No Lasting Burial

by Stant Litore

  The stranger was pale. “That … that’s what you were beating at, with spear and oar, when you stood in your boat.”

  “Didn’t you hear them moan?” Shimon said.

  “I heard them moan,” the stranger said. “Every moment I’m awake, I hear them moan. All the dead and all the living. Screaming in my ears.” He let the rope fall from his hands and walked down to crouch beside the corpse.

  Torn between watching the raving stranger and watching the corpse, Shimon stepped near and took the net itself in his hands, his muscles bunching, pulling it away from the hungry tide. For an instant the corpse dragged over the sand. The stranger gripped the tattered remnants of its tunic in his hand as though to pull it from the net, but the water-drenched garment peeled away from the corpse like an old blister, leaving the stranger crouching with it in his hand and the corpse dragging nakedly after Shimon, the sand sloughing some of its skin away as though its skin were only a second and equally decayed garment.

  The stranger’s face was so full of pain that Shimon had to look away. He kicked the corpse’s hand a few times, knocking it loose from the net. Then he left the stranger and the corpse there, pulling the net with him, leaking fish. The corpse would have to buried, in accordance with the Law—under earth or hard rock, so the uncleanness of it wouldn’t spread to blight the plants that grow in the open air. But that could wait until the fish were brought in. It would have to.

  Soon the other nets were half up the shore. Shimon, Yakob, and Yohanna ran back to gather up the spilled fish in their arms and carry those up, too, before the tide could take them. They had to work fast. There were other boats approaching the shore but still a ways out. Yakob ran to their own boat up above the tideline, snatched out an oar and an armful of the sheaves of lake-weed for binding the fish, then ran back. He tossed the sheaves into the sand at the others’ feet, then veered and ran down the shore to a great white rock that was always above the tide and could be seen from some distance out. He leapt up on the rock and waved the oar, shouting at the far boats. Out on the water, men stood up against the rock and sway of their craft and called back to him, their voices thin in the dawn.

  Yohanna and Shimon opened the unbroken nets, and the fish rivered out onto the sand in a flood of flashing scales. Still breathing hard, Shimon clapped Yohanna’s shoulder. “Get help from the town. Bring bins, baskets, anything you have.”

  “What about him?” Yohanna nodded to the man still crouching at the water with that garment in his hand.

  “Never mind him. Don’t you see the gulls? Be quick!” Overhead, the sky was filling already with white birds, swooping down in wheeling circles, screaming their hunger. Shimon’s blood roared in his ears. No time, no time.

  “There won’t be much help. We came back earlier than most,” Yohanna said.

  “Then bring the women!” Shimon roared. “We are not losing these fish! Not to the dead. Not to the sea. And not to the birds. Get me some hands!”

  Yohanna nodded, clapped Shimon’s shoulder in return, and then sprinted for the tideline grass and the low, crumbling houses beyond. He was the fastest runner in Kfar Nahum, a man with long legs as though he had Greek blood, but even if he had been short and slow, Shimon would not have left the nets himself.

  Swiftly, Shimon crouched beside one of the opened nets and began wrapping the fish in sheaves of lake-weed. Even as he worked, the fish slick and wriggling in his hands, the air about him filled with beating wings and hoarse shrieks, and the gulls descended on him like the host of God. Some dove at Shimon’s face and he beat them off with an arm; others settled on the nets or on the spill of fish on the sand, digging in with their sharp beaks. Then Yakob leapt in front of him and swung his oar about, slamming the hard wooden blade against the birds. There was a grate of other boats on the shingle, and then running feet, and other men sprang over the fish with oars in their hands.

  A man knelt by him; Shimon glanced to his side and saw the stranger, his eyes still haunted. His dousing in the sea had washed away his stink but it could not wash away his bruises or his desert-tangled hair. Shimon shrank back. The stranger looked so much like one of the under-the-boat beggars, only he moved nothing like them. He took up a fish and wrapped it swiftly. His man’s hands were free of rope burns and the straight scars that came of cuts from a slipped fish knife, but they were calloused and rough. He was a man who worked with his hands, then. Only not with fish. His feet were raw and scarred and bare, as though he had walked long on this shore or in the hills without sandals.

  He looked … unclean.

  The stranger reached for a second fish, and Shimon’s breath hissed in through his teeth.

  The stranger stopped. Hurt flashed in his eyes, but he concealed it quickly.

  His own movements quick, tense, Shimon knotted a bit of cord about a sheaf of fish, baring his teeth against the storm of feathers about him.

  “I’d like to help,” the stranger said.

  Shimon ignored him. The stranger watched as he bound a few more musht. The scent of the fish maddened Shimon’s belly; he yearned to abandon the nets and gather up one armful of musht, just one, and run with them over the sand and through the grasses to the stone fishers’ houses, to his mother and brother whom he’d often left ravenous, as his father never, ever had. He longed to cry out at the door for Rahel to light the firepit in the atrium. Or he might not even gather up that armful, might not even leave the shore; he might lift the fish raw to his teeth, even as he crouched here near the water.

  The stranger reached again for a fish—with his bruised, unclean hands—and Shimon turned on him, his eyes fierce. “Stranger,” he said.

  The man crouched, very still. Watching him.

  “Your accent,” Shimon said roughly. “Are you half-Greek? From Many Birds?”

  “Natzeret. Both my parents are Hebrew.”

  Natzeret was a small town high on the hill on the road west, above the Greek colony city that the Hebrews called Tzippori, or Many Birds, because of the brightly feathered creatures that the Greeks had brought from many parts of the world to sing among the town’s well-watered trees and marble pillars.

  “Those bruises on your face, your arms …?”

  “Stoning,” the stranger said.

  “What?” Shimon shot him a look of horror. “What were you stoned for?” His voice was little more than a gasp. This man might be a killer, or a seducer of men’s wives, a blasphemer, or a witch.

  “I … I don’t know.” The stranger’s eyes were full of raw pain and bewilderment.

  That was hardly reassuring.

  “I’m …” The man glanced down at the fish. “I’m having trouble, trouble remembering. There are all these rooms, these rooms in my mind. Some have people in them, people I’ve known, people I grew up with … mother, father, brothers, priests, and weavers. Children running and laughing and singing. And others are empty and cold, as though whoever was there packed and left and is not there anymore. And there is one roo—” He took a breath. “There is one room with a rug hung over the door, and that room burns with light and I can’t see in.” The man looked away. “Maybe that’s where my … my missing memories are, Cephas.”

  Shimon swallowed. That was not the answer he’d expected. No sin confessed or evaded … only these mad words that made little sense.

  The man gazed fixedly at nothing. Perhaps he was walking through that house in his mind, checking the empty rooms.

  “The gulls,” the stranger said. “And the tide. You don’t have much time. May I help you?”

  Shimon tossed three more fish into a sheaf, bound it, and muttered, “Why do you call me that?”

  “Call you what?”

  Shimon met his gaze, boldly, intending to stare him down. But the stranger’s own gaze was intense, and for just a moment, Shimon thought he was gazing into a mirror, a dark mirror, where he saw the inside of his heart and the inside of his gut reflected, and everything he regretted and everything he’d given up. The stranger’s g
aze was direct and unguarded and piercing, uncaring that they were strangers and might share no kin, uncaring that they might be different.

  It rattled him.

  “Cephas,” he muttered, trying to recover. “You keep calling me Cephas.”

  The stranger just looked at him.

  “I am Shimon bar Yonah.” The anger rose in his voice. “Everyone here knows my name and my father’s. He was the greatest fisher on this sea. I am Shimon his son.”

  “I am Yeshua bar Yosef,” he said, “and I know you. You are Cephas, the rock. We have met before. Or …” The man looked just past him, his eyes going cold and clear, as though he were gazing far out over the wooded ridges and high peaks of Ramat ha-Golan. “… Or we will meet. I know this,” he whispered. “How do I know this? It’s your voice, isn’t it? I heard your voice … when I was in the desert. I am certain of it. It was your voice.”

  Shimon watched Yeshua out of the corner of his eye. The desert. If this ragged man had spent long nights out there, alone, in the wilderness of the Essenes, where the wind screamed almost without cease and the shedim moaned in their hundreds on neglected battlefields, what uncleanness might he have brought back with him or within him?

  Yet, whatever his misgivings, the tide was coming in. The shrieking gulls were swooping low now in numbers that might be too much for Yakob’s swinging of the oar to keep back. Shimon needed help, and quickly. “Fine,” he said. “Whoever you are, help.”

  The stranger nodded and bent quickly to the work.

  Other boats slid up onto the shingle, escaping the night hunger of the sea. Men leapt out, Mordecai and Natan El and others, bringing armfuls of lake-weed to use in wrapping the fish. Some ran to stand sentinel with Yakob, oars lifted in challenge to the screaming gulls. One—Natan El—began searching the shoreline for stones large enough for a cairn, to bury the corpse they’d dragged up. The water had destroyed the thing’s face, and it was impossible to tell who that corpse had been, whose kin. No tomb for the waterlogged dead, only a pile of rock. Other such cairns stood at places along the shore, sun-bleached and stained with the leavings of gulls.

  Some of the fishers joined Shimon and the stranger at their work, not speaking but gazing about at the heaps of fish with wild eyes. A few cast wary glances at the corpse where it lay lifeless on the sand and lifted their fingers in the sign against the evil eye.

  Then, with a shout, Yohanna came running down toward the shore from the stone houses. Others ran beside him, women and old men carrying empty baskets. Glancing up, Shimon saw his mother Rahel, and Bar Cheleph with his bad hip. And, running behind, his gray hair wild in a gust of wind, Zebadyah the kohen, Kfar Nahum’s priest.

  “What has happened?” the kohen cried out against the wind. “What has happened?”

  “Fish!” Yakob shouted, and swung his oar against a bird that had swept too low; the gull wheeled quickly out of the way. “Fish!”

  “Fish!” Bar Cheleph cried.

  “My son!” Rahel cried, and her eyes glistened. “Oh, my son!”

  Yeshua looked up at her, and for a moment a sad smile transfigured his face.

  Soon the sand and shingle was littered with baskets and lids and rolls of cloth and bits of cord, and half the town crouched with the sea lapping at their feet, working swiftly to gut the fish and bind them or basket them. Several women, their eyes shining, began carrying baskets and sheaves of musht in a line up the shore toward the stone houses. Bar Cheleph—whose limp seemed to be bothering him—hung back. Perhaps because Shimon glared at him. The younger man had beaten Shimon’s brother once, and Shimon hadn’t forgotten it. His anger was not as strong as his guilt, for when he gazed at his brother with his useless arm, he saw what Bar Cheleph saw: a body twisted and unclean, a broken oar on a boat that needed all its oars. But Koach was his mother’s last child, the last she would ever have. And no one would lift their hand against anyone his mother loved, not while he stood near.

  Bar Cheleph moved down the shore a little way, gathering up bits of wood and other drift as if for a fire. As if he meant to begin roasting some of the fish right here. On the shore, this very morning. That changed Shimon’s mood quick as a sea wind.

  There hadn’t been a fire for cooking fish on the shore since he had been a boy. Since before that night … He swallowed back some of the saliva filling his mouth, wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. He felt suddenly faint.

  The priest stood on the shore looking about with startled eyes. His gaze moved over the sand as though he were looking for the footprints of God, looking for some reason why this blessing had been visited on ruined Kfar Nahum so unexpectedly.

  Then his gaze settled on the stranger. Yeshua had risen to his feet and stood over one of the baskets, lifting wrapped fish quickly into it.

  “Who are you?” Zebadyah said bluntly, without any note of welcome.

  “He is the one I told you of, abba,” Yohanna said. “He says he called the fish.”

  “He has a mouth. He can speak.” He raised his voice. “Who are you and who are your kin, beggar?”

  Yeshua glanced up, his face still drawn with memory of pain. He opened his mouth as though to answer, but at that moment there was a cry from farther down the shore.

  “Look! Look!”

  They all swung about to look.

  Some way to the south, a man was walking up the shore, coming toward them. That was strange, both because few walked beside the sea—most took their boats to move from one town to another—and because hardly anyone ever, ever came to Kfar Nahum.

  But he did not walk like one of the boat people. He strode along that shore like one accustomed to long travel and unafraid of it, though not unwearied by it.

  “Who is that?” Shimon murmured.

  Yeshua straightened from the basket, and his shoulders lifted as though whatever pain he had brought with him was abruptly gone. He stood tall and still. His eyes had that intense, elsewhere gaze again, as though he were staring intently past them all at something only he could see. “I remember this,” he whispered. “Father, I remember this. When the father needs a thing done, he brings us together, all of us, all those he needs.” He shook his head slightly, as though in wonder. Then he cupped his hands to either side of his mouth and called out: “Shalom!”

  The distant walker lifted his hand in response, and it was clear that he carried some object in it. He brought it to his face, and suddenly a loud blast rang out against the hills. A horn call, deep and resonant. Shimon could feel the call even in his bones.

  “My God,” he whispered.

  Yakob and Yohanna both gazed at the far traveler without speaking, their faces struck with wonder.

  Zebadyah scowled. “It can’t be,” he muttered.

  After more than a year following the Roman-killer through the streets of the cities of their People and into wild places in the hills, Bar Nahemyah had come back.

  EPISODE 5

  THE CARVED MAN

  The newcomer strode with purpose up the shore. Yet his eyes held not just the fatigue of a man who has walked through the night along the sands, but the weariness of a man who has walked a year and found no place to rest in all that time. His shofar was still slung about his neck; he wore a tattered but heavy cloak, and his clothing was simple and plain though of southern weaving. His beard had grown long; his hair he wore in a braid down his back. Girded about his waist was a cracked leather scabbard the length of his forearm, from which protruded a hilt of polished bone. He carried a waterskin over his shoulder but no pack; he was lean, his face weathered, bitten by the wind and by the stress of things he wished he hadn’t seen. He slowed his stride as he reached the men and women standing on the shingle, then stood with his hand lifted in greeting.

  Zebadyah spoke first. “Dead have been coming up from the sea. What makes you think you are welcome here, Bar Nahemyah? You who gave our dead no burial?”

  Bar Nahemyah’s face tightened. He glanced past the priest. “Shalom, Bar Yonah
.”

  “Shalom,” Shimon said hoarsely.

  Silence. Bar Nahemyah heard only the gulls’ cries and the beating of the oars against feathered bodies. Men stood with fish in their right hands and baskets in their left. All eyes on this man who had saved their town and then destroyed it. This man who’d felled the corpses at the very door of the synagogue, saving the town’s last men and women, and then filled the sea with their dead and dying. And who had, a year ago, been taken from them. And who hadn’t come back. Like all the town’s fathers, like God and Yonah and so many, Bar Nahemyah had abandoned them.

  Here, facing his town … Bar Nahemyah felt unsettled. He didn’t let it show in his face. But even as he and his town watched each other, the wind gusted and tore his cloak aside, baring his left arm. The men at the nets gasped. Zebadyah cried out. Bar Nahemyah braced himself but made no effort to conceal his arm. What they saw there had been dearly bought.

  “What have you done?” the priest moaned. “Bar Nahemyah, what have you done?”

  Nearly twenty fine scars, white against Bar Nahemyah’s sun-darkened skin, had been cut in parallel lines between his left shoulder and his elbow. They were too fine and too close a pattern to be wounds from a battle; anyone looking knew that they were a deliberate scarring of his flesh.

  “You’ve defiled your body,” Zebadyah said, his eyes dismayed.

  “No.” He let his voice ring with cold purpose. “This is a covenant. My body was marked when I was eight days old. That was a covenant with God. This is a covenant with the unclean dead. Nineteen of them I have put in the earth since leaving Kfar Nahum, and nineteen marks I bear in my flesh, to remember.” His voice fell. “Though I don’t think I could ever forget. I have seen Herod’s ghoul pits.”

  The other men’s faces went white.

  Even in Kfar Nahum, it was known how the old Herod, that desert king hired by Rome to rule over an enslaved People, had grown old and mad. They had heard how he’d slain even his own kin. How he had filled the Roman baths in his palace with the dead, and thrown first his wife and then his own young daughter into the water to be devoured. How he’d sat on the steps of the baths, watching with tears on his face as his daughter was eaten. How at her shrieks, all the blossoms in Herod’s gardens had withered. How he had sealed off the baths afterward with so many layers of stone that the wailing of the dead could no longer be heard. How he’d then sat in his bed reeking, unbathed, for the better part of a month, and anyone who came to him with reminders of affairs of state, he’d had put to death.