No Lasting Burial

by Stant Litore

  The priest worked his mouth a moment, to get enough spit to speak clearly. He looked to his sons’ gaunt faces. “Where are Yonah and Rahel? And their boy?”

  “We haven’t seen them, father,” Yakob said.

  Zebadyah squeezed his eyes shut. If they were not here …

  He forced his head up, looked around at the refugees of their town. More than forty lay on the clothes and blankets that had been tossed across the synagogue’s stone floor for bedding, some of them shaking, some of them still. Some with horrible wounds, and their kin huddled over them, praying or giving them water or pressing wool against their limbs or their bellies to staunch the bleeding. Feverish faces in the candlelight—all these men and women waiting for death and for what nightmare might come after. A few of the unbitten stood solitary or sat against the wall, their heads down. None of them would ever sleep well again, ever trust the night again or the strength of their doors. A few looked his way, but Zebadyah lowered his eyes. He had hidden during the night while they suffered. He hadn’t known the dead would come. He had hidden from the living. The Romans. But he hadn’t been here—that was the accusation he believed he’d see if he faced them. He hadn’t been here. He, their priest.

  He realized Yakob was speaking to him. Perhaps had been for a while. His son’s words rushed toward him from some distance like a flash flood down a river channel.

  “—never got in the synagogue. It was Bar Nahemyah, father. He held the door against them during the night, and the corpses piled about his feet.”

  He glanced up at his son, whose face was drawn. He tried to understand. Bar Nahemyah—but he was only a youth, hardly older than Yohanna.

  “Then he took some of the others and left. Yohanna and I stayed because people started bringing their wounded here, and they needed water and help.”

  “Have to find them,” Zebadyah muttered, rising to his feet.

  Yakob caught his arm to steady him, but he shrugged away his son’s grip and the look he turned on his son must have been grim and desperate and near madness, for Yakob stepped back quickly.

  “The old altar,” Zebadyah rasped. “Past the grain caches, between the tanner’s house and the ruin of the old wall. That one. Burn an olah there, while I find Yonah.”

  “We have no goats, no doves, father,” Yakob said hesitantly. The altar hadn’t been used since the days of the Makkaba; instead, Zebadyah went to Yerushalayim once a year to atone for the sins of the town, buying a goat to sacrifice from the market in the great city.

  He muttered, “Perhaps God will accept a few fish. This one time.”

  He bent quickly to grip Yesse’s shoulder and whisper, “My sons will look after you.” Breathing raggedly, Yesse didn’t open his eyes, and after a few beats of his heart Zebadyah left him and staggered toward the door of the synagogue.

  He stumbled on through the death-reek of the town, seeking his brother Yonah. He stepped through the broken doors of houses and peered into emptied, unlit rooms with bloodstained walls. At the door of one house he heard low growls and he ducked away quickly, shaking.

  He even strode out among the legionaries’ tents beyond the north end of the town, but searching there he found at first only dead Romans and dead women and corpses whose heads had been split by Roman blades. Too many of the bodies were known to him. He saw Asher lying dead across the body of his wife, where he had perhaps died defending her from either the living or the dead. He saw Nahemyah’s two sisters, their bellies torn open, entrails spilled messily about them where the dead had feasted. Their eyes glassy with death. But Zebadyah noticed one of the women’s fingers twitching. He gasped and hurried by.

  Nowhere did he see Yonah, or Yonah’s wife or his son. Yet it was unthinkable to him that Yonah had perished. Yonah the iron-hearted, Yonah the furious. He recalled the rage in his brother’s eyes that autumn as he cast the tax collector the Romans had sent into a house at the edge of town, a house empty except for the corpse that had wandered inside and been trapped. The man had shrieked and pounded on the door from the dark interior, and Yonah had not flinched, though Zebadyah’s own palms had gone slick with sweat. He tried to remember that tax collector’s name, and in a moment it came to him: Matityahu, a Hebrew from the Greek city of Many Birds to the west.

  Reaching the end of the Roman tents and finding still no sign of his kin, Zebadyah glanced back and was struck to the heart by the sight of his smoking town and the shore and the wide, wide sea. For a moment he couldn’t breathe. When he was a boy, he used to stand on this shore beside his father, near this very place, once a week, welcoming the Sabbath Bride with song, with shouting and praise and the slapping of his hands against his thighs. The Bride would tread lightly over the water with the dusk from the eastern shore, hurrying toward them from God’s house in the heavens to bring rest to God’s People.

  When he was a boy.

  Now beside the beauty of the waves his town lay crumbled and reduced to charred stone, like a withered old corpse seated beside a lovely woman, a woman who has not yet consented to bury him, though she can no longer feed him bread or fish.

  Zebadyah closed his eyes and pressed a fist to his breast, as though he must hold in the anguish or it would burst him open. “What evil have we done, O God?” he moaned. “How have we broken your Law?” His voice gathered strength, as it had so many times as he prayed on the synagogue steps. “Lord and judge of the earth, for what do we stand judged? Was it our violence against Matityahu, who was Hebrew as we are? Was it that we took goods from the heathen traders, the pig-eaters, that we defiled our town? Was it for the Grief of Ezra? For what, Adonai?” He sank to his knees, the hard earth. “Why? Why have you made a wasteland of us?”

  At that moment he heard a cry. A hoarse voice, a small voice, a child’s, calling out for help. Zebadyah opened his eyes and looked to the tents.

  There it was again.

  Staggering to his feet, the priest followed the sound. After a moment, he stopped, called out: “Where are you?”

  The cry that answered was inarticulate and without words, but it led Zebadyah to a great tent crimson as the insides of the eaten. The centurion’s tent. It was cut open on one side, doubtless by the slash of the centurion’s sword as he made his escape from the dead lurching through the tent’s door.

  Inside, Zebadyah found a corpse with a cloven head and heard gasping breath from beneath the centurion’s overturned desk, a heavy thing of no wood the priest could recognize, one of those ostentations the Roman military brought with them on their galleys from other shores across the world.

  Pinned beneath the desk was a boy of eight years, his eyes glassy in a gray face. Zebadyah knew the child, for he had circumcised him and given him the name his father Cheleph had chosen for him: Yakob, a name Zebadyah’s own eldest son shared. But Zebadyah had not seen the boy’s parents at the synagogue.

  “Yakob,” he breathed. He bent quickly to feel for the boy’s pulse. It was fast but steady. “Oh, Yakob.”

  The boy’s gaze wandered a moment, then met his.

  Zebadyah felt weary as the land itself. “I am going to get you out of here.” He drew in a quick breath and got his hands under the edge of the desk and pulled, prying it off the boy. It was much heavier than he’d expected. He strained against it, gasped a prayer, heaved again. A surge of strength surprised him; it had been years since he had set his hand to an oar or heaved up a net from the clinging water. But he would not leave this boy to die in a heathen tent. The boy made no move to wriggle out as Zebadyah raised the desk, but the priest pulled at it until he had the desk high enough to thrust it to the side with his hip and shove it away, thudding into the dirt.

  Breathing hard, he bent over the boy again. Yakob bar Cheleph was naked but for a thin night-tunic, and he had soiled his legs during the night, for his under-clothes were gone. With a bit of nausea, Zebadyah wondered suddenly if the boy had been raped by the centurion, and the desk thrown against him on purpose, in hopes that the dead would bend over it an
d feed on the boy while the Roman escaped. This had not happened, clearly; the corpses must have followed the centurion out. The desk had lain across the boy’s chest, and he was bruised there, badly. Running his fingers quickly over the boy’s chest, Zebadyah didn’t feel any ribs broken. Yet when he got his arms under the child and lifted him, the boy cried out and nearly fainted.

  “Father,” the boy gasped as Zebadyah regained his feet with the child in his arms, “father—”

  “He’s gone, boy,” Zebadyah said. His voice hoarse. “He’s gone.”

  The boy shook; even to be held must have been a torment, his body was so bruised. Zebadyah blinked, forbidding his tears, and held the boy gently to his chest. The boy’s eyes were glazed with pain and shock, the need in them louder in Zebadyah’s heart than the roar of his own shame. Zebadyah looked to the door of the tent, where a wind from the sea tugged at the canvas. At that moment, he made a vow, and he made it without sacrifice and without ritual. He made it as a man, not a priest—the first time he had ever approached the God of his fathers so nakedly. He vowed to raise the boy with his own two sons. Little could Zebadyah do to repair the shattered houses and shattered lives of his town—he had not even been there to protect his own father—but he could shelter this one small boy. Surely he could do that.

  THE GRIEF OF EZRA

  The dead must be buried: that was the one most important condition of their Covenant with God. Generations before, the Makkaba had left so many fallen in empty places in the hills with their eyes open to the sky. Furious to drive out both the Greeks and those Hebrews who wished to be like the Greeks, the Makkaba had rushed from battlefield to battlefield, striking hard like the hammer after which he was named, not pausing either for burial or for tending the wounded. Kfar Nahum had paid the price of that neglect of the Law during the night. Many of their people now were bitten and feverish. Those few still on their feet would invite no new disaster. By midmorning, Zebadyah led some forty of the survivors of Kfar Nahum in carrying the dead up the slope to the tombs. All the dead, not only those who were Hebrew.

  The tombs nearest the town were long since filled with their ancestors; farther up the hill were those of the living families, with some shelves occupied and some vacant and waiting. And highest on the hill, three new kokhim that had been dug in the past few years at Yonah bar Yesse’s request, in anticipation of good harvests from the sea and growth for Kfar Nahum. “Who is born, dies,” Yonah had said with a cold smile. “Will we have no houses waiting for them?”

  Zebadyah and the others brought the hastily shrouded dead to these new and empty kokhim and there they set the Hebrew corpses on shelves, and in heaps against the wall they lay the corpses of the legionaries, some of them still in their armor. Though most of the tombs stood open to the air, that God might look in and see the dead and sing them to restful, unwaking sleep, each of the caves holding these dead would be sealed behind a great stone. These dead, whether Hebrew or Roman, would lie forever in the dark.

  Zebadyah bent and took up a handful of dirt, dry and grainy, and rubbed it on his hands. He was grim. His father would live, but many down in the synagogue would not. And those who did—how would they live, after what had happened? Most of the town’s women were dead, because most of them had been forced to the Roman tents before the dead came, and the dead had reached the tents first.

  He glanced down the slope, found the winter-bared sycamore that stood by the entrance to his own family tomb. In it, his wife, taken by death while bearing his sixth child, the one who hadn’t lived. The girl. This morning he felt no pang, staring down at her tomb. Only dull relief. She had been spared the brutality of the Romans and the coming of the dead. She had been spared this day.

  Yakob bar Zebadyah stepped from one of the kokhim to get another body to bear within, saw where his father was looking, and walked over to stand beside him, his own face drawn with weariness and fear. He had left Yohanna in the synagogue tending Yesse and Bar Cheleph; of their kin, only he and his father were here on the hill.

  “She was a good woman,” Zebadyah said to him after a few moments. “She lived by the Law. Never a Greek garment in our house, never an uncleanness on her lips. I loved her.”

  They stood by each other, in silence.

  Not heeding the priest and his son, the other men worked quickly, carrying bodies into the hill. They shelved the dead, then hurried back out into the pale sun, not pausing even to chisel or scratch the words of Ezra into the stone beneath the burial shelves, as was usually done: For you God are holy and we who are flesh lie before you; who can stand before your face?

  A gust of wind across the hill, and Zebadyah stiffened against it, his lips closed tightly. Only when the wind died away did he speak. “God has withdrawn from us, Yakob.” He gestured at Kfar Nahum below them by the bleak sea. “Look at the town. Our houses are built like Greek houses. Look at the women grieving, look at their dresses. Look at the decorative designs along the hem, designs that are not Hebrew.” He thought of those he’d never see again, and of his brother, whose body he hadn’t found. His heart grew small and cold. “God has turned his face. We were unworthy of his protection. The Grief of Ezra, my son.”

  Yakob only looked at his father with eyes that had seen too much suffering in one night to know or care how that suffering might be interpreted. But Zebadyah bent over one of the bodies, gripping beneath its arms to lift it, his anguish violent in his breast.

  The Grief of Ezra.

  That was what their People called the words of Ezra the Scribe, who centuries past had led the People home over the desert from their captivity beneath the walls of Shushan and the other cities among the mountain forests and wide plains of the east. Returning to the holy land after long exile, they had found their fathers’ country ravaged by the hungry dead. They’d hastened to rebuild the long-crumbled wall about the great city, Yerushalayim, and those towers whose names their fathers had sung to them when they were young—names beautiful as the names of rivers: the tower of Meah, the tower of Chananel.

  Every man toiling at the stones kept his spear beside him, where he could grasp it quickly if the dead lurched out of the olives on the mountain and came at them. When the dead came, hissing in the dark, many men who sealed the gaps in the wall with their bodies and their spears died, torn apart by hands that were without warmth, devoured by bodies in which there beat no heart. And as darkness ate the sky or as dawn bled into the heavens above the eastern ridge, more dead would stumble down from the high olive groves. Always more dead.

  At sunset on the nineteenth day while the wall was still low and half-finished in some places, Ezra the Scribe stood before the People with his back to the stones and demanded of them that they stand and look out at the corpses. Our land that God gave to our fathers is defiled¸ he cried, and you can smell the reek of it. Yet after all the evil that our fathers did, God has delivered us, patient as a father, and given us back our city. Yet even this day we do not keep his Law. Many of you have taken heathen daughters to your beds, and dress in the clothing of the east, and burn gifts of berries or small fruit to the gods who are not ours. And now we may be devoured. And this day, this night, will we still fail our God, until he turns his back again and no remnant of our People remains on the earth, and there is never again a return home? For God is holy and we are flesh before him.

  Then Ezra gave his fatal command, that the strange wives must be cast outside the wall and given no home within the city. We must wall out what is unclean, he shouted. We must be clean and Hebrew again. Or this very night we will be eaten, and perish.

  Some of the men in the city refused, and some were slain. Ezra’s speech had filled those at the walls with fear—the men who had gazed night and day into the eyes of the dead, men who’d taken up their spears and fought for the wall with their lives. At Ezra’s word, many of these turned against their brothers in the city, tore their wives from their arms, and threw them over the low wall. Some of the women beat on the stones of the wall
and screamed the names of their husbands. Others ran in search of crevasses in the rock or shrubs under which they might hide from the corpses that already lurched toward them.

  While the dead ate, some of the men threw down their spears, set their backs to the wall, and covered their faces, shaking. Others toiled furiously at the stone and mortar, but did not look to the ground below. Ezra alone stood on the unfinished wall that night, watching by starlight and by the light of a torch he held as the screeching dead devoured the women. It was said afterward that he did not look away or blink or cover his ears against the screams and the cries for help. That he watched silently without tears as the women the men of his People had loved were caught and eaten, one after another, shrieking as they died.

  Only when dawn came and there were at last no screams but only the moaning of the shedim through the mouths of the old dead and the new dead—the heathen wives risen in hunger, with horrible wounds that did not bleed—only then did Ezra come down from the now-finished wall. As he walked through the streets of Yerushalayim, such was the horror in his face that any who looked on him fell stricken to the ground, and died.

  Ezra did not halt. Passing through the gates of their ancient city, he walked out alone into the wilderness above the Tumbling Water, speaking to no one. And he was never seen by the living again.

  That was how Yesse his father had told the story.

  Now, after the night of the dead, the Grief of Ezra held a new horror for Zebadyah.

  “We must wall out what is unclean,” he said quietly as he and his son carried another corpse into one of the crowded tombs. The reek was in their clothes now, in their hair. Though they both wore heavy fishing gloves and though the dead were shrouded to protect the living against any accidental touch, both men stank of rot. Zebadyah imagined that even if he were to swim in the sea, as the Greeks did, he would not be free of that smell. “We must wall out every heathen influence, every heathen word, every thing in our homes that was made by heathen hands and brought from outside, anything that may have tempted God to look away when the dead came last night. We must scrub every bit of rot from our doorsteps and our walls. We must bury and seal away these dead. We must be clean again. Until the navi comes. We must be Hebrew and faithful, so that God’s gaze will be drawn to us again. To bless us, not to curse us. God gives and God takes away.” He glanced at his son, whose face was pale with horror, and said, “Blessed be the name of our God.”