Quarantine

by Jim Crace

  He entertained himself with thoughts of leaving Miri behind in Jericho or, better still, exchanging her for Marta. What would he do when he got north, apart from looking for his uncles and his cousins? He’d have no trouble getting restitution for the merchandise they’d taken—they’d think he was a ghost—although it might be many seasons before he traced his old companions. How would he live, what would he buy and sell until that day? He asked the question to himself a thousand times, and every time, it seemed the Gally’s face imposed itself on Musa’s mind. ‘Be well,’ he’d said, and driven out the fever.

  Yes, patience was the watchword now. Everything would turn out well if Musa could only wait until he found the healer for a second time, and enticed him to his tent again. In his dreams and in his drink, he’d lured the Galilean from his cave and asked, in lieu of rent, to be taught the trick of healing. He learned to fill his saddle-bags with prayers and spells, to dig up roots, pick leaves. Then he travelled to the pleats and pockets of the world and sold long life, and health. He was mistaken for a holy man, and people emptied out their purses in his lap. He drove out fevers for a price, turned water into wine. He made barren women pregnant with his Galilean tricks, and caused the lame to dance for him. At last he was respected for himself.

  He could not stop himself inventing new, unholy miracles. He knew — let’s say — the art of seeing through the women’s clothes, so he could watch them naked as they lined up at his stall. He practised this new skill on Marta. He’d find some task for her close to his bed, so that he might see her bend or lift her arms and watch her fabrics shift across her skin, so that he might enjoy the smell of her. He made her wait at his bed’s end, while he made plans.

  But for the most part of the day, Marta and Miri had their privacy in the screened end of the tent and with the goats. They hardly spoke at first. What should they say? You only had to read the parchment of their skins to know these women had little in common apart from their age, perhaps. Marta’s face was hardly marked, except for a few lines around the mouth, and two almond-shaped wedding scars on her cheeks. But Miri’s face was an empty water-bag – squint lines round the eyes from travelling too long and often in the sun; dry skin across the forehead and the nose; chewed lips; and battle scars.

  On the first occasion that Marta had gone beyond the curtain, Miri’s face was bruised. Her smile was puckered by the swelling at her mouth; one eyebrow was bluey-grey and swollen. Hers was a beggarwoman’s face. The elders of Sawiya would drive her sort out of town, with Thaniel leading them. There was, nevertheless, something jaunty and unquenchable about the little woman that Marta found irresistible. She had to reach across and touch the bruise, a healing gesture of her own. The two embraced, and held each other’s hands like sisters. It did not matter that they did not talk at first, for women always find some soundless intimacy with which to occupy themselves.

  Marta simply followed Miri. Sat when she sat. Watched when any work was done. Smiled when stared at. Passed the hanks of wool. She held the nannies by their ear tufts during milking. She helped to shake and separate the curds. She took her turn with blowing into the goatskin from time to time to clarify the yoghurt into butter, and collected herbs from the scrub. She learned to slap the unleavened dough against hot fire-stones to make platter bread, cooked in moments. She learned to check and block the pegs on Miri’s loom, and to tie the smallest knots in the broken yarn. She was like a child in some aunt’s yard, clumsy, willing, slow, engrossed, her tongue between her teeth, eager to be praised, and quite content to be ignored. But soon the intimacy of weaving, of sitting side by side on the woven fabric as the mat progressed and lengthened, to help maintain the loom in tension, turned the women into twins. A muttered conversation started. Their shoulders and their fingers touched. Their knees collided on the wool. They talked about their lives, about their marriages, and Marta wept – sad for herself and sad for Miri – on the day that Miri asked how many children she had got at home. Not one.

  They shared a bowl of water when they washed. Behind the curtain, Marta let all her clothes drop to her waist and took her underlinen off, while Miri brought a dampened cloth for her to wipe herself, and a head of lavender to make the water sweet. Then Miri matched her nakedness, though less majestically, and washed. She let Marta put her fingers on her stomach and feel for heels and heartbeats. Once they heard the curtain drop. It was still swaying when they’d pulled their clothes back on. They knew that Musa had been watching them. But still they laughed. These were the fullest forty days they’d ever lived.

  Late in the afternoon, the men arrived and readied Musa for his daily walk. They left Miri preparing bread behind the tent, and went off through the falling scrub to look for signs of Gally. A path was worn where there had never been a path, between the caves, the tent, the precipice. Musa with the curling stuff. Aphas with a bending stick he’d made from sapbush. Shim, safely at a distance, lost—or hiding—in his meditations. The badu, following and leading, low-shouldered, like a herding dog. And Marta last.

  Again there was no sign of anyone in the cave. No healer waved at them. No Galilean shouted out for food. There were just shades and shapes. The rocks were shivering.

  Aphas could hardly breathe, he was so disappointed. His lungs felt squeezed. ‘I’m not a very devout man,’ he said, when it was almost time to leave. ‘If I’d prayed more, and bathed and followed rules, observed the sabbath better, I might’ve not got ill. Who knows? I might’ve not got this.’ He touched his bulging liver, and gasped several times. The constant pain was wearying. It took him to the edge of tears. ‘But this is what I feel when I am here. This air is … sweet … There is someone.’

  Aphas could not stop himself from weeping now. His illness and his imagined eloquence were more than he could bear. His voice was smothered by his sobbing. He was recalling Musa’s words, how Shim’s very stupid boy had pressed his holy fingers on Musa’s face, and said, I will not let you take this man from us. How he had plucked the fever out; how he might pluck the cancer out of Aphas as easily as he could pluck the stone out of an olive and toss it to the ground. Those were the very words, more powerful than scripture. ‘I did see someone move,’ he said at last. ‘Forgive my tears.’

  ‘Someone, perhaps. A shepherd …’ said Shim.

  ‘Why not a holy man?’

  Shim would not allow that possibility. He spoke from personal experience. He’d seen holy monks several times before, he explained. He’d sat with them, in temples to the north, in Greece, in other caves. He’d seen a prophet once. He’d been with men who knew their scriptures off by heart, and others who could discern the future of the world from studying the stars. All of them looked wise and old, as dry and silvery as weathered timber. Enlightenment took time. Their beards were long and grey; their skins were lined like parchment scrolls. There was a light around them, not like light from a fire, but cold and pious, coming off their skin like phosphorescence on a fish. Such a light was the mark of holiness and such a light, people said, could heal. It was a light he hoped to earn himself. It wasn’t easy to acquire without long years of seeking it, far from the comforts and distractions of the world. It wasn’t given after forty days. It wasn’t squandered (on the likes of Musa). It wasn’t found in shepherd boys. ‘It does not climb down cliffs to hunt for eggs,’ he said. ‘You mentioned shapes and shadows when you saw something in that cave, but you did not notice any light, I think.’ He closed his eyes. He concentrated on the light to come. ‘Don’t give up hope.’ He meant that Aphas ought to hope that Shim would soon begin to glow.

  ‘I do hope,’ Aphas said. ‘What else is there for me but hope, and prayer? We ought to pray. As loudly as we can. Then he’ll come. He’ll come to join the prayers, if he’s a holy man.’

  It was not easy to kneel in prayer on that rough, sloping ground. Marta felt she ought to help the old man, but once she had, Musa demanded help as well. She had to hold him by his wrists, and take his weight while he sat down, and then she had t
o pull him forwards on his knees. He held on to her hands too long. His nostrils flared when she got close to him, as if she were a meal. They rocked in prayer until there was hardly any light remaining in the sky. They asked for cures, fortunes, changes in their lives. But still there was no sign of Gally.

  ‘He’s gone for good,’ said Shim. ‘I told you so.’ But Musa, Marta and Aphas would not hear of it. Musa pushed his borrowed staff into Shim’s back. A warning to stay quiet. It left a puckered indent in his clothes. They watched for tremors in the darkness of the cave. They heard odd sounds, thin evidence of hope. It seemed, as well, that there were marks of movement that looked like lettering on the sloping rock in front of the key-hole entrance. Some stones had been displaced since their last visit. Perhaps by birds. Perhaps by someone sitting on the rock.

  ‘He’s there,’ said Musa, almost the first words that he’d spoken since they’d left the tent. ‘I’m sure of it. And we must tempt him out. A hundred prayers won’t do the job. He isn’t short of prayers. He has his own supply. But he needs food and drink or else he’ll die.’ The next time that they came, he said, they’d bring some dates and bread, and water in a bag. ‘We can tie them to some yarn and lower them on to the rock. He’ll show his face for that. If he’s a man.’

  The pilgrims pulled each other to their feet and stood on the promontory for one last view of the cave, like mourners, their shadows dropping out of sight. No movement on the precipice. There was no one to look at but themselves. Then not even themselves, because the light betrayed them. They had to scramble back to safer ground up slopes which had no shape or colour, through scrub which still was waiting for its moon. Meanwhile, elsewhere, in candlelight, the purple and the orange wools embraced.

  18

  Jesus wanted to believe that a flapping pigeon had landed in the canker thorn above his cave. Some proper company at last, out of the ark. Grey feathers and red earth, black wood. He was familiar with pigeons. They roosted underneath the beams of his father’s workshop, and lived off garden scraps and chicken feed. He knew their sounds, especially the alarm of their wings if they got trapped by cats or caught in the twig nets put down to protect the beans and peppers in the family patch. Then he’d be the first to run outside and set them free. God’s work.

  From the noises that he heard, he judged his visitor to be a single bird, caged by the thorn. He recognized the sharp and frightened chirps it made, the heedless way it shook and banged its wings. Come down, he whispered to himself. He hardly had the voice or faith to call out loud. He longed to press its feathers to his face. That’s what the fast had done to him. He no longer prayed for god to come. He’d settle for the bird.

  His pigeon dislodged a cloud of dry marl, which floated at the cave entrance, making speckled columns of the sloping sunlight, making temples of the air. His pigeon knocked off some of the thorn’s few silver leaves. The tree was shedding sins at Jesus’s feet. He could have put his arms out into the sun and caught a leaf if he’d had the strength and could have stopped the trembling in his hands. As it was, he did not move at all. He let the leaves make their pattern on the ground, uninterrupted. He only watched and counted them, telling fortunes from the way they fell. It would be bad luck if any leaf was touched or covered by another. And then – when bad luck was heaped up on the ground – he would outlive the fast, escape the scrub, only if the falling leaves exceeded forty. Or, every leaf was one more year of life. In that hard light, with his poor eyes, the piles of leaves looked like a hoard of silver jewellery.

  Soon there were leaves enough for Jesus to escape the scrub and live another sixty years. All he wanted now was for the pigeon to come. It was bound to be a bird from home, he told himself, a grateful pigeon sent from the Galilee to be his witness. He sat in darkness, his ankles crossed, just his toes amputated by the hard edge of the sun, and listened to the frantic beating of its wings. He waited for the pigeon to liberate itself, and fly down with its narcotic ookuroos to hunt for chaff at his feet. There was no chaff.

  Jesus rubbed his knuckles in his eyes, he pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping to clear his sight. The entrance to the cave appeared hard and sharp, a jagged pyramid of light, but anything beyond was out of focus. His eyes had weakened in the gloom, and one was watery and blurred from an infection. The tears drained from his sinuses into his throat; that was the moisture he had drunk for thirteen days. His tongue was dry and stiff and silvery, a thorn leaf in his mouth, a mouth stuffed full of sin. The only sounds that he could make himself were little more than ookuroos. He and his pigeon were cousins, then, tongue-tied, inconsequential in the scrub, and insubstantial to themselves. They were soft creatures, naked, dislocated and afraid, and tired beyond the boundaries of sleep.

  Jesus did sleep, though, or fainted. When he woke, the pigeon had grown larger and more threatening. There were no chirps or beating wings. What he’d mistaken as a bird now struggled with the thorn too heavily to be so small and feathery. It tugged and tore too madly at the branches. The sheer cliff-face above his head, where surely nothing larger than a single bird or bush could find any purchase, seemed to be making noises fit for a rock cat or a wolf. Bigger pieces of the marl began to fall, and cover the jewellery. The leaves seemed curses now. Sixty years in hell.

  Jesus was not too tired or ill-nourished to be afraid. He closed his eyes, squeezed the bridge of his nose again, and concentrated. His hearing was still as sharp as reeds. He heard the bush grieving for its last few leaves, the crumbling marl, the tetchy bluster of the valley wind, his own uncushioned heart-beats. At last and in the distance, high and thin, coming from the naked air above the precipice, there was the turbulence of agitated men. Another flying donkey then?

  A branch snapped loose and fell on to the sloping rock in front of the cave. Then a small leather bag, much reddened by the marl and snagged by the canker thorn in which it had become entangled, dropped into view. It hung on a plaited wool rope in front of the key-hole opening at knee-height from the ground, and swung from side to side, its weathered leather chirping sharply – a cowering pigeon, indeed – until it lost momentum and only swayed when it was tugged from above.

  Jesus did not even sway. He put a finger in each ear and pressed his palms into his eyes. He would be deaf and blind. But he could not shut out the world for long. He had no doubt what sound would be the next, a voice too high and reedy to be a normal man’s. No soothing ookuroos. He’d heard and feared that voice a dozen times before, because each evening of the fast the fever-giant he’d left for dead in his black tent with its bat wings had come on to the rocky promontory a little to his right to tempt him from his quarantine. He shouted out his messages in short and breathless bursts, like some trinket salesman, as if long phrases would not have the wings to fly between the promontory and Jesus’s cave. ‘Come out, Gally. Let’s see your face … My name is Musa. I’m your cousin. And your friend.’ No answer? Then, ‘I’ll make you rich …’ At other times, ‘At least put up. Your hands. To pray for us. You can’t refuse. This woman’s barren, see? This uncle’s dying. From a canker. A canker in his ribs. These other two. Have been possessed. The one. Won’t speak. The other one. Can’t shut up. Come. Up to the tent. You are. You are the healer. Come up. And heal.’

  Jesus concentrated on the leather bag, and waited for the voice to start again. He could imagine Musa and his retinue — the blond, the tall woman and the limping man, the cat-like madcap with the hennaed hair – now inventing their beguilements in the company of serpents and hyenas on the summit of the precipice. He could imagine them with wings like vultures, and with yellow eyes. When they had lured him into their tent, amongst the fingered cushions and the seeing lamps, they’d rub their sins against him, flesh on flesh, and defile him with their food — their mildew and their carrion, their sabbath fish, their cups of blood, their geckos and their pigs.

  It might have been wise, if Jesus wanted any peace of mind, to impose upon himself the cheerful, undemanding view of radicals and city Greeks,
that the devil was simply an excuse; someone to justify a person’s own shortcomings, someone to take the blame. It was their creed that devils had no place on earth, that evil was not a living creature in the world. There was no one to blame other than oneself There was just good luck and bad, god’s rules observed and broken, the clumsy juggling of happiness and guilt. And death of course, but death without a reckoning, and death without eternity. If Jesus could persuade himself of that, then how much more comfortable his quarantine would be. The leather bag would be nothing more than an irritation, and the big man on the precipice would be no angel out of hell. His shouted words would only be another earthly test of Jesus’s patience, simple to combat, safe to ignore.

  Jesus, though, was young and inexperienced. His life so far had been unGreek. It was cheerless and demanding. Death was still far enough away — and too improbable – for him to want to believe that there might be no reckoning. He was, besides, a villager, too direct and untutored to take much comfort from abstract notions that life was finite or that the devil was not flesh and blood. For him – although he could not put the words to it – the living devil was just as real as god. Indeed, the devil was the living proof of god, for everything that god had made was weak and blemished and imperfect by design. God’s pot had cracked inside the kiln, so that his sons and daughters could by their labours and their prayers restore perfection to the pot. The devil occupied the crack, and lay in wait like a thief. God put him there. To deny the presence of the devil was to turn against the perfect blemishes of god.

  So Jesus was in little doubt that, should the devil choose, he could easily appear as Musa on the precipice. He could produce a thousand leather bags. He could invade his soul and jostle for a perch inside his heart as truly and as tangibly as a raiding jackdaw could invade an open nest and jostle out its chirping innocents with its black wings. That was the drama and the cruel romance of Jesus’s theology. That’s why he clung so greedily to god. This was not the Galilee, with its flax fields and walnut groves and rain, its cousins and its fig-shaded yards. He only had to stare out of his cave to know for sure. The evidence was large. This was the devil’s kingdom. Hot winds. Hard rocks. Dry leaves. A barren universe, and death disguised.