No Lasting Burial (17 page)

Silence
in the street.

“My
son,” Rahel whispered.

But
Koach didn’t answer. He just crouched over the body of the young woman he’d
loved, the woman who had touched him so often in his dreams as he lay in the
quiet hours in his bedding. He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed raggedly.
The stone fell from his limp hand, a soft thud into the dirt.

No
one spoke. No one moved. Rahel swayed a moment on her feet as though feeling
faint, but she didn’t approach. Bar Cheleph took a few unsteady steps away,
looking on, wild-eyed.

Koach
opened his eyes and, against all Law and custom, he pressed his hand to the
dead girl’s cheek. Her skin was cold. So cold.

His
chest clenched in on itself. Pain, a new pain. He had
known fear and rejection and grief, but this was a new loss. She was someone he
had loved, someone whose heart had mattered to him, someone he had yearned to
protect. Gone, torn from her life as savagely and quickly as
a fish might be ripped from the sea.

“Tamar,”
he whispered.

There
wasn’t much left of her face; he had destroyed her with that blow from the
rock. His hands began to shake.

She
hadn’t forsaken him.

She
had never intended to miss their tryst.

While
he had been reviling her bitterly in his heart, she had been in that room,
dying. He leaned back on his heels and just breathed. Just
breathed. Then he took from his pocket the carving he’d made for Tamar,
the wooden horse.

He
turned it over and over in his hands, feeling the smooth length of its limbs,
the intricate carving of its mane, the small roundness of its eyes.

She
was dead.

She
had tried to
eat
him.

But
more than that, she was
gone
. The
shedim
within her corpse had
eaten her heart and her soul, leaving only hunger behind, only that.

Koach
didn’t know how long he sat there, turning that carving in his hands as though
it were the only thing real left in the world, the only thing that wouldn’t
fade away and die. But at last he tucked the carving gently into the bodice of
Tamar’s nightdress, giving it to her as he’d meant to. Then he rose to his feet,
while others around him murmured. He stepped up through Benayahu’s door and
into his atrium, hardly aware of his own movements. He found the small knife
his mother had lost and brought it back to the body. No one took a step toward
the corpse; no one bothered Koach as he knelt by Tamar and turned her gently to
her side. Then he sawed at her bonds, one-handed. She must have been bound by
her father, who had then fled his fevered daughter and his house when she
stopped breathing.

Or even
before
she stopped
breathing.

But
no, there was blood on her mouth; she had risen and bitten him. But how had
she
been bitten? How? Her father had kept her so tightly locked away. Had she
started down toward the boats to meet her lover, then been set upon by some
corpse out of the sea? Run home then in terror, bleeding? Or had something
crawled into their house? Had she eaten a fish that had nibbled at a corpse?
Could such a thing make the fish unclean, and the one
that ate it unclean? If so, why wasn’t the whole town defiled? How had this
happened
?

The
cords snapped with a quiet, rasping sound, and Koach set down the knife, his
hand trembling. He lay Tamar on her back again and rose to his feet, breathing
hard. She had been
bound.
That man—that man who had beaten Tamar, night
upon night upon night—he had just tied her like a slave and
left
her
here. Clear in his heart he recalled all the times Tamar had walked painfully
to the roof after a severe beating. He recalled his own fantasies of killing
her father, of driving a fish hook through his breast, of taking a boat and
slipping out to the sea by night with her, to seek some far town on the other
shore, some place where he would not be shunned for his withered arm, some
place where a cripple might find a way to feed and shelter the woman he
desired. He recalled the beatings he had seen, how he had seen them—and done
nothing. Now it was too late.

There
was a bellow, and without turning he knew that his brother was forcing his way
through the onlookers. “Koach!” Shimon cried hoarsely.
“Koach!”

Koach
didn’t answer. His fist was clenched at his side, his other hand limp and
useless. He felt Rahel’s hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it away.

“Koach!” Shimon shouted
again. Then a grunt as he shoved someone out of his path. “Let me by!”

Koach
glanced back then and saw his brother break free of the press, all those faces
drawn with horror. Bar Cheleph had faded back into the crowd; Koach caught a
glimpse of his face, flushed as though with shame.

Shimon
stopped; the two brothers faced each other. The rage in Koach’s breast went out
like a candle at a breath of the
shedim
, a gust of wind in the night. He
looked from his brother’s face to Tamar’s, her lips still pulled back as for a
snarl or a screech; her fingers still half-curled into claws, her chest
completely still. Koach unclenched his own fist, and fatigue settled over him
like heavy mud. His hand began to shake.

“I
am not strong enough to carry her to the tombs,” he said.

Shimon
glanced at the rock that had fallen from his brother’s hand and then at Koach’s
face. This was his younger brother, the feeble one, whose very birth had failed
the hopes of his family. Yet what he saw now in Koach’s eyes struck him to the
heart. This was no boy looking back at him with tears in his eyes; this was a
young man. In his face Shimon saw graven both the stubborn strength of his
father and the ferocity of his mother, to defend his own. A hot pool of regret
settled in his belly—regret for his words earlier, by the boats.

Grimly,
Shimon shrugged the heavy water-coat from his shoulders and lay
it on the ground beside the girl’s corpse. Then he took the fishing gloves from
his belt and put them on. He took hold of the body and rolled it into the coat.
“I will take her,” he said, wrapping the coat about her like a shroud. He
pulled the hood over her face, shutting away that feral grimace, that
blood-stained mouth.

His
brother watched him silently as he lifted the girl into his arms. She was
light, as though he held only a few coats. Neither of them said anything. What
was there to say?

A
hand gripped his shoulder. “I will help, Bar Yonah.” That was Bar Nahemyah, his
gaze fixed on the dead girl.

“No
need, Bar Nahemyah.”

“Call
me Kana,” the man said softly. “It is a long walk—”

He
fell still at Shimon’s look.

Shimon
turned toward the crowd, who stood between him and the walk out of this town to
the tombs of his People. He could feel Koach’s gaze on his back. The sun
overhead seemed too cold. After a moment, those gathered parted to let him
pass, standing aside, staring at him as though they
were witnessing some holy rite. Bar Cheleph leaned back against the wall of the
house opposite Benayahu’s, his face lowered. As Shimon passed his mother, whose
face was flushed as from exertion, she lifted her voice softly and began to
sing the Words of Going, the most ancient of songs, the keening lament for the
dead. The sound made Shimon’s eyes burn; he could never hear it without
recalling the singing on the hill the morning after most of Kfar Nahum died.
The grief of the town’s women, carried to him on the air as he cared for his
mother and infant brother, as he ran down to the sea to watch for his father’s
boat.

Having
passed through the crowd, Shimon looked back. He saw his brother still standing
alone where the body had lain, with that haunted look in his face. Then Shimon
could not hold back his fury. The last of the day’s numbness broke, and all the
anger of a fatherless son poured out, and in that moment he knew the breach in
the wall of his numb grief could never be repaired, never be
shored up again. Though his heart was naked and torn with pain, he faced the
men and women of his village. His gaze swept them all, and some of them ducked
back as though he had struck at them. Bar Cheleph didn’t look up.

“The
Romans,” he said in a voice cold as the tomb, “say we are a small people. Would
you prove them right? Do we defile our dead? This is not worthy of our fathers.
It is not worthy of our town. It is not worthy of our People. You are small
men, and you shame me.” His face quivered with emotion; then he got it under
control. “My brother, who you call
hebel
, he is the only one today who
is
koach
, the only one whose heart and will are
strong.” Shimon spat in the dirt before their feet and glanced at Bar Cheleph,
who didn’t look up. “I am ashamed of you,” he said.

Bar
Cheleph’s shoulders tensed.

Then
Shimon turned and carried that dead girl from his town.

Koach
lowered himself to his knees and touched his forehead to the earth, oblivious
to his brother’s receding footsteps and to the whispers around him. “God,” he
murmured, “let me sleep and find that this is only the dream country.” His
shoulders shook, but he did not weep. He heard his mother’s voice fall silent.
He heard some walk by him and depart. He paid none of
them any mind, just pressed his face to the dirt. It was like something deep
inside him was lost and he couldn’t find it, didn’t know what it was, didn’t
know where to start searching.

He
heard Bar Cheleph, his voice anxious. “Bat Eleazar, I meant no offense to your
son.”

By
which he meant Shimon.

Koach
didn’t hear his mother’s reply. He whispered, “You killed her.”

Stillness.

“You
killed her,” Koach said. Louder. Lifting
his face from the dirt.

Bar
Cheleph looked shaken. “She was already dead, Hebel.”

“You
killed
her.” His voice a hoarse whisper. “You
never even saw she was hurting. That she needed help.” His chest went hot. “You
all killed her.”

Bar
Cheleph drew back, as though wishing to flee. Yohanna, who stood near, took his
arm and murmured something in his ear. Around them, a few other faces went
ugly. Koach braced himself, every line in his body taut and furious, but before
either words or blows could fall on him, he heard a low gasp.

“Koach—”

Turning,
he saw his mother swaying on her feet. Her face had gone gray, her eyes a
little glazed. She held her right hand pressed to her left arm just below the
shoulder, and with a shock Koach saw that her sleeve had darkened beneath her
grip.

“Koach—I
don’t—I don’t—”

Her
voice was faint.

Then
her eyes rolled back, and with a slow, terrible kind of grace, she slumped to
the ground as though between one heartbeat and the next her body had been
emptied of her spirit.

Koach
was by her side at once. He pressed his left hand to her brow, and paled. She
was burning.

“No,”
Koach whispered.

Slowly,
as his heart beat brutally within his chest, he drew Rahel’s sleeve up her arm.
The underside of the sleeve, between wrist and elbow, had gone dark with blood.

Then
he found it: a bite in her arm, just above the elbow. Flesh had been torn out
of her arm, and only the thickness of the wool sleeve she’d pressed to the
wound had prevented it from spilling her life’s blood already to the earth at
her feet. Now that she had fainted, it ran down her arm in a rush like red
water, darkening the soil beneath her. With a cry, Koach pressed the sleeve
quickly against the wound again, holding it there with his one hand. His eyes
burned; she had concealed the bite from her sons, had not wanted them to know
she was about to die.

About to die.

His
legs gave out beneath him; he found himself sitting by her, everything a blur
to him but the wound on her arm and the pressure he held against it. Tamar,
Rahel. The waters wear away even the stones, and nothing is left.

Yohanna
crouched by him. His voice came from a great distance.
“—have to get her
inside. Make her comfortable. Let me help, bar Yonah.”

He
glanced up at the older man’s face, saw the pity in his eyes, but it was like
looking at a reflection in the water rather than at something real.

“She
needs you to be strong, Koach. Strong.”

Strong. His name, Koach. The word for
strong
.

He
heard his breathing, loud in his ears. “Yes,” he whispered. “Inside.”

Yohanna
placed his arms around Rahel and lifted her, his face strained; Koach got his
arm around Rahel’s legs and did what he could to help carry her; people gave
way as the two carried Rahel awkwardly toward the door of her house, so near
Benayahu’s. At the doorstep, Koach set her legs down and fumbled a moment with
the latch on the door, then swung it open, putting his shoulder against the
heavy wood. Yohanna carried Rahel through, and Koach followed, his heart
pounding, panic rising dark and shrieking in his mind.

As
he caught the door with his good hand and began to swing it closed again, he
found Bar Cheleph on the doorstep.

“I’ll
help,” Bar Cheleph said quietly, his face dark with shame.

Koach
shut the door in his face.

Yohanna
carried Rahel into the atrium while Koach ran and gathered up blankets from her
room. He made a small bed by the olive tree, then left Yohanna to lay his
mother there and hurried for water from her ewer. When he came back, he found
Yohanna pacing. Rahel lay with her eyes closed, her fingers moving restlessly
over her blanket. Small whimpers came from her throat, each of them like a
shock of ice to Koach’s heart.

“She’s
going to die,” he whispered. “She’s going to die.”

“I
have to get the
navi
,” Yohanna said, his face pale. He bolted toward the
door.

Koach
heard his steps. Heard the door sway open, heard it slam shut. He sank to his
knees by his mother, a bowl of water in his hand. Some beast was clawing its
way up his chest, tearing him. An old beast, the
helplessness. He was
hebel
again. His mother was dying, dying the
worst of deaths—the one where the body staggered, lurching, to its feet once it
no longer breathed. His eyes blurred. His brother wasn’t here; there was only
him. And he could do nothing.

He
took her right shoulder and shook her gently. “Amma,” he moaned, “amma.”

Her
breathing was shallow. Her eyes opened at his call, making him gasp, but they
didn’t focus; they seemed to stare past him, at the open sky.

“My
son,” she rasped.

He
fumbled, found her hand, clutched it fiercely. His
throat was dry. “I am here, amma. I’m here.”

“My
son, your father would have loved you.” She began to shake, as though she were
terribly cold, though her face shone now with sweat. “I kept you too safe. I
was so—afraid—for you. He would have seen how strong you were. He would have
been proud of you.”

“Amma,”
he whispered, pleading.

“
Tzelem elohim
, my son. Your face is
God’s face; you are his likeness. What does your arm matter.
Your face is—so beautiful. Tell Shimon …”

She
fell silent.

“What?
What do I tell him?”

But
she didn’t say anything more. Her breathing was even shallower. Koach watched
the tiny rising and falling of her chest, cold with fear.

He
didn’t know how long he sat there watching her die. He didn’t care. In all the town only Rahel and Tamar had spoken to him as to
one who might be respected and loved. And perhaps Bar
Nahemyah. Now he would be alone. He’d thought he was alone before. Now he would
truly be alone. What hopes he’d kept secret had been crushed, what people he’d
leaned on had been torn from him.

Breathing
against the tightness in his chest, Koach tucked Rahel’s blanket about her.
That took some doing with only one hand, and for a moment he glanced down at
his lifeless arm and hate seared through him, self-hate, hot as a furnace. He
struck his chest with his left hand, because the pain of that small blow
distracted him and jarred him back to the present, to the things that needed to
be done. He got up, went to the little room that was Rahel’s during the winter,
took down his father’s
tallit
from its peg, and brought it back to her.
He lay it folded beside her, then took her right hand
and curled her fingers around its edge. His father could not be here, at his
mother’s last breath. There was only his son, only one of his sons, the
worthless one. His father’s shawl was the only small comfort he knew how to
provide.

A
heavy knock at the outer door startled him.

But
he didn’t rise until the knock came again, and Yohanna’s voice called: “Bar
Yonah! Bar Yonah!”

Numb,
he went to the door and opened it. Yohanna stood at his doorstep, and with him
stood the bruised, haggard beggar-man he’d seen on the shore, the man who was
as alone as he.

Yeshua
looked past him, toward the atrium. He looked exhausted, his eyes bleary.

“Will
you let us enter?” Yohanna said softly.

Koach
hesitated. Once you invited someone over the threshold, they were no longer a
stranger. They were your guest, as fully under the protection and provision of
your roof as your own kin. You were bound to them, and they to you.

But
he had strength neither to argue nor to shut the door. He could hear his
mother’s ragged breathing in the atrium behind him, and that quiet, desperate
sound to him was as loud as shakings in the earth. He nodded tensely.

Yeshua
stepped by him, without a word. Yohanna followed, gripped Koach’s good
shoulder, then shut the door for him.

As
if in a dream, Koach followed the other men into the atrium. The stranger
seated himself by Rahel—gently, as though she were
sleeping and he didn’t want to wake her. He just sat by her in silence, as
Koach had moments before. There was sorrow in his face.

Seeing
that, the heat of Koach’s fury returned. His mother would not live long. He
understood what was coming, as much as any young man could. He didn’t want
anyone else here, certainly not any stranger to their town. Why had he opened
the door?

“Why
did you bring him here?”

“He
is the
navi
,” Yohanna said softly.

For
a moment, the word stirred Koach despite his fear. A word of hope from
remembered stories. Rahel’s stories. Always when the
dead had risen to devour the People, there had been a
navi
, one anointed
to counsel and preserve their tribe. Elisa, who had called the very
malakhim
of heaven down in chariots of flame to scorch the unclean dead from the earth. Yirmiyahu, who had faced a corrupt king and begged
him to shatter the gates that locked in the living with the dead.
Daniyyel, who had prayed an entire night unharmed in a cave of walking corpses.

But
how could this man, in his ragged brown robe, with those bruises on his face … how could he be the
navi
? Koach peered at those livid marks on his
skin, and his throat tightened. They were so much like Tamar’s bruises. This
man had been beaten, like her. He was a man someone had failed to defend.

“I
know him now,” Yohanna said. “I’ve seen him before. I couldn’t remember where
at first. It was last summer, with Yohanna ha Matbil in the wilderness about
the Tumbling Water. I was there.” He was quiet a moment, and when he spoke, he
did so quietly, as though fearing to disturb either Rahel or the stranger. “We
light few lamps and we live in the dark and we try to sleep, Bar Yonah. We
don’t want to remember. Your brother seems content to sit in the silence, to
sit
shiva
until his last breath, but this silence grew too heavy for me.
So I left. To live with Ha Matbil beneath the open sky.
I was there on the Night of Five Hundred
Mikvot
, when so many were
immersed in the river to be cleansed. Nothing I’ve said about that night is an
untruth. People’s faces shone as they rose from the water. Men,
women. And the moon was full and the stars as bright as they were for
Moshe in the desert. And I heard the singing, I
heard
it. The
malakhim
, the angels of God, calling to each other in
the dark, from one hill to the next. Like something important was
happening in the land, a blessing, at last. That night we did not hear the
moaning of the dead but the singing of angels.”

He
fell silent for a moment, but Koach didn’t say anything. He was barely
listening. He watched the rise and fall of his mother’s breathing. In his
heart, he stood in a dry, bleak place, where Yohanna’s words were little more
than the wind in the stones.

“At
sunset before the song in the night,” Yohanna said slowly, “a man came walking
down to the shore. Yohanna immersed him in the water. And after, as the man
walked from the east bank out into the ravines, Ha Matbil pointed him out to me
and to the other men who were with us, and he said—I remember it—
There is
the
olah
, the lamb of our God, who takes away the evil and the
uncleanness from the world. A
navi
has come like one Israel has never
seen, and I am not worthy even to tie his sandal-string.

“That’s
what brought the hundreds. It was a mighty sign, Bar Yonah. That night they
came to the water. So many. Hundreds.
All of them kneeling before Ha Matbil, confessing all they had done and all
they had seen and not stopped, every uncleanness they had witnessed or made
happen in our land. And Ha Matbil gave them to the water and brought them up
again. To each one of them he said,
The
time
of God is near. Be ready. It is near
. And oh, Bar
Yonah, what we heard. What we
heard
. Ha Matbil, he looked at the hills,
at the singers none of us could see. He saw what would come—like a
navi
.
And he said,
It
is near.
” Yohanna looked
rapt. “Your brother thinks this man from Natzeret has one of the
shedim
eating him from within. But I think he is of God.”

“This.”
Yeshua spoke suddenly, though he did not lift his gaze from the rise and fall
of Rahel’s breathing. “This. This is what the father wanted me to see. What he
whispered in my ear, out in the wind, in the rocks, in the wind in the rocks.
It has to be, it has to be. This. This is what I have
to do. This …” His voice trailed off. Yohanna stared at him intently.

“She’s
dying,” Koach choked.

“She
is dying,” Yeshua said. “And I am dying, and you are dying, and those women and
men out by the boats are dying. We are all dying, dying, dying …” The
stranger traced his fingertips over Rahel’s arm, over the torn edge of her
skin. She didn’t stir. “But not today. No more dying
today.”

With
fingers as gentle as though he were touching a lover, Yeshua opened Rahel’s
right eye and gazed into it a moment. Her eye was very round and very dark, but
she gave no sign that she was aware of him. Koach tensed—that a stranger should
touch his mother!—yet he found himself waiting, waiting for he didn’t know
what. Breathless.

Yeshua’s
voice was soft and distracted, as though he were talking to himself, or to
someone who sat right beside him, someone only he could see. Koach held himself
back, tense.

“My
mother … she told me once that our father did not promise a life without
pain,” Yeshua murmured, closing Rahel’s eye. His words were slow and spoken
with terrible clarity. “Not without pain. Only that he would weep with us. Only that his heart would break. Only that he would take
each moment of suffering, each death, each, and hold it in his hands, and …
and bring from it something, something even more beautiful than what was lost.
A forest of cedar grows from a field of ash, and each seed, every seed must
fall to the earth, fall and fall and crack open and die before it can become a
barley plant.” He touched Rahel’s hair, stroked it a moment. His gaze never
left her face.

He
began singing softly, words in the dialect of old desert Hebrew, and after a
while he hummed them, as though he needed his mind elsewhere and could no
longer spare any of it to make articulate words. He moved his fingers carefully
over Rahel’s arm and hummed that quiet desert melody, one Koach had never heard
before—though hearing it, he could imagine men and women of his People singing
it or playing it on flutes as they stood at the doors of their tents, long
before they came to this land.

Koach
watched like a man gazing over the brink of a cliff, his heart thunderous
inside him.

Then
Rahel sighed softly and closed her eyes, and the stranger moved his fingers back
and forth over the inflamed bite, kneading her torn skin as though shaping clay
with his hands. The bite closed, and then, a moment later, it was gone. Simply gone. The olive skin of her arm was smooth and
unbroken as though it had never suffered so much as the press of a thumb.