Quarantine

by Jim Crace

  Not all the cavers were insane. That spring there had been fever in Jerusalem and many deaths. Musa wasn’t the only one to leave his mouth unguarded. Most of the travellers heading eastwards for the solace of the hills were the newly bereaved who wished to contemplate the memory of a mother or a son in privacy, and for whom the forty days were not remedies but requiems. There was a group of nine or ten of these – all Jews – who, for a modest rent paid to the shepherd, had taken up their grieving residence in natural caves above a stream on the trading route just south of Almog, where their deprivations would be slight. There were produce markets at the waterhead, an undemanding walk away, where they could eat once the daylight fast had ended and take their ritual baths, and the caves were relatively warm. Bereavement’s punishment enough, they thought. Why starve? Why freeze at night? Why hide away? How would that help the dead, or bring them back?

  There was another group of twenty-four – all men, and zealots, pursuing the instructions of Isaiah, ‘Prepare straight to the wilderness a highway for our god’ – who were keeping to the Dead Sea valley, looking for the Essene settlements. They’d spend their forty days in artificial, dug-out caves, waiting for the world to end (Please God the world won’t end in forty days and one …) and sharing their possessions and their prayers, with only the palm trees their companions.

  But those who made it to the perching valley where Miri – half open-eyed – was sleeping, and where Musa and the fever devil were bargaining the final hours of his life, sought something more remote and testing than requiems and communal prayers. There were five of them – not in a group, but strung out along the road where earlier that morning the caravan of uncles had passed by. Three men, a woman and, too far behind for anyone to guess its gender, a fifth. And this fifth one was bare-footed, and without a staff. No water-skin, or bag of clothes. No food. A slow, painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising, mirage heat, as if someone had thrown a stone into the pool of air through which it walked and ripples had diluted it.

  The first four – their problems? Madness, madness, cancer, infertility – had started their journeys that morning from the same settlement in the valley. Though they had observed the proprieties of pilgrimage by keeping some distance apart, they had at least endeavoured to keep each other within sight and hearing. There were robbers in the hills, army deserters, lepers, devils, animals, avalanches of dry scree, and a threatening conspiracy of rocks, wind and heat which made the landscape treacherous and unpredictable. It was a comfort to have some help close by. By the time they’d clambered up the shifting landfall to the plateau at the top of the precipice and were walking through the flatter scrub towards the tent, they had become separated by only a few hundred paces. They were more hesitant and slow. Exhausted, obviously; but also uncertain of the way, uncertain even if this quarantine were wise. They were searching for the wayside marks, carved in the largest rocks by some holy traveller years before and now much eroded, which indicated where the caves were found. The marks directed them towards the higher ground. They had to leave the camel tracks and the cliff-top path before they reached or even saw the tent, with its abandoned invalid. They walked along the flood-beds of the little valley, and none of them could miss the opportunity to make their own marks by stamping on the soft clay before they headed for the scarp and for the dry and warmer caves behind the poppies and the grave. So Miri woke, startled by sudden noises. The first of the temporary hermits was scrambling through the loose stones of the scarp to choose his place to sleep. Miri could not see who had disturbed her, but she recognized the sound of human feet, slipping in the scree. She could hear others approaching from below.

  Miri curled into a ball, a porcupine without the quills. She was no longer undisturbed. Whose unsteady feet were these? She wished that she could disappear into the ground. That was possible. There was an open and inviting grave for her, within arm’s reach. She only had to roll the once. A few stones clattered into the grave with her, but they were not noticed. Four pairs of climbing feet were making greater noises of their own and, anyway, no wild land is ever entirely still and silent. It has its discords and its detonations. Earth collapses with the engineering of the ants; lizards smack the pebbles with their tails; the sun fires seeds in salvos from their pods; pigeons misconnect with dry branches; and stones, left loosely to their own devices, can find the muscle to descend the hill. So Miri settled in to Musa’s grave and, for the moment, was not seen or heard.

  She had been dreaming about her child, of course. The usual mix: anxiety and joy. Her sleep had shut her husband out. But, in those alarming moments when she woke, became a porcupine, became percussion in the scrub, became the first trembling resident of her husband’s grave, she had convinced herself that it was Musa who’d woken her. Who else? He had disturbed her sleep so many times before. So it had been his stiff and bloodless feet which sent the small stones tumbling. He’d died, alone, with no one there to mediate. That was the fate that’s worse than death. Now he’d come to find his wife. She wasn’t hard to find. There was the recent kicked-up trail which led out from the tent across the flat scrub, into the valley, up to the scarp. There was the abattoir of stones, clawed out for him. There was her mocking headscarf, thrown off, snagged on a thorn, and left to flag him to her. There was the grave, and Miri crouching in it, hardly hidden, the tiny sobbing woman in the fat man’s hole. How could he miss her? And, then, how could he let her go unpunished? Musa was no mystery to her. He’d use his fists and feet. He’d pick up rocks and earth to finish her. The living would be buried by the dead. That’s what the prophets said. The world would end that way.

  But minutes passed. There were no rocks. She was not stifled by his body pressing down on hers. Finally she found the courage to crouch in the corner of the grave and peer out, a rodent peeping from its burrow. Of course she did not recognize the people that she saw, but neither was she frightened of them now. They were, at least, the living. No Musa then. Not even death and its three partisans. She was exposed to nothing worse than strangers.

  Miri felt too foolish and too shaken to emerge. Just like a child, trapped underneath the mat when adults come. She would simply have to wait for a natural opportunity to escape. Sunset, perhaps. By sunset, surely, Musa would be safe and cold, and she could slip away unseen and go back to the tent. She’d ululate for him. That – precisely – was the least that she could do. In the morning she would get him on the donkey’s back – impossible without some help – and bury him. Here were the stones – where she now crouched, a hen on barren eggs – that would be Musa’s bed-mates. There wasn’t one she hadn’t touched while she was digging. What other widow could make such a boast, or know her husband’s grave more intimately? How very dutiful she’d been.

  For the moment, Miri had little else to do but study stones and, once in a while, when she grew too stiff for her interment, pop her head above the topsoil and watch these new arrivals select their caves, as far from each other as was possible, though close enough for safety in the night. They were like ravens, not like rooks – neither sociable nor hostile with their neighbours. She watched them set up home, one by one, throughout the afternoon. They kicked out the detritus of animals and other visitors, turned stones to check for snakes and scorpions, pulled thorns across the cave entrances to blunt the wind and keep animals out, threw bones as far away as possible. Then they sat in front of their new habitations, looking out across the valleys and waiting for the darkness and, at last, the arced and glinting goblet of the moon. The start of quarantine.

  Of course, for all their birdlike meditation and reserve, they could not help but notice Miri watching them. They were so concentrated on the land which would be their host for the next forty days, and so fearful of it, that hardly a beetle could move without them knowing it. How then could they avoid seeing the newly exposed grave and its occupant, both gaping? But none of them behaved as if it were odd, or even unexpected, that there should be a woman who, seemingly, had dug a pit
for herself and was content to squat in it all afternoon. This was the season of the lunatics. If her presence made them fearful and uncomfortable, then so what? That’s what they’d come for, after all, to encounter and survive anxieties like this.

  Miri wished she had the nerve to stand, waist-high in stones and soil, and call to them. She was a rook. She needed company. She’d ask them what their purpose was, what they were seeking in the caves. She’d ask if they might – later, soon – help to lift her husband on the donkey’s back and bring his body here for its interment. She could not manage it alone, she’d say, and tell them she was abandoned, widowed, pregnant, borderless … and desperate to urinate. Her child was pressing on her bladder now. Her back and thighs were tormenting her again. But Miri 16 was uncertain of the visitors, their sullenness, their lack of smiles, the absence of any conversation or greetings between them. She was afraid that they might ask, Where is your husband now? Then, Why aren’t you sitting by the corpse? Or, Have you run away and left the man to die? So Miri dared not leave her hiding place. Nor dared she urinate. It would be a sacrilege, and dangerous. To wet a husband’s grave like that would bring bad lack. So she squatted amongst the stones, her bladder nagging, her nerve-ends trapped, her conscience throbbing like a wound, her untied hair turned brown with dust, and waited for the sun to drop.

  5

  There were eleven caves above the poppy line – a decent choice for these four visitors. Enough room even for the fifth when he or she arrived. The caves were not hard to see. Their darkly shadowed entrances made a constellation of black stars against the copper of the cliff. There were two easily accessible caves at the cliff foot, partly obscured by salt bushes and fallen debris, and then a further four above, opening on to a sloping terrace. Higher still, and less inviting, were three more caves, set far apart. And then, a hundred paces to the left, a further two, halfway up a seam of darker, stony soil.

  The first of the cave-dwellers to arrive and startle Miri had been the oddest of them all. Was that the word? Not odd, perhaps, but out of place. He was a gentile, blond-haired and narrow-faced; quite beautiful, she thought. And a touch sinister. A Roman or a Greek perhaps, a traveller. But there was nothing Greek or Roman in his quality of clothes. He wore a local tunic and a high, woven cap which made his face seem even thinner than it was. His skin was dry from too much sun. But he seemed strong, like leather thongs are strong. Designed to carry loads. And he was heavily and well equipped – a large goatskin for water, a rush bed-mat, a cloak, a walking staff made from an elongated piece of tarbony with ram-horn curls halfway along its length so that when he rested on its nub his weight had to drop and spiral twice before it reached the ground. He’d taken the smallest and the warmest of the middle rank of caves.

  The second chose the middle rank as well; his cave was twenty paces from the Roman or the Greek, the furthest to the right, and in a shallow declivity of the terrace which would protect the entrance from his neighbour’s gaze, and from the evening sun. He was an elderly Jew, wearing a felt skull-cap; yellow-eyed and yellow-skinned, frail and timid beyond his years, shortsighted, tired, running short of time. He busied himself, peering nervously amongst the stones and scree, collecting thorn roots and branches for a fire, and carrying small rocks for his hearth. He talked out loud to no one in particular. Himself? The lizards? Not prayers or incantations as you might expect. But remarks on everything he saw and found. A good supply of wood and that’s a blessing … We’ll live like kings, old friend …

  The third was – surprisingly – a female Jew of Miri’s own age, though tall and stout and obviously not used to walking. And obviously not used to cleaning out a cave. She could not bear to touch the bones and carrion inside. She couldn’t make a decent broom from any of the bushes. She’d chosen her shelter badly, too – one of the two caves on the lower level of the scarp, the first she’d found, easy to reach, but hard to protect. The bushes at the front would encourage flies, and worse. The entrance was a little higher than the chamber itself. It wasn’t likely there’d be rain – but if there were she’d have to sleep in it.

  The fourth? A badu villager from the deserts in the south, with silver bracelets and a hennaed beard and hair. He was more familiar. The caravan had often traded with such men; some silver for a dozen goats, some perfume for a roll of cloth, a tub of dates for unimpeded passage through their land. They’d sell their children too, it was said. And their wives. He stood outside his cave, one of the two set at a distance from the others in the darker seam of rock. He pulled and twisted his hair, so tightly that the skin on his skull came up in peaks, and stared at Miri. Finally she had to reach for her discarded headscarf, cover up her hair, and duck into her grave. Why such a man would choose a cave and not a tent was inexplicable. The badus only went into caves to die, and this man – small and unrelenting – seemed too wild to die.

  Miri watched the four of them until she and her bladder were set free by darkness. She did not see the fifth.

  6

  The fifth, a male, was far younger than he might have seemed from a distance. Not much more than an adolescent, then. Bare feet make old men of us all, on stony paths at least. But even when he reached the softer and more accommodating track above the landfall, he walked not from the shoulders like a seasoned traveller intent on vanquishing the rocks and rises in his path, but cat-like from the hips, his toes extended, pointing forwards, and put down with caution before his heels were committed to the ground. He’d learnt the single lesson of the thorn. His feet were already torn and bruised. So: long legs, long neck, long hands, short leopard steps. And like a leopard he paused frequently, not to rest but to sniff the air as if he could locate – beyond the sulphur rising on the valley’s thermals – that a caravan of camels had passed, that there were gazelles feeding in the thorns, that there was someone dying in the wilderness ahead.

  He was open-mouthed. He looped his tongue from side to side, circling his lips, tasting the atmosphere for smells. In fact his sense of smell had been so bludgeoned by the heat and by his thirst that he could not detect the sulphur even. He was parched and faint. His lips were cracked. His legs and back – unused to heat and effort such as this – were aching badly. If he paused to sniff so frequently, that was because he could smell nothing. It worried him. He hoped to clear the blockage in his nose, and shift his headache too.

  He was a traveller called Jesus, from the cooler, farming valleys in the north, a Galilean, and not one used to deprivations of this kind. He’d spent the night in straw, a shepherd’s paying guest, and had that morning left his bag, his water-skin, his sandals and his stick where he’d slept. His quarantine would be achieved without the comforts and temptations of clothing, food and water. He’d put his trust in god, as young men do. He would encounter god or die, that was the nose and tail of it. That’s why he’d come. To talk directly to his god. To let his god provide the water and the food. Or let the devil do its work. It would be a test for all three of them.

  First he had to find a place where he and god could meet in privacy. He’d say, if asked, that god had told him where to go, the details of this very route. He had been standing at the window of his father’s workshop and god had called his name. Every time the mallet hit the wood, his name was called. And every time the mallet hit the wood he took a further step along the road in his mind’s eye, down from the living sea in Galilee to the salt-dead waters in the south, and then ascending to the desert hills and caves.

  There were nine days of mallet hitting wood before he found the courage to argue with his family, tie his bag, and leave. The hills were beckoning, he’d said. But as he walked up into the wilderness – his nostrils blocked, his feet raw, another mallet striking on his skull relentlessly – he could not find much evidence of god. The Galilee was full of god at that time of the year – new crops, flowers on the apricot, the lambs, the warmer nights … It was not hard to worship god in the Galilee. But here the spring had hardly made its mark. Jesus was an optimist. Loo
k at the uncompleted land, he told himself, dry-tongued, enfeebled by the labours of the walk: the valleys waiting for their rivers, the browns and yellows waiting for their greens. Creation was unfinished here. This was where the world was not complete. What better place to find his god at work?

  Unlike the four who had preceded him that afternoon and set up home amongst the poppies, Jesus did not follow any of the carvings in the rocks which indicated where hermits would easily find caves. He did not mean to leave his imprint softly in the clay. He was looking for much harder ground. He preferred the pious habitats of lunatics and bats where he could live for forty days, hanging by his toes if need be, and not have any excuse for shifting his eyes from heaven for an instant. He’d seen that there were caves set in the crumbling precipice which fell away abruptly below the camel trail, beyond the ambition even of goats. He’d choose one which was hard to reach and inhospitable, exposed to the sun and wind and cold. He set his sights on the remotest and the highest of the caves, a key-shaped hole. It had no more than a sloping rock as its yard, hardly bigger than a prayer-mat, the perfect perch for eagles. And for angels. But Jesus hesitated at the point where he should start to climb down. He surely had the right to drink before he embarked on his trials. It was not dusk. There was, as yet, no thin and bending moon to mark the onset of his fast. God would not come before day one. So he could drink. It was not a sin to drink. It would not be a sign of weakness, either, if he prepared for quarantine with, say, a simple meal, a wash, a rest.

  He’d seen the batwing outline of Miri’s goatskin tent, pitched on the flatland of the valley head. He walked towards it. There was no one to be seen in the open. But there were goats. If there were goats then there was water too. And milk and meat.