Quarantine (9 page)

matter how tiny.

She stepped too close. She knocked a loose stone in. That's

all it took. There was a startled screech and then a gust of flapping,

muscled wind as the pit made instant shapes from shadows and

flung its contents in the air. It sounded like a hundred husbands

shaking out their clothes. Damp bodies hurtled from the grave

into the night, as headlong and as vengeful as demons hurled

out of a nightmare and driven forwards by the seven winds of

hell.

Marta screamed loudly enough for her new neighbours to

hear, and to hear the echo, too. She dropped heavily on to her

knees. Her face was wetly, firmly struck a dozen times. Her chest

and shoulders took six or seven blows. She was assaulted by

wings and beaks and smells. Then - almost before her scream

had ended - they were gone, crying curses at her as they fled.

She did not know what birds they were at first. She was too

shaken. Her heart was beating faster than their wings. One of

the birds had snagged its claws inside the loose weave of her

cloak, and was hanging at her thigh, upside down, thrashing and

spiralling. Marta, her panic equalling the bird's, beat at it but

could not knock it away. Once she had caught her breath again

and steadied herself, she held its wings and feet and pulled it free.

Her hands were shaking. It was a heavy, barrel-breasted bird,

with a mottled throat and muddy-coloured underwings. A scrub

fowl of some kind. She knelt on the cold ground for a few

moments, panting, warming her hands in the bird's breast

feathers. She would not let it go. This was a gift. The evening

meal, to mark the end of her first day of fasting. She held its

feathers to her cheeks and lips for a few moments. It was softer

than any cloth. But she understood this was no time or place for

childishness. She broke its wings to stop it struggling. She ought,

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she knew, to slaughter it according to the rules by draining out

the blood. But there wasn't any knife - or priest - to hand.

Instead, she put her thumb against its neck and snapped its

vertebrae.

There was a second unearned gift as well. Once the morning

light had lifted high enough for her to see inside the grave, she

found what the birds had gathered for. When Miri had dug the

grave for Musa, she'd gone beyond the biscuit and the stones,

and cut across the underground water-seep which drained what

little moisture sank into the scarp. During the night, the grave

had formed a perfect cistern; cool, straight-sided, and impossible

for antelope or goats to raid and empty. The water was dark

brown and little more than ankle-deep, but it made the forty

days ahead seem almost comfortable.

Marta was not thirsty but she knew she ought to drink before

the sun appeared and her quarantine began in earnest. She lay

down on the ground, with her chin resting on the outer rim of

the grave, and reached down to the water. Luckily, she was a

tall woman and her arms were long enough to touch the bottom.

At once a few black ticks alighted on her wrists. The water tasted

rich and soupy, earth-warm, not appetizing but cruelly beneficial

like herbal medicine. It tasted fertile. What would Thaniel think

if he could see her spread out across earth, immodest as a girl?

She was not scooping water on her own for long. The blond,

summoned by her involuntary scream and by the hubbub of the

birds, was soon lying at her side, toasting his good luck and

drinking palmfuls. The older Jew had trouble kneeling, let alone

lying on his chest and reaching for the water. He held his side,

and frowned with pain. Marta scooped water up for him, losing

most of it between her fingers before she could get her cupped

hands, still shaking from the fright she'd had, up to his mouth.

He shook his head, apologized. It would not do to let his lips

or tongue come into contact with her skin. He gave his felt

skull-cap to her. It didn't hold much water but it absorbed

enough for the old man to squeeze into his mouth. At first he

tried to remove the scabs of earth from the felt before he drank,

but he soon settled for the simple life by swallowing the water

first and then picking the grit and sand off his lips and tongue.

The badu was the last to come, evidently not alarmed by Marta's

scream. He could not easily reach the water either with his hands.

He jumped into the grave and got down on his knees to drink.

He had the manners and the narrow backbone of a goat.

There's nothing like a desert water-hole for making good,

brief neighbours out of animals that have nothing much in

common other than a thirst. There is the story of the leopard

and the deer, standing patiently in line while vipers drink. And

the tradition amongst travellers that anyone who pushes at a well

will die from drowning. Their bones will never dry. So these

four strangers, gathered round the cistern, were more careful

and polite than they might have been if they had met, say, at a

crowded market stall, where the sharpest elbows and the shrillest

voice would get the leanest meat. Even the badu, for all his

childish, knee-deep impropriety, kept to his comer and was

careful to avoid the other dipping hands. There was a good deal

of nervous laughter, as well. They knew they were a comic sight

- unwashed, unrested, far from home, and with the rankest

water, hardly clean enough to irrigate a field, slipping through

their fingers, down their chests and legs. So, once they'd filled

themselves with water and were sitting on the rocks waiting for

the sun to come and dry their clothes, they had no reason to

behave as if they were entirely strangers. Like fellow travellers

sharing tables at an inn, and knowing they would share the same

uneasy stomachs in the night, they had to talk. They'd come

into the hills for privacy, perhaps. But there were customs to

observe. Customs of the water-hole. Customs of the road. And

for the men, the awkward and restraining customs oflanguage and

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demeanour forced on them by the presence of an unaccompanied

woman. Who knows how these three might have spoken and

behaved if Marta, handsome and imposing, her throat and arms

and ankles close enough to study and to touch, hadn't been

there? Who was the viper? Which the leopard and the deer?

Marta knew that she was disconcerting. Men stared at her,

even in Sawiya where she was no longer any novelty, as if her

presence made them uncomfortable. They stopped their work

to watch her walking down the alleys towards the well. She

could hang the sickle and stay the saw. The same men watched

her coming back, balancing a filled pitcher of water on her

shoulders. They hoped to see her arms lifted above her head.

Her breasts would spread high and flat across her chest. Any man

that watched would know that her stomach was still unburdened

by a child, and - for reasons only understood by men and

cockerels - that was arousing. But Marta misread their stares,

and stared back at them, meeting eye for eye. Why should she

feel ashamed? If they grinned or whispered amongst themselves,

then she could guess exactly what they said and why they smiled.

She was for them a fruitless tree. 'Poor Thaniel,' they must have

said. 'No sign of any crop this year. Two barren wives. Too

much to bear.'

Poor Marta, though. Despite her boldness in the alleyways,

she was embarrassed by herself Her sterility. Her size, which

she considered to be too manly and ungainly. Her undernourished heart. Now she was embarrassed even more, in front of strangers. Her inadvertent scream had brought them running

from their caves. It was as if she'd summoned them. Now she

was exposed. Her hair, uncombed inside its scarf. Her wet and

dusty clothes. The earth and water on her face and chest. A

married Jewish woman ofher age was not accustomed to spending

any time alone with men, apart from family or priests. Even

Thaniel, her husband, did not spend much time with her on his

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own if he could help it. Thank god for that. So she was not

comfortable to be displayed for strangers in this way. She tucked

her feet out of sight, behind the hem of her tunic, wrapped her

arms and shoulders as modestly as she could inside her cloak,

hunched her shoulders like a raven so that her tunic hung straight

down as a curtain and hid her body, and sat a little distance from

the men. She put her hands on to the edges of her tunic and

found the seeds that she had stitched inside the hem some years

before, a good luck charm. There were ten seeds, each one an

unborn child, each one hardened by the passing months. Five

daughters and five sons, a balanced set of dowries if all of them

survived. She ran them through her fingers like prayer-beads on

a bracelet, counting them up to forty and then back to nought

again. She counted secretly. She did not move her lips. She tried

to tum herself to stone. She'd have to be discrete for forty days.

She'd have to keep her distance from the men. The priest was

right: it had been wilful, perilous and unbecoming to flee from

home into the wilderness. No one had warned her, though, how

fired and animated she would feel.

The old man did not worry her or even interest her, despite

his frailty. He was a Jew. She'd met his type a hundred times

before. Her uncles and her older neighbours were like him,

meek and pompous all at once, slow to walk, quick to talk, and

made babyish by any pain. This was her husband in old age. The

blond one, though, was odd and beautiful. A foreigner, she

thought. A disconcerting foreigner to dream about. She'd seen

that colour hair before, amongst the legionnaires and sometimes

on the merchants coming from the north. A perfume-seller's

hair. It was the colour of honey. His neck and cheeks were as

brown as beeswax. She watched him from the comer ofher eye,

not wanting to be seen, but not finding any reason to look

elsewhere. He sat cross-legged, self-consciously, his legs

entwined, almost in a braid. He had a staff, made out of twisted

5 1

wood, with perfect curls along its stem, which he held across his

lap. He ran his fingers round the curls. He was a handsome man,

she thought. More than handsome. Statuesque. She wondered

if his body hair was blond . . .

Marta did not like the badu much. He'd jumped in the cistern

with no regard for anybody's cleanliness. She did not trust the

way he squatted on his heels, rocking like a crib, twisting his

hennaed hair between his fingers, and ready to spring up. He