by Stant Litore
The shadow moved, and he glimpsed the man grasping Tamar’s hair, holding her still as he hit her. But at that moment her gaze flicked up in pain, and she saw him.
They saw each other. From the rooftop to the small room.
Had Koach been able to think past the shock and the fury in his heart, he might have expected to see anger in the girl’s eyes, or shame. Shame that he would see her like this. But Koach didn’t see those things in her eyes. Only recognition. Then her eyes glistened in the light of the candle, as though filling with tears that she had forbid herself until that moment.
And her face relaxed. Like letting go of a burden too heavy for her. Like glancing down and seeing warm bedding before you when you are tired. Like relief.
Relief that one other person knew she was suffering, and cared.
He took a step back, but her gaze held him. A silent demand in her eyes: Don’t go. Don’t leave me alone.
So he stayed.
Something in him died and something else was born, something dark and furious, as he watched the blows fall on this young and beautiful woman. He did not turn his head; he would not betray her. He witnessed all of it. And when Benayahu had left his daughter sobbing on her bedding, Koach longed to go to her, to tend her bruises with a damp cloth or to hold her. But he didn’t know how. He could not call out to his mother. Rahel was not a man; she could not interfere in the doings in Benayahu’s house. There was no one to go to, no one who would listen to a one-armed boy, or care. His brother, maybe, a strong man, could leap from this roof to the other. But Koach was not his brother. If he tried that leap, he would only break his body on the stones between their houses. He might go down to Benayahu’s door, but why should the nagar open up his house to him?
He did the only thing he could: he waited with her while she cried, though a gulf of air separated them. Finally she lifted her face from the bedding, and the misery in her eyes smote his heart. Quickly she brought her blanket up to her face and dried her tears. Then Tamar rose and slipped from her room, disappearing from his sight.
Koach stood still on the rooftop. He felt emptied of all feeling. He counted the beats of his heart. Somewhere around two hundred, he saw Tamar emerge onto her own rooftop, stepping onto it from unseen stone steps. At first she didn’t look at him. She just stood there with her head down, in her blanket, the moon on her hair. As lovely as Batsheva must have looked to Dawid the king. Like Dawid, Koach had seen her naked, but unlike Dawid, the sight moved him to a desire to protect her, not possess her. He had seen her bruised and now, as she lifted her head and their gazes met, he saw her heart in her eyes. Her solitude and pain.
Neither of them looked away.
Neither dared call out, for fear of alerting Benayahu or breaking the intimacy and peril of this moment.
They stood like that a long time, seeing so much hurt in each other’s hearts.
Finally, he mouthed the words in his heart, keeping them silent but exaggerating the movements of his mouth, to be certain she would know what he said:
I want to help.
I know, she mouthed back. Then: You didn’t leave me. That is help.
A shake of his head. I will help.
They considered each other. Then she did something he did not expect. She let the blanket slip from her shoulders, let it settle to her feet, gently as feathers. For a moment, she held her arms across her breasts, then let them fall to her sides. She lifted her chin, though her face burned. She let him see her, all of her, her beauty and her bruises. This gift of herself. Her father might strip her or beat her, but he could not take this from her: her right to open her heart and her body to one whose heart called to hers. Koach held his breath. All his life, he would remember this moment. His first sight of her. The memory would be holy to him. As though her rooftop were the place where God touched the world and created beauty.
His loins stirred for her, yet his face was wet.
Whether he wept for her, for himself, or for them both, he couldn’t have said. His hand trembled as he lifted his fingers to the clasp of his own tunic. He kept himself fully clothed at most times, even in his mother’s house; he couldn’t bear the way others looked at him when his deformity was visible. But he could not hide it now, could not conceal it when this young woman had unclothed all of her bruises, risked everything to be seen by one other.
He kept his movements slow, his heart loud with his fear. It took some work, with only his one hand and not his mother’s to aid him. But at last his clothes were in a heap beside him, and he stood naked on the roof, the air cool on his skin. There was mercifully no wind to chill him or carry to his ears the voices of the shedim. He stood as straight as he could; his phallus had stiffened and grown so that it stood hard, as he had found it lately in the mornings when he woke, but for once it did not embarrass him.
He wanted to give her what she had given him: a sight of all of him. Even, no longer concealed in its long sleeve, his withered arm and deformed right hand, the hand that could never touch her face or bring her pleasure or work to feed her. Never having felt so naked, he looked to her eyes anxiously. Saw them tearful. But she was also smiling.
He felt warm through every part of his body. Whatever the days ahead brought—whether hunger or ill dreams or riders out of the south with heads tied to their saddles, or stones hurled at him, or dead lurching up from the waves—whatever the days brought, for the first time he was certain he would not face those days alone.
ONE YEAR LATER.
26 AD—PRESENT DAY.
THE STRANGER
Shimon’s boat approached the shore, riding low in the water and almost tipping into the sea from the weight of its nets. Even as the fishers breathed in the fecund scent of kelp and dead shellfish, the stranger came wading out toward them, the lake water about his knees, his eyes wild. “Your nets!” the man cried, an edge to his words, a hill-country accent Shimon couldn’t place. “Your nets!”
Shimon stared at him as he heaved at the oar, uneasy. The man’s clothes were strange—not a tunic and cloak but a long robe of brown wool. His arms and legs were smeared with dirt, as though he truly had walked here out of the deserts in the south. His hair lank about his bruised face. His right arm bore bruises also, as though he had tried to shield himself from blows. With him came the reek of a man who had spent long days without a roof or clean water.
Even as they heard the scraping welcome of the shingle against the keel, the stranger took the gunwale in his hands. “So many!” he gasped, gesturing at the nets, staring wide-eyed at the fish. His face was wild with shock. “So many! And they’re … they’re beautiful! I didn’t know this would happen, I just cried out, I cried out, I cried out!” His gaze shot to Shimon’s face, and in his eyes there was sudden joy, like a man who has walked all his life in the dark and for the first time sees firelight burning away the shadows. Shimon just stared back, the others silent behind him in the boat, startled at this raving man.
“Don’t you understand? I heard you!” the man cried. “I could hear all of you, all last night, all of you moaning … your hunger, I couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear it, couldn’t … and I heard the father, I heard the father weeping for you, and don’t you see, don’t you see, he must have heard me, he must have heard me too, he must have heard me, the father heard me!” His hands tightened at the gunwale, as though he were going to pull himself into the boat, his voice rising. His eyes shone with tears. “Do you understand! Do you understand! It was too great to bear, the hunger and the father’s cries and the screaming and the screaming and the screaming”—his voice was now a wild shriek of joy, so that Shimon leaned back away from the man—“and I cried out and he heard me!”
The stranger’s eyes rolled back and he pitched to the side, crashing into the water.
Shimon swore and cast his oar aside, leaping to his feet. He sprang over the gunwale as Yakob and Yohanna looked on, their eyes wide. He felt the water about his shins, the cold shock of it against his toes, and pebble
s shifting beneath his sandalled feet. The boat scraped past him and he plunged his arms into the water, groping. Shimon found the man and hauled him up. The stranger’s head lolled back and his mouth fell open.
“We’ll get the boat up!” Yohanna cried behind him.
Shimon didn’t answer. He slapped the man’s cheek to rouse him.
Yohanna and Yakob leapt from the boat, the familiar sound of their sandaled feet sinking into the sand. Their hands gripped the gunwale and they began sliding the boat up the shingle. Though large, the boats of Kfar Nahum were lightly built; yet it was a great labor dragging the craft up toward the tideline.
After a moment, Shimon dragged the man out of the sea and lay him on the sand. Life came back to the stranger’s eyes, and he gasped, “Water.”
Shimon got to his feet and ran to the boat, exchanging a bewildered look with Yakob. Reaching in, he snatched up one of their waterskins, then ran back to where the stranger lay.
He held the waterskin to the man’s lips, saw his throat move in great gulps. Then the stranger choked a little, and Shimon lifted the waterskin and set it aside. Even as he did, the man’s hand grasped his wrist with a fierce strength. His eyes were intense. For a moment the stranger fought for breath. Then he gasped: “Cephas!”
Shimon didn’t understand. Cephas was the Aramaic word for rock.
“Cephas,” the man said, swallowing, getting more moisture into his voice. His gaze held Shimon’s with an insistent, desperate demand. “Somewhere I have to be. Something I have to do.”
Shimon shook his head. He didn’t know whether that was a question or how to answer.
“Cephas, Cephas.” The man fell back, his eyes turning toward the sky. “Something, something I have to do. I knew it, I knew it so clearly, so clearly only a moment ago. Like my father had spoken it right into my ear. Right into my ear, Cephas. When the fish came, I knew what it was, this thing I have to do. For just a moment, a breath, I knew it, Cephas. I knew it.” He seemed to be fighting to catch his breath. “Now it’s gone, gone, like … like leaves blown into the desert.”
“Who are you?” Shimon gasped.
But the man closed his eyes and his grip on Shimon’s hand weakened. Then his chest rose and fell as though he were asleep. Shimon slipped his wrist from the man’s grip and stood, a little shakily. He gazed down at the man’s battered body in its ragged brown robe. If Shimon had not heard the man’s eerie cries, calling the fish, he would have thought him one of the boat people, the beggars and outcasts wandering up and down the shoreline of the Galilee who had become stuck here at their shore, too sick or too weak to move on. They often slept under the derelict boats just above the tide’s reach. Shimon glanced uneasily up at those boats where they lay rotting in the tall grasses, but there was no sound or sign of movement. Yet there were always beggars there.
His hands shook. Had this man’s cries—his eerie calling for fish over the water—filled the nets? The man’s words were like raving. Like the words of a witch who had called the shedim into his body to inhabit it. The body was a house: what was living in this man’s house?
Yet the nets had been empty, and now they were not.
“Yohanna!” he called.
In a moment, the son of Zebadyah was at his side. “Who is he, Shimon?”
Shimon only stepped back, making the sign against the evil eye.
“Wait.” Yohanna gave the man a closer look and drew in a breath. “I know this man.”
Shimon looked to him quickly, but Yohanna only frowned. “I don’t know who he is. But I’ve seen him. I’m certain of that. I have seen this man before.”
“He must be one of the boat people, one of the unclean,” Yakob called behind them. Glancing over his shoulder, Shimon saw the boat half up the shingle with Yakob trying to pull it up alone, the veins standing out against his forehead. The nets were still in the water. Cursing, Shimon sprinted for the boat and lent his own arms, gripping the hooks beneath the gunwale and lifting the boat as he dragged it. In a moment, Yohanna was with them, leaving the stranger behind on the sand.
“He’s not one of the boat people,” Yohanna gasped, as they pulled the boat up the sand.
“He looks like one of the boat people,” Yakob grunted.
“Didn’t you see his robe? Fine wool. Pattern at the hem. Not rags. Not boat people. Essene, I think.”
“Essene,” Yakob wondered. “What is an Essene doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
“But his face—he’s Galilean. He’s one of us. Not from Kfar Nahum, but he’s from here.”
“I know.”
Shimon took a steadying breath and turned his back on the stranger with the bruised arms and face. “Talk later,” he said. “Nets won’t wait.”
A few moments of struggle, and they had the boat up into the tall grass above the tideline. Yakob took the prow, guiding the boat into place in the line of fishing vessels. Those still in use were at the end of the line nearest the town; those farther down were long derelict, decaying and spattered with gull feces, wooden corpses of themselves waiting for time to eat away their last timbers.
Then they ran back for the nets. Shimon glanced at the man lying in the sand, but he didn’t have time to stand about wondering. They needed to be quick, for the oncoming tide was tugging at the nets, and the flashing silver of the fish, tails wriggling against the nets, was drawing down out of the sky white birds, swooping low.
They ran down the sand, which was wet and packed beneath the slap of their sandals. They took up the casting ropes and strained to pull up the nets, fearing the nets would break and spill this miracle catch back into the sea, the way a broken body spills back into the dark the life God once breathed into it. Shimon sucked in breath through his nose and breathed out through his mouth, pulling hard on the ropes with each indrawn breath. He kept his eyes on the water and the wild flopping of the fish, fearing that they might yet haul another corpse out with the catch. His forehead was clammy with sweat.
Then two hands grasped the rope beside his and pulled, and the net came half out of the water. Shimon glanced to the side; the stranger stood there. The sea had washed most of the smell of the hills from him; water still trickled from his hair, making dark streaks down his robe. He returned Shimon’s look, then heaved at the rope again.
“What are you?” Shimon panted. He wanted to pull away from this strange beggar man, but he didn’t want to let go of the rope. The nets were heavy. He could not remember them ever being so heavy.
“A friend,” the man said. He was calmer now, though his voice was strained.
“You’ve been in the desert.” Shimon glanced at the man’s brown robe.
“I have,” he said.
“Are you an Essene?”
He shook his head. Not one of the desert hermits, then, who lived in their small communities hiding in caves from the dead and teaching their bodies to endure any hardship, that they might draw nearer to God.
“You’re tattered and bruised.” Shimon’s voice was thick with his distrust of outsiders. “Are you unclean?”
The question appeared to startle him. “No,” he said, and heaved at the rope. “No, I don’t … I don’t think so. Not unclean.”
“I don’t know what you are, who you are, but you called the fish,” Shimon said, struggling to understand. “What are you? I heard you call them.”
The man’s eyes were dark and he stared past Shimon and over the water, intently, at some far other place. His voice changed, going quiet and intense, burning with terrible clarity. “Something is happening, Cephas. And whatever is happening, it will be like sword and like fire and like bread in the mouths of a thousand, thousand children, and nothing will ever, ever be the same way again.”
Shimon stared at him, uneasy.
The stranger’s attention returned to the rope they were straining at. “I cried out, and they came,” he gasped. “Barbels, musht. No catfish, nothing unclean to throw back. How many will they feed?”
/> “The town,” Shimon said. Hoarse. “The entire town. For two weeks, maybe three.” He heaved at the net, and suddenly it broke open, spilling fish over the sand, flopping and wet.
The stranger gasped.
Shimon caught his breath also. There, where the water met the land, where the net had broken open at their pull, their last heave had pulled a white corpse half up onto the sand. Its hand was caught in the netting, with the fish flopping about it as though in panic at the unclean touch. The corpse itself was still, a gash in its brow where Shimon’s fishing spear had caught it.
“No,” the stranger whispered, his face white with horror, as though the appearance of the corpse was some intimate betrayal. “No.”
CEPHAS
The thing’s jaw was open in gaping, eternal hunger, its eyes sightless. Gazing down at it now, Shimon felt none of the rage that had surged in him, hot and violent, when he’d defended his nets on the sea. Only dread, cold in his belly. One thing to encounter the dead out on the sea, or in the dark waters of the dream country. Quite another to see one wash up on his shore.
It seemed to him that if he were to take his eyes from the corpse for even a moment, its hands might twitch and it might lurch again to its feet.
But it didn’t move.
The corpse just lay there on the shingle like a stain of blood on a garment, one that could never be cleansed, never be entirely hidden or forgotten.
“El Shaddai,” Shimon whispered, stepping back. There had always been one or two that would walk out of the waves and feed on the vagrants under the boats until they were discovered and stoned. But there had been three already this year.
And then this.
He tore his gaze from the dead thing and looked out at the cold waves, at that sea older than humanity that could hold so many dead concealed within it. The dread in his belly hardened, like a heavy stone to crush him to his knees.