No Lasting Burial

by Stant Litore

  Rahel straightened, smoothed down her garments, grateful none of them were torn. She wanted to touch her face where it hurt and burned, but she did not. Her hands were shaking, and she clutched her skirt until they were still. She stood with dignity, and though her voice quivered, it was not weak. She faced the priest. “God will provide for my sons and for me, Bar Yesse.”

  He glanced back at her, his eyes full of so many things that he must have wanted to say and couldn’t. Then he looked at her son, and Shimon met the priest’s gaze with quiet resolve. It was as though a weathered old tree were facing a tall rock.

  The priest looked away first. “It is your house, Bar Yonah,” Zebadyah said quietly. His shoulders tensed. Then he stepped past him to the door, Yakob moving aside to let him past.

  Rahel’s heartbeat did not slow until the sound of the priest’s footsteps, and then his son’s after him, had faded in the street. Not until she held the baby in her arms, holding in tears that she would not shed where her son could see. Not until she felt the cool cloth against her cheek and Shimon’s words soft by her ear, promising that he would care for her and for his crippled brother both, whatever might come. That she would never be hungry. That she would never need to go to the priest if she didn’t wish it. That she was his mother and he loved her. And then she did cry, and it was a long time before she was done.

  FIRE ON THE WATER

  The stone steps leading to her roof were cold under her bare feet, but for once Rahel didn’t mind that; the shock of sensation each time she set her foot carefully down—so carefully, because she was sore, and carrying her child in her arms—reminded her she was alive.

  It was after dark now; the first panic of Zebadyah’s visit had dulled, to be replaced with a throng of small, sharp fears, each of them nipping at her like wolves harrying deer. She felt that each step might send her body crashing to her knees in fatigue, yet her mind was fiercely wakeful. In any case, she couldn’t bear finding a place to sleep in her open atrium or in the small winter rooms around the inner walls of her house. The house was too empty; the family they had once shared it with had not survived the night of the dead. Shimon had succeeded in scrubbing most of the blood out of the walls, but Rahel thought she could still smell it. And Shimon had also boarded up the outward-looking windows of their house, which made it worse. She understood why he had done it; many had died that night because the dead had climbed through open windows. Other houses throughout the town were boarding up, too. But in seasons past, she had often leaned out of those windows and talked with the town’s other women as they passed by. Now those other women were gone, no one left to sit shiva with her and mourn with her for her husband, and even her windows were gone. This no longer felt like her home.

  Only the rooftop felt the same.

  Reaching it, she stood still for a few moments, just breathing. The wind from the sea was chill against her face, but she didn’t fear the shedim. Let them come. What more could they take from her?

  She gazed out at that sea, where she could see the white chop of the waves and a few dark shapes rocking on them: the boats moving out to gather the night’s fish. They looked so few, so few. Only a week before, the boats had set out like a flock of great birds, fast over the water. Now she could count only ten. In one of them was her older son, setting out with Yakob and young Yohanna in his father’s boat, on the sea without him for the first time. Tears burned her eyes. She blinked them back and made her way to the little bed of cushions Yonah had made for her during the early months of her pregnancy, knowing how much she loved the open air and the sky and the scent of the sea.

  Her infant stirred slightly as she settled with a groan and a sharp ache where she had torn in birthing him, but she held him close and drew the shawl in which she’d wrapped him up over his head until he fell asleep again. She held him to her, kissing the top of his head with the softest brush of her lips, again and again. She smelled baby, and she smelled her husband, for the shawl she’d swaddled him in was Yonah’s tallit. It was wrong, perhaps terribly wrong, to swaddle a baby in a prayer shawl, but the cloth carried Yonah’s scent and her heart knew the shawl would protect her son, as Yonah himself would if he were here.

  Her heart beat a little faster. She tried to think of whether Yonah would have lifted this child into his hands and accepted him as his own son, if he’d lived. She felt certain he would have. Yes, she was certain of it. The man who had held her after that storm on the sea would never have turned away any life that came from her body.

  She glanced out at the sea again, its wind in her hair, and could not remember ever having felt so alone. “What do I do?” she whispered, pressing her nose to the tallit. “What do I do?”

  But her husband was not there to answer her. There was only her, making decisions to stand between her children and the hungry grave. Shimon would bring home fish, and perhaps … perhaps he would not grow to resent her for not going to the priest’s bed, for risking her children in the winter.

  It was not too late, she knew. She could run from the house, up the street, knock on the door of Zebadyah’s house, endure the staring eyes of the few other surviving women from the windows and rooftops of their own homes. She could give herself to him, undress for him, and whisper after he lay in her, “Please, feed my sons.” Many women of her People had done so before.

  But her belly twisted at the thought, and her face throbbed where her husband’s brother had struck her. She clutched her baby closer, shivering.

  She didn’t know if Shimon would be able to bring enough food for the three of them. She didn’t know if Zebadyah would be harsh with her, if she went to him, if he would often strike her. But she knew he would never feed both her sons. He would not take her second son into his house.

  As though hearing her thoughts, the infant stirred and began to cry. She lifted him to her breast. Seeing the way he kneaded her flesh with only one hand while the other hung lifeless at his side, Rahel closed her eyes, forbidding herself tears. A feeling of warm sleep stole over her as often happened when the baby fed. For a while her fear for him pierced through it.

  Yet somewhere between one breath and the next, she slipped into the dream country. And it was water, all water, dark waves covering all the world and nowhere any shore. It closed over her, taking away sound and light. Then she flailed about and found herself facing Yonah, her husband’s face stern yet his eyes turning gentle when he saw her, as they always had.

  She had wedded Yonah when she was fourteen, had wanted to believe he would be a shelter and a strong place for her in this uneasy world. Once, when she was still young, he had rowed her out onto the water, uncaring that the sea was for fishermen, not their wives. That one night, he had gone without nets or spear, just rowing out with his wife until they were far from shore and no other boats could be seen dark on the water. The waves rolled them with a motion that was soothing and sure. There he made love to her, while the stars moved slowly across the sky. She remembered the sound of his breathing, his face above hers, his touch. Afterward, a storm had fallen on the sea. He bound her to the row bench, then cast his coat over her, while she watched the surge and growl of the sea and the heavy dark of the sky with wide eyes. She watched her husband fight the waves, and the sea tossed them and spun them. Water came over the gunwale and tried to slam her from the boat, but her husband’s ropes held her fast.

  Then the sea was quiet, as suddenly as though the storm had been a candle snuffed out. The clouds broke open, revealing the moon. Yonah cut his wife loose from the bench even as she sobbed and gasped in great gulps of air no longer laden with water. She shivered with cold as he clutched her to him, tearing away his soaked tunic and then tearing away hers, so that her body and his were pressed naked to each other, and she could feel the fire in him and his heart loud against hers, as when they had made love. His rough hands rubbed life into her arms and back. She shook and clung to him and sobbed, and heard him sobbing in her ear, too.

  The moon had set while th
ey made love, before the tempest; but now there was a moon in the sky. The storm had lasted all of a day and it was now the next night, the Sabbath night, and as they warmed each other, Yonah started to murmur the words of a song in her ear, words he might sing to greet the Sabbath Bride as she came over the water.

  Though the fig tree does not flower,

  And no grapes are on the vines …

  Rahel woke with a start, her infant asleep at her breast. She heard shouting in the distance. Blinking quickly, she looked about and her first impression was that the sea was on fire. But as her eyes focused, she realized that men had built a great blaze on the shore among the wrack left by the outgoing tide. She could see their shapes dark against the glow of it, and hear their voices, most of them indistinct but one calling louder than the rest and carrying to her on the sea wind.

  Zebadyah.

  He was reciting passages from the Grief of Ezra. Catching the words, she shivered and clutched her infant tightly. She watched with wide eyes as the men on the sands tossed items into the flames, and she heard the roar and rush of the fire as it fed. She couldn’t see what they were burning, but she could guess.

  The remains of the Roman tents. Any clothing of Greek weave or any ornaments from other towns that the Romans had looted from their homes, or any they had left. Anything that was not Hebrew. Anything that was unclean, or broken, or suspect. Anything that might tempt God to look away from the town when the dead lurched near.

  They were cleansing Kfar Nahum.

  Perhaps it was only that she had just risen out of the waters of sleep. Perhaps it was only the stress and anguish of the past few days. Whatever the reason, Rahel had a vivid, brutal vision of Zebadyah lifting her infant up and casting his small, wailing body into the flames.

  She shivered. Pressing her lips to the baby’s head, she whispered, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

  But she could not look away from those flames, or from the dark silhouette of the priest standing so near them, nor shut her ears against Zebadyah’s harsh, grieving cries. And she did not sleep again that night.

  ONE OF OUR TRIBE

  Shimon’s first nights at sea exhausted him. After he and Zebadyah’s sons pulled the boat up to the tideline, gutted their fish by the pre-dawn light, and stumbled back into the town with their catch, it was all he could do to embrace Yakob at the door of his house and offer a tired grunt of thanks—though if he’d been able to summon more words, he would have called him brother. Then he’d enter with a weary nod toward his mother and her infant, tumble into his bedding in the olive’s shade in the atrium, and snore until long after the noon heat. He had been out on the sea with his father a few times, but it had never been like this—his hand casting the nets, and no midnight nap while his father fished. You didn’t nap when you were one of the men in the boat, when it was your hand that must keep the tiller or the oars if a storm came up.

  On one of these first mornings, he stepped through the heavy cedar door of his father’s house and heard his infant brother shrieking. Not a hunger cry but a pain cry, a thin, desperate wailing that tore through his body, making his blood run cold. There was a hoarse note in the cries, as though the boy had been wailing for a while.

  His heart sped up. Where was his mother? Was she all right? Why hadn’t she come at her infant’s cry? He burst through into the atrium, not even pausing to toss away his coat or peel off his gloves that reeked of fish and were slippery with oil.

  And he stopped, shocked.

  Rahel knelt on a rug she had unrolled across the atrium’s dirt floor, a rug that had belonged to one of Yonah’s kin, now dead. She was holding her baby tightly to her, her own eyes squeezed shut; she must not have heard Shimon come in, not over the baby’s screams. A stone knife lay discarded by her left knee, and in the early dawn light blood shone on the blade. Her hands were bloody, too.

  Shimon took it all in at a glance, and realized it was his brother’s eighth day. The stone knife—stone, not iron—was used for circumcision. He didn’t know where Rahel had found the knife or from where she’d taken it.

  “Where’s Zebadyah bar Yesse?” he asked hoarsely.

  Rahel gave a start, glanced up at him, her eyes red from weeping.

  Not knowing what else to do, Shimon came and sat by her. The baby’s cries were deafening.

  “He thinks my child is unclean.” Rahel’s voice quivered. “Do you think I’d trust him with a knife?”

  Shimon knelt by her. Without speaking, he took his infant brother and held him, that small, squalling, misshapen thing that had brought such anxiety into their house. Rahel put her face in her hands, shaking silently, staining her face with blood.

  The baby kept wailing. Shimon swallowed. For days he had tried not to look at his brother. Now he couldn’t look away. Uncomfortably, he held him, uncertain of what to do. The boy’s wound had been cleaned and bandaged.

  After a few moments, Rahel drew a shuddering breath and rose unsteadily to her feet. She left, then came back with a cloth and pushed one corner of it, which she’d dampened, into the baby’s small mouth. One hand pressed to her left breast as though it pained her. For a few moments the baby still shrieked, then his mouth closed around the cloth and he sucked at it vigorously, making small, muffled whimpers.

  “He is Koach. Koach bar Yonah,” she said.

  “Koach?”

  “Koach.” Her face was wet with tears. Tears for her child’s pain, tears for her own. Tears reddened by the blood on her face.

  On the eighth day of a boy’s life, he is circumcised and gifted with a name and a blessing that tell him what he will be. This was always a rite performed by the priest, but today, by the morning’s light in her own house, Rahel had laid the boy on this rug and taken up the knife and had done it herself.

  She had named him Koach.

  The word for “strong.”

  Silently, Shimon and Rahel knelt beside each other, gazing down at that small, anguished face. A bent child, but the only child Rahel would ever have again. The three of them were the only family they had left.

  Gently, Rahel drew her fingertips along the curve of the boy’s cheek. “You will grow strong,” she promised him. “Strong.” Her voice low and fierce with that tone that only mothers use, the tone that over the cruel years of history has made even emperors kneel before those who birthed them, has made even kings seek the embrace of their mothers’ arms.

  FOURTEEN YEARS LATER—25 AD.

  BARABBA

  The man was Barabba the Outlaw, the Roman-killer, and he rode one morning out of the hills and out of the wilderness and walked his horse through the streets of Kfar Nahum as though he owned the town. His beard was dark and there were small twigs in it as though, like a prophet of old, he had neither time nor attention to spare it. His face was brown with dust. From the right side of his saddle hung two heads with their hair cut in the Roman style, and to the left side he’d roped three more heads, these torn with strips of flesh missing as though they’d been savaged by beasts. Each with a puncture wound in its brow. Their faces those of the unclean dead, the dead that hunger.

  Men and women drew back into their doors as Barabba passed, not wanting to be near the unburied heads. Barabba himself was a forbidding figure, a giant on a black horse larger than any they had ever seen. It was as though God had turned a bear into a man and sent him into their narrow streets. Every town in the land had heard of this man, even ruined towns. In the dead-haunted hills above the Tumbling Water, this man and others like him, men who knew the use of curved blades and of poisons, waited in caves or lurked by the high pass called the Red Way. They set themselves against the living and the dead alike. Bar Abba, their leader called himself, “son of a father,” to hide his kin and his home from the Romans. None knew where he had come from, but they said he had not seen his brothers, his sisters, his mother in long years. They said he had never been seen to weep. Or laugh. That he had once ridden his horse into a Roman centurion’s house and killed th
e man with a blow of his steed’s hoof, then swept his wife and daughter up into the saddle—and that they had later been sold from the block in Yoppa, to be slaves in far provinces across the sea. They said that he had once left a Greek idolater flayed alive and hanging from the gates of Beth Anya as a warning to any who might defile the holy places of their People. That he had abducted a levite who had informed the Romans about his movements, and had taken the man up to a cave in the hills and forced him to eat a poisoned loaf.

  In the cities of stone several days to the south, some hoped in him. Some feared him. But in Kfar Nahum’s crumbling houses, he had been only a story. Until this day.

  Barabba didn’t speak until he had reached the open space before Kfar Nahum’s synagogue, a massive basalt edifice. The synagogue was the only building in this town that was still well-kept; the others had fallen into a dilapidation and a weariness that conveyed the town’s poverty as starkly as the gaunt faces and thin, brittle-looking arms of its inhabitants. But if Kfar Nahum’s poverty affected Barabba, he revealed no sign of it. He looked at the faces of those who had gathered, but without pity.

  Before the polished steps of the synagogue—polished only because aging Zebadyah made the washing of them his religious duty each day, a duty performed with his own hands and his own cloth and water he had carried up from the sea himself, for the only slave he had owned had died on that night he refused to remember—before those clean, white steps, Barabba sat his saddle and glowered at the crowd that was gathering, men and women who had slipped from their doors to follow his horse—at a safe distance—through the streets. In fact, by the time the hoofbeats fell still, most of the people who still lived and breathed in Kfar Nahum stood in that public space or filled the alleys that emptied into it. Their faces were pale; they couldn’t look away from the corpse-heads that hung from the stranger’s saddle, moving a little as the horse breathed.