Quarantine

by Jim Crace

  ‘You can’t bury him in the water that we drink,’ persisted Shim.

  ‘Whose land is this? Go somewhere else for water. Go down to Jericho and drink your fill. There’s an empty cave below that you can have for free, if you’re not frightened of those birds. Climb down. Do what you want. But this man has a grave already dug for him.’

  Shim and the badu carried Jesus to the tent and rested there while Miri gathered extra water-skins to fill before they used the cistern. She found some food for them to eat as well, and some blanket cloths. Everyone would have to spend the night in caves. The tent was useless now.

  They took the body through the pans of mud and up the scarp, with Musa, Miri and Aphas following as mourners. They should have put a flower on the Gally’s lips, but there were none left standing. They had to make do with some blackened poppy petals. And then they put the body in the same cave that Musa had used the night before, for safe keeping, until everything was ready for his burial. They blocked off the entrance with uprooted thorns, and lit a fire close by to keep the flies away. The wood was damp; its smoke was black, then purple-grey, the proper colour for a funeral.

  ‘Where’s Marta?’ Miri asked.

  27

  ‘You’d better make a sacrifice to speed the Gally on his way,’ said Musa.

  Shim and Aphas nodded warily. Their landlord was being uncharacteristically comradely with them; anything to hold their attention and keep their minds off his wife. They could hear Miri searching in the rock falls beyond the caves, calling ‘Marta, Marta,’ with rising desperation in her cries. But Musa raised his own voice to drown hers out. He did not want the men to help Miri. If one of them found Marta alive, sobbing and bruised, what might he ask her? What might she reply?

  It would suit Musa if he never saw the woman again. He was angry with her. She had not been sensible. If she’d had any brains she would have packed her few belongings and set off home already, saving trouble and embarrassment for everyone. But Miri had searched inside the cave and Marta’s clothes were still there. A woman would not leave without her spare clothes. So she was either hiding in the scrub, or something bad had happened to her. Something fatal, Musa hoped. She brought these problems on herself. If she were dead, they’d have to hold a double burial, the Gally and the woman in one grave. She could be a handmaiden for Jesus for eternity. An honour, actually. Too good for her. But if she were still alive, then the very sight of her would spoil the Gally’s funeral. Musa wanted to despatch the healer with proper, blameless piety. He did not want his little sins to stand as mourners at his side.

  ‘You cannot send him to his maker without a sacrifice,’ said Musa, breaking his own silence. ‘Come on, come on. What will you do for him?’

  ‘What kind of sacrifice?’ asked Shim. Was this to be a sacrifice of principle or dignity or money? He was running short, although he still had some coins hidden in his cloak, and didn’t want to part with any.

  ‘What do these people sacrifice? Their daughters, probably. Some animal, then. We have to spill a little blood for the man, to wet our funeral prayers. That’s how it’s done in the Galilee. They take an ox and slit its throat.’

  ‘Regrettably, I cannot lead you to an ox,’ said Shim, much relieved. ‘I haven’t noticed any oxen hereabouts …’

  ‘There are your goats,’ said Aphas helpfully. ‘Kill one. It would be generous.’

  ‘Wasteful, too,’ said Musa. ‘And only generous for me. What would be your part in it?’ He would not agree to sacrificing merchandise, not even for the Gally. Goats provided milk and meat and fuel and skin. Killing one without a proper purpose would be a four-fold waste. ‘Send him,’ he lifted his chin towards the badu. ‘He’s the hunter, isn’t he? He’s already poached enough birds and deer from off my land. Send him to catch something for us. I think I can afford him that.’

  Musa threw a stone at the badu to draw his attention. ‘Explain what we want,’ he said to Aphas. ‘He’s used to you.’ He watched the old man mime the catching and the slaughter of an animal. The badu did not seem to understand. He grinned and shook his head, until Musa took his ornamental knife out of its cloth and made a motion with its blade across his throat, followed by the hand-sign for a prayer. Then the badu nodded. ‘See, he’s not as stupid as he looks,’ said Musa. ‘How could he be?’

  The badu hurried off towards the valley. He’d almost understood. He was to catch a bird for Jesus. The smallest funeral offering. He had mistaken Musa’s praying hand-sign to be a bird, the fingers pressed together like closed wings, the thumbs protruding like a little head. The badu knew exactly what to do. Catching birds was easy. He’d been doing it for years.

  He ran down to the tent and hunted through the goatskins until he found Miri’s cooking chest. He popped a little cube of hard salt between his lips, and unravelled a fraying length of green cotton thread from one of Musa’s ruined samples. He wrapped the thread around his finger and tiptoed amongst the goats, which had been let loose to graze on the tattered fabrics and any food that they could find. To anyone that watched it would seem that he was whispering in their ears, more evidence of lunacy. A madman speaking to the goats. What did he want with them? To tether them with his thin thread? To strangle one of the goats for Jesus, perhaps?

  The badu searched the goats until he found one with a bloodfilled tick in the skin folds of an ear. Easy to see, but not so easy to get out. Some smoke, blown from a burning stick, would usually make a tick detach itself. But the badu hadn’t any smoke. Instead he took the now softened cube of salt out of his mouth. He crumbled it into the goat’s ear and rubbed it into the skin. Salt was better than smoke for catching ticks. A goat with a burning ear would not stay still. The tick, however, hated salt. It contracted, darkened, and fell into the badu’s palm. That was the easy part.

  The hard part was to tie the thread around the tick’s abdomen without popping its blood sac, and without the tick attaching itself to the badu’s finger. But he was practised. He had harnessed hundreds of ticks since he was small. He could have pulled a chariot with them.

  The badu took the fastened tick into the nearest stand of thorns. What little rain there’d been in the night had tempted last year’s seeds to hazard their first green shoots. Insects, tempted by the moisture and the exposed sap of wind-snapped branches, competed for a meal. So did the birds. Finches, wheatears, warblers had come from nowhere to gorge themselves. And there were circling hawks, of course, waiting for the plumpest opportunity.

  The badu put his tick on an exposed flat rock amongst the bushes, a little grape of blood, and weighed the thread down with a stone, a finger-length from the tick. It could not wiggle away, out of the unforgiving light. It couldn’t even fall very far, but it had just freedom enough to advertise itself with its struggles. It didn’t like the thread around its abdomen; it didn’t like the sun. The badu backed away, downwind, running the remainder of the thread through his fingers, until he found a hiding place behind a bush where he could not be seen but from where the twisting tick was visible. Now he would fish himself a bird.

  He was an expert at keeping still, though anyone who’d seen him in the past thirty days, running in the rocks, tugging his hair and hands unceasingly, would have been amazed that one so plagued by movement and loose limbs could be so quiet and patient when it suited him. Perhaps the truth was this: he was a madman only when observed, the cussed opposite of those who conspired to be rational in company and cultivate their manias alone. The badu, without any witnesses to click their tongues at him and shake their heads, appeared entirely sane. He crouched beneath a thorn bush in the scrub, a blood tick offered on a thread to passing birds. And he was happy, too. He had his plans. He’d do his duty to the Gally who had died, and then he’d make a rich man of himself.

  It wasn’t long before a banded wheatear came, a male, on its way north to breed. For all its mating splendour, its damask eye plumes and its black flights, it was tired from its long journey, and glad to have such easy and nou
rishing prey. The trick, it knew, was not to peck the tick. The bulb of blood would burst. Instead, the wheatear turned its head and took the tick whole. It lifted up its head to let the feast fall into its crop.

  The trick for the badu was to wait. If he pulled on the thread too soon, before the wheatear’s throat had ended its spasm of swallowing, the tick would pop out of its mouth again, without the blood. If he pulled on the thread too late, the wheatear’s flight might be strong enough to snap the cotton. The badu waited until the wheatear spread its wings, two beats, and then he jerked the thread. The wheatear tumbled in the air, and fell on to its back. The badu was already there. The bird was his. Not quite the perfect sacrifice, of course. Not quite as generous as a goat, not quite as heavy as an ox. But better than no sacrifice at all.

  The badu only broke one wing so that the wheatear could not fly away. He held it, quivering, in both hands. It didn’t peck at him for long. Only its trembling chest showed that it was still alive. He snapped the thread off at its beak and carried the bird to the men, waiting at the grave. They were disappointed. They had hoped that he would catch a little deer at least.

  ‘If that’s the best that this mean land will offer us, then damn it and so be it,’ Musa said. ‘We’ll make do.’

  ‘This is, undoubtedly, the meanest place I’ve ever seen,’ said Shim, with feeling, kicking at the stones and waving his hands around at all the unrewarding wilderness, the unremitting sun, the unrelenting landlord. He was already persuading himself that it was time to leave.

  It was not fair of them to blame the scrub for being stingy with everything except for space and light and stone. Even if it had not displayed much magnanimity towards the men, it had, at least, been generous to Miri. It had not maddened her or lamed her, yet. It had not made her ill or thin. In fact, she was the only one of them to put on any weight during the thirty days. It had allowed her to complete her birth-mat; there’d been delights in that, despite the wools. And, in the night, it had even conspired with the wind to free her from the family tent. An act of charity.

  But Miri was exceptional. She had bewitched the scrub on her first day. They were equals in their plainness and their endurance. Usually it was a less forgiving, more dogmatic host, despising doubt and mocking faith at once, and favouring the predatory, whatever their beliefs. It was even-handed in its cruelties. It did not normally discriminate between the donkey and the mule. It did not prefer the vulture to the crow. It did not favour hennaed hair over blond. It did not hang its trees with food or fill its hollows up with drink to make life easy for its guests. The scrub required its passengers to take care of themselves or go without. The scrub was economical, as well, like some old man, and boundless in its barrenness and poverty. Its air was thin; its earth was pale; its weeds were frayed; its moods were fractious and despairing.

  But there was also something rich, at times, about the scrub, despite itself. Something sustaining, unselfish, fertile even. Perhaps this was because it made no claims. It did not promise anything, except, maybe, to replicate through its array of absences the body’s inner solitude and to free its tenants and its guests from their addictions and their vanities. The empty lands – these very caves, these paths, these desert pavements made of rock, these pebbled flats, these badlands, and these unwatered river beds – were siblings to the empty spaces in the heart. Why else would scrubs have any holy visitors at all? Ten thousand quarantiners had come to these parched hills and passed their days, some delirious with illness; others feverish with god, and guilt and lunacy, unravelled from themselves by visions of a better and eternal world; the rest made mad by fasting. Yet, at the end of their forty days, the scrub sent all of them away enriched and dryly irrigated. Even Aphas. Even Shim.

  But the chosen one or two, the very few, were rewarded for their quarantines with sacred revelations. The scrub allowed them up its steep and narrow tracks, and through the softened silhouettes of hills, to their attending gods. And there it stretched its grey horizons to reveal what far--off armies were approaching with their spangling phalanxes of spears, what distant kings and preachers came with gifts and prophecies, how slow and never-ceasing was the world. And there it gave its voyagers their glimpse of paradise.

  Jesus had achieved these sacred fields and seen horizons on horizons without end. He was still there.

  And Musa, too. Yes, even Musa – especially, Musa – had had his glimpse of paradise and felt the fingers of his preacher king. He would not go back with nothing to declare. The scrub would not return him empty-handed to his market-places. What greater generosity than that?

  28

  Miri was not interested in visions or prophecies, or in a god. She’d never called on him for help, not even in the fist of the storm when her mother’s loom was breaking into pieces. But she was praying now for Marta. She ran from cave to cave, and then from bush to bush, in a panic, yelling for the woman, anticipating all the joys of finding her, yet fearful that Marta was already dead. She’d seen the death or something just as bad in Musa’s eyes.

  It was a barking fox that finally led her to Marta’s hiding place. Something tasty must have tempted it to show itself in daylight. Some easy carrion. Miri feared the worst. But it was only following the spots of watery blood which Marta had spat out as she ran for safety in the rocks when she’d seen Musa and the line of mourners climbing to the caves.

  Miri pulled her, trembling and limping, into the sunlight. Her clothes were torn. Her wrists were bruised. Her lower lip was split and swollen on one side, still bleeding. She had to brush away the flies. That was an injury that Miri recognized. She’d had a mouth like that herself. She still had the scar. Musa liked to grip her lips between his teeth.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  Marta hadn’t got the courage to speak.

  ‘It’s Musa, isn’t it?’.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Who then? There’s no one else … I know it’s him. It’s him!’ Miri punched her hands together. ‘That man’s made fools of everyone. Again! He wasn’t even ill. All lies. He’ll bring the heavens down on all of us …’

  ‘No … I fell.’

  ‘Musa must have pushed you then. Look what he’s done.’

  ‘It was the wind …’

  ‘The wind? How could the wind do that to you?’

  ‘Threw stones and bits of stick at me. I fell …’

  ‘It’s him.’

  ‘No. Don’t make me say.’

  ‘Listen, Marta. Give me your hand. Just say you didn’t fall. Be brave. Tell me. I know my husband, what he can do. He leaves his thumbprint everywhere.’

  ‘He doesn’t know I’m here? Don’t let him come.’

  ‘It’s over now. He’s finished with you now. Just tell me what the demon’s done.’

  ‘Can’t tell. There’s nothing left to tell …’ She was sobbing, pushing Miri away yet still holding tightly to her wrists. Her face was dry. No tears. ‘Don’t make me say.’

  Miri put a finger on the uninjured side of Marta’s mouth. Miri’s cheeks were wet with tears. ‘Don’t say. I know what he can do. You haven’t got to say. Don’t say.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘You can’t stay here. You have to come back to the caves …’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You must. You’re safer there. There’s five of us, and only him. I’ll take good care of you. He’ll stay away, I know. What can he do to you with us around? He’s frightened of you now.

  ‘I’m scared … to go.’

  ‘Come on. I need your help. The Gally’s dead. You saw the body they were carrying?’

  Now Marta could not stop the tears. ‘The Gally’s dead?’

  ‘We’ve got to bury him. Come on. Be brave.’

  Marta did as she was told. She followed Miri. Held on to her arm. Entwined her fingers into hers until they reached the caves. She’d find an opportunity to tell her sister what the wind had really done.

  Musa did not even look at them.
He sat in conversation with the men, facing across the valley, with no expression on his face, his fat neck creased, a stack of twenty grimaces. He called to Miri only once, without turning to face her. ‘We’re waiting.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For you to get the Gally ready for the burial.’

  Preparing bodies was women’s work, in his opinion. The men could sit and pray, while Miri and Marta – glad to be busy and out of sight – gathered the leaves and bark of trees to make their shrouding ointments. They picked morning star and hyssop, dill pods, and the yellow spices from solanum stems to perfume the body. Then they pulled back the smouldering fire and thorns, lit cups of candle-fat, and took refuge inside the smoky cave with Jesus.

  They stood hand in hand in the ducking candlelight and the plumes of clearing smoke looking at the wrapped body, uncertain where to start. Only his hands and feet were visible, and so they cleaned them first with water taken from his grave. His skin was cold and dry. Despite the broken nails, the blisters and the sores, his hands and feet were still beautiful, as polished and unyielding as sculpted wood. The fast had thinned and lengthened his toes and fingers, so that the bones and joints were round and ripe like nuts in pods. The women unwrapped him from his curtain, removed the poppy petals from his eyes, and stood back to let the candles light his face. Marta gasped. She touched the Gally’s cheeks and lips, and shook her head. She was almost smiling, for the first time that day.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Miri. ‘Are you all right? Sit down. I’ll do it by myself.’

  ‘No, let me help. I want to help.’ Marta touched his cheeks again. ‘I’m not afraid of him. He’s only skin and bone.’

  The women covered Jesus’s face with a cloth, to protect his mouth against the devil and to protect themselves from the dangers of looking a dead man in the eye for too long. That was the superstition, ‘Dead eyes looking, Bad luck cooking.’ But neither of them felt ill at ease with Jesus. Nor did they feel much reverence for him. His body was too damaged and degraded. Only his feet and hands had caused any wonder. The rest had been more cruelly treated by the fast and was not beautiful. But touching him was not distasteful. It felt more like a blessing than a chore. They’d have good luck, not bad. Miri and Marta did not talk while they were preparing Jesus. Their task was far too solemn and distressing. He was so young and disfigured. But they were glad they could at least share and halve the task with each other. They washed his body, wiped away the dried blood, the film of dust and ash, and cleaned his eyes and mouth and loins. They shut his eyes and pulled his lips over his teeth as best they could. His gums were so badly swollen that his mouth would not close. His grin was wide and mirthless. They anointed him with the herbs and ointments they’d collected, and burnt the seeds for incense in the candle cups. Finally they bandaged his feet and hands, and wrapped him in the curtain once again. They’d done as much as any woman could. Now it was men’s work to carry him down to the cistern, and bury him. No woman should come near the grave. Miri and Marta stayed inside the cave, watching candle flames while Jesus was interred.