard the
corpses hissing at him from above the midden pit, dark silhouettes against the
stars. Screams that were utterly lost amid the death-cries of
the town. Or perhaps he had lain silent and still while they fed on the
dead or dying women, until one of the corpses found him, too.

Bar
Nahemyah and the others had kept silent in their approach; until the call of
the shofar the dead hadn’t looked up as they lifted red flesh and entrails to their
gaping mouths. Watching them, Bar Nahemyah had stood cold, as though he had
swallowed the winter wind and given it a place to lie still and icy inside his
chest. When he had left the synagogue with the shofar, he had not taken time to
wash away the dried blood on his hands and arms from the two Romans he had
killed during the night, nor the filth that had spattered across his coat as he
drove a hammer into the heads of the groaning corpses that sought to surge
through him into the synagogue.

He
was fifteen and only recently a man. He had watched skulls burst apart beneath
his hammer, had seen the meat and bone inside the human body. Had seen the girl
who had given herself to him in an hour of gasping and heat on the night of
their betrothal torn apart before his eyes, screaming for a few brief moments
as the dead ripped out the insides of her belly, hollowing her until she lay
still. He had seen all that. Now Bar Nahemyah was cold, everything in him cold.
The shaking that had taken him after the violence had subsided before the
rising of the sun, leaving behind only this heatless fury. No messenger or
messiah of God had arrived during the night to halt the slaughter, no Makkaba
riding from the cities of the south with vengeful, armed priests on dark horses
behind. No miracle, no deliverance. There had been only the hammer held in his
hand.

He
had cast away the hammer in disgust and wrath once there were only bodies
before the synagogue door, and he had not stopped to retrieve it as he strode
out to check for other dead. Only after he came down to the shore had he
realized his hands were empty; he’d stooped then to take up the stone he held
now.

As
the notes of the shofar faded, he lifted that stone and gazed down at the dead
in the midden. “Heard that, did you?” he called to them.

The
dead hissed and lurched to their feet, their jaws opening to reveal bloodied
teeth.

“Don’t
get too close,” Bar Nahemyah said to the others.

Then
he hurled the stone.

For
the briefest of moments it spun in the air like a ball in one of those games
the pig-eating Greeks favored.

Then
it smacked one of the corpses in the left shoulder. The corpse spun about and
crumpled to its knee. The other two shambled past it. But even as Bar
Nahemyah’s companions threw their own rocks down at the dead, the first corpse
looked over its shoulder at them and growled like a beast as it staggered to
its feet.

Then
the men were hurling stones down at the midden, to the cracking of bones and
the growling of the dead. One of the corpses toppled and lay
still, its head crushed in. The others lurched on up the shallow sides of the
pit, reeking of death and offal and salt water. A stone crushed one’s thigh—a
corpse that, in life, must have been a girl nearly old enough to bear a child,
her hair long and lank about her gray shoulders, one of her breasts chewed half
away. Still she dragged herself across the shore with her hands, hissing and
snarling.

Their
bodies broke beneath the rocks, yet they kept coming.

And coming.

“Fall
back,” Bar Nahemyah snapped. “More stones.”

The
young men retreated at a stumbling run toward the grasses at the tideline, and
along the way they lifted from the sand and shingle what they could: rocks
smoothed and tossed landward by the sea, gnarled driftwood, shells of sea
creatures blind and deep and strange as the world’s beginning, anything that
could be thrown at the dead to do damage.

Another
corpse fell, a large-bellied man, most of whose face had been eaten away before
he rose. The sharp edge of a broken shell lodged between his eyes like Dawid’s
slingstone, and he toppled backward and did not get up.

The
last corpse still growled and lunged toward the living with uneven steps. It
was the girl; she had risen up on one foot and was coming after them at a
crouch, dragging her bad leg behind her. It was nearly on them now, and Bar
Nahemyah’s companions fell back into the grasses. Bar Nahemyah himself stood his ground.

“Be
still, you unclean
tameh
,” he cried, wrenching a long branch of
driftwood free of the sand. Lifting it like a club, he waited for the corpse to
stumble nearer. Its eyes were fixed on him, those gray, scratched eyes. Its jaw
worked, opening and closing.

With
a shout, Bar Nahemyah swung the branch, slamming it hard into the side of the
corpse’s head, knocking it to the sand. He leapt over the fallen girl, spearing
the end of the branch toward its head even as it hissed and tried to get up.
The side of its head gave, yet it spat, and the thing’s hand clutched the end
of Bar Nahemyah’s coat. Then he was slamming the branch down against its head,
again and again.

Until it was still.

Bar
Nahemyah stood over the body, panting. The other young men drew back in mute
horror at both the dead and the man who had fought. The corpse’s fingers were
still curled about the hem of Bar Nahemyah’s coat. Bar Nahemyah roared,
shouting all of his rage and impotent grief at the thing’s dead face, and
lifting one foot he drove the heel of his sandal against the clutching hand and
broke its grip.

The
hand fell back limp against the grit of the shore.

Bar
Nahemyah gazed down at it for a long moment, breathing heavily. Then glanced up at the other, pale-faced youths. At the midden and the stinking dead lying on the offal. Heard the sigh of the waves and behind him, at the tideline, the
rush of the wind in the grasses like the sound of God weeping. He cast
the branch aside into the sand. Though his lips moved, no words came. He swayed
on his feet. Then he tilted to the left and vomited.

Before
sunup, Shimon had walked to his father’s house in Beth Tsaida, that long line
of fishers’ homes just above the tideline. He found the house empty and in
disarray, its atrium open to the sky and silent but
for a few of his mother’s chickens, the small, enclosed rooms around the outer
wall dark. No one was there. The ewer his mother used for water had been
shattered, and there were streaks of blood across the atrium’s dirt floor. For
several long moments, Shimon stood staring at those dark stains, hardly
breathing. All he could think of was the blood on his father’s hand. Was this
more of his blood, or had others entered the house and struggled during the
long night’s fight with the hungry dead?

But
his father clearly was not here, whether this was his blood or not. And that
meant this day was up to him.

Hastily,
Shimon scooped up an armful of blankets and ran with them back up the hill to
the tomb. He ignored the weeping he heard in the town and ignored the fear in
his breast, knowing that if he stopped moving, that would be it. He would be too
exhausted and too panicked to get up again.

When
he reached the tomb, he wrapped Rahel and the maimed baby in blankets. He put
his mother’s arm about his shoulders and, supporting her weight, he helped her
slowly down the hill. Rahel looked about with bloodshot eyes, her face paling
with horror as she smelled the smoke and witnessed the ruin of their town, the
crumbled houses, the bodies in the streets.

A
few survivors were already moving, shrouding the corpses or simply walking in
listless circles, their faces bloodied or tear-streaked. No one called out to
Rahel and her sons, no one challenged them, not one.

His
heart beating fast, Shimon lay his mother down on her bedding in the small
winter room she’d shared with his father, and handed her the baby, that small,
crippled baby, that shattered hope. He covered them both with blankets. Rahel
was shaking, but her son didn’t know if it was with cold or fear or grief or
shock. He rubbed his hands together a moment, trying to think. Swallowed
against his own fear. This was too big for him. They
needed his father. Where was his father?

“Shimon,”
Rahel whispered. “There.” She lifted a trembling hand, pointed.

He
looked. It was his father’s white
tallit
, the four-cornered prayer shawl
he wore to the synagogue, still folded over its peg in the wall, miraculously
undisturbed by whatever chaos had struck their small house.

“Bring
that here, please.”

When
Shimon pressed the
tallit
into her hand, Rahel took the folded shawl and
brought it to her lips, kissing the rough fabric. Glancing toward the roof, she
whispered fiercely, “Adonai, find him, bring him home to us. Please. Let him be
breathing. We need him. The boys and I. We need him.
Bring him home.”

Her
voice wavered. She kissed the
tallit
again, her eyes shining. She sang
softly:

Though the fig
tree does not flower,

And no grapes
are on the vines …

She
closed her eyes, fell silent. After a moment, she ended her prayer as prayers
were always ended in Kfar Nahum: “Bless us and keep us, O God. Until the
navi
comes.”

At
those words, Shimon straightened. He recalled the rough way his father had
shoved him to the door, uncaring of his own safety. If God were watching, he
would not bless him or his town for shaking in the dark. He heard the soft
sounds of his crippled brother mouthing, reaching for a breast.

He
went to the bin in the atrium beneath his mother’s olive tree, took up a clay
bowl from the stack beside it, and scooped some of the last of their grain from
its bin. He brought the bowl back to his mother and saw the relief in her eyes.
He realized from the way her hands shook as she accepted it how fatigued and
hungry she actually was. He glanced about, made sure
the waterskin was within her reach. Then he met her gaze.

“You
are safe,” he said. “I’ll go find father.”

Rahel
nodded, her eyes closing. “The boats, my son. The boats. He would have gone to the boats. Gone out on the
water, to get to some other shore where there were no dead. So he could circle
into the hills and come back to us. See if his boat is here.”

Shimon
took his mother’s hand quickly and kissed it, his eyes filling with tears that
he blinked back. Then he turned and hurried to the door and flung it open, nearly
ran across the packed dirt of the narrow street outside before stopping himself
and turning to shut the door, putting his weight against it. Again he saw the
blood on his father’s hand. Breathing raggedly, he leaned a moment against the
door, gathering his courage. Then he hurried through the battered houses and
out to the wild grass. He saw the sea, open and vast with its horizon of far
hills, and he ran for the line of boats, the long row of wide-beamed fishers
moored above the tideline.

It
took him only a moment to be sure. Some of the boats were missing. His father’s boat, others. The tide had come and was now
receding, and had washed away whatever track Yonah’s boat had left in the sand
when his father dragged it out to the water, a task that normally took two men.
It was not a small boat, and his father never brought in small catches.

Swallowing,
Shimon straightened and looked out over the waves. A few cranes glided low over
the water, but he could see no dark shape of a boat out there, nothing but the
blindness of the sun’s fire on the sea.

A
fear took him then, and he walked out onto the sand and planted his feet there
among the shells and lake-weed the tide had left behind like memories the sea
refused to carry. For no reason he could have given, Shimon was certain in his
heart that if he went back to his mother now, he would never see his father
again. That he must wait, here, faithfully. Watching the sea.
Awaiting the rock and pitch of the boat’s return on the
waves. His mother had water and grain. He had found her and brought her
and his brother safely home; he’d done his father’s command. Now his duty was
here, at the edge of the sea.

Once,
while he waited, he heard the call of a shofar and lifted his face. The call
was very beautiful, and it carried over the water, and the hills across the Sea
of Galilee gave it back. Shimon looked to the sea with fresh hope. Perhaps his
father would hear the call and row toward it or run toward it along the shore
if he was already on the land and not on the water. But there was still nothing
on the sea, neither boat nor bird.

When Bar Nahemyah and other young men,
ten or twelve, began bringing bodies down to the shore and laying them out in a
long line on the sand, Shimon watched without speaking. The sight of
the corpses was horrible, yet he neither flinched nor looked away; he felt
detached, as though this were happening on some other shore and not here. He
could see the rise and fall of their chests; these bodies still breathed. Their
faces were flushed with fever, and they bore terrible wounds on their faces or
their arms. Bites. Some had been torn open, and those
were pale as though emptied out. Shimon bar Yonah knew some of them. There were
old men and young, old women and young women, nearly a hundred. And among them,
a few mercenaries, some dark-skinned, some olive, some white. Hired swords from
every part of the Roman world, broken away from their brothers and then
reassembled into a unit that could be put to the use of Empire, fighting for
coin and glory rather than any bonds of blood or kin or covenant. Shimon did
not understand how such a thing could be.

“
Shalom
,
Bar Yonah. Will you aid me?” Bar Nahemyah called to him. He had the eyes of a
man who did not remember sleep or rest, and so would not seek either. Gore had
spattered his storm-coat.

“I
have to wait for father,” Shimon said, his voice distant. “He’ll need me.”

“All
Kfar Nahum needs you, every man who still breathes.” Bar Nahemyah’s voice was
low and intense. He swept out his arm, indicating the line of unconscious
bodies. “By noon all of these will be dead, and some will have risen, and they
will hunger. They will want to
eat
our People, what is left of our
People, our kin. Look at them. Romans and heathen, and our
own brothers, our own sisters gone from us.
Every one
of these
will kill. But that is
not
going to happen. Let us have justice. I will
see that these unclean monsters suffer for all time, for what they have done
this night. For Ahava my beloved. For
our fathers and our children dead.”

But
Shimon had turned his head back to the sea, whose waves were louder in his ears
than Bar Nahemyah’s impassioned words.

When
he said nothing, the other man’s eyes flashed hot with anger. “Your father
understood justice,” he cried. “He would have helped me.”

Shimon
felt no guilt. His whole heart was pulled by the emptiness of the sea, and he
felt tugged beneath waves of dark terror. He gazed out desperately for some
sight of his father’s boat that he could cling to.

Bar
Nahemyah’s face hardened. He turned away.

There
was the sound of Bar Nahemyah exhorting the other youths, a drone in Shimon’s
ears. Then cries as other young men came down to the shore. Yakob the priest’s
son was with them, and he exchanged harsh words with Bar Nahemyah. Heated voices. A fight broke out, men beating each other,
some to protect their ill, others to seek vengeance
for the eaten. For a few beats of the heart, men fought on the sand over the
bodies of the dying. Still Shimon ignored them.

In
the end, a few ran back to the town, led by the priest’s son. The others turned
the bodies onto their bellies and bound their ankles. They took cloths and
filled these with stones from the shore, then knotted up the cloths and bound
those to the ankles of the bitten. One after another they lifted the feverish
bodies, one youth at the head and one at the feet, and carried them into the
boats, piling them atop each other like fish. And when there were no more, the
boats slipped from the shore, each with two youths at the oars, their eyes hot.
Shimon felt a dull horror as he watched the boats grow smaller on the waves.

Those
in the boats were not dead. They lived. They breathed … though none of them
were awake or aware, and none would survive the morning. Dimly, Shimon
understood that Bar Nahemyah meant to toss them into the sea, that there would
be no tombs on the hill for these. Yet the horror of it was something outside
of him, like water beating against a rock; the horror
inside
of him, the
memory of the blood on his father’s hand, the frantic look in his father’s
eyes—that was far more personal and overwhelming.

Behind
him, the priest’s son came running back with Zebadyah
his father panting behind him. Perhaps the priest had been searching again
among the tents and ruins for survivors; it had taken Yakob a while to find
him.

And
now it was too late.

When
Zebadyah reached the shore, he broke to his knees in the sand, his eyes wild.
He screamed at the retreating boats: “No! Come back! Bar Nahemyah, come back!
The dead must be buried! They must be buried! The Law! Come back!”

But
no answer was called back over the water, and none of the boats turned its bow.

Shimon
felt someone beside him, and though he didn’t turn, he knew by the sound of the
youth’s breathing that Yakob was there.

“Amma
is in the house,” Shimon said. He kept his eyes on the water.

“Yohanna
and I will bring her water,” Yakob promised. He stood by Shimon a moment,
seeming to understand why his friend was here, and whether because he could not
think of something to say or because he knew that there wasn’t anything to say,
he spoke no word but only gripped Shimon’s shoulder. Then he turned and went to
help his father up from the sand. The strength seemed gone from Zebadyah’s
limbs; his face glistened with tears.

Numb
inside, Shimon gazed always past the boats out across the empty sea, looking
for one boat, one boat that had set out in the dark and not returned.

Somewhere
out in the middle of the water, as the sun rose hot over the sea, the youths
set aside their oars and stood, their legs spread wide for balance as the boats
rocked. They lifted the bodies over the gunwales and slid them, one after the
other, into the cool womb of the sea. The wrath Shimon had seen in the youths’
eyes as they set out made the reason for their act clear. The young men knew
the bodies would rise, and the memory of the dead devouring their village
during the night was bitter in their minds and hot in their hearts. They needed
someone to suffer for what had been done, for the kin who had been eaten, for
the kin who were dying now. They needed to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for
a tooth. They could not make the Romans suffer; the Romans were gone, eaten or
fled. They could not make the dead who’d attacked suffer; for they had been
destroyed during the night and the dawn that followed, by Roman swords or
Hebrew fishing spears or by Bar Nahemyah’s hammer and stone. But these bodies
that lay now in their boats would become eaters, too. Unless speared through
the brow or burned with fire, they would walk and moan for years, feeding on
the People.

Or—dropped
into the sea, their ankles bound, these new dead would writhe in the water,
without food, without breath, their moans heard only by the fish. They could be
made to suffer. The youths hoped this fiercely, and like the heathen tribes
from whom their fathers had wrested the land many centuries before, they gave
their dead to the sea. Not in reverence but in fury and a longing to forget. A
punishment meted out, justice done, and the pain of that night would lie
beneath the waves, never to be spoken of.