by Stant Litore
When Herod had been a young man, he had built great cities of marble on the coast, cities of Greek design and Roman public spirit, cities to rival any in the world. Caesar’s City, and Yoppa rebuilt, and a new Temple in Yerushalayim, far greater in size and beauty than the Temple of the ancients, though this one had been built with unclean hands. The young Herod had sat in his gardens and sang poetry and made love to his wife beneath the stars. The older Herod had slaughtered all the children in Bet Lechem on a whim, and given his family to the dead to devour, because he believed they were plotting to poison or knife him in his sleep. When the moaning shedim creep into a man’s ears and his mouth and into his heart, no one is safe.
Herod had been entombed for years, and his son, the new king, Herod Antipas, hid from nightmares of the brutalities he remembered, devoting the dark hours of his nights instead to endless revelry, to feasting and wine and the dancing of naked young women before his seat of white marble. But Antipas’s bitter-minded wife found the memory of Herod’s bath useful; she’d had Greek stonemasons wall up the baths in Antipas’s house, though she bid them open up the roofs to the sky. Corpses had been tossed in, and Herod’s wife often had dissidents lowered down to them on long ropes.
Bar Nahemyah had seen a man, one of Barabba’s, lowered into the stink and the dark, kicking his legs and screaming as the corpses below reached for him with long, grasping fingers.
He had seen her watching, standing at the edge of the wall. Herod’s wife. Had seen the slight curving of her lip, and her eyes shining in the dusk.
He had turned away and covered his ears against the shrieks.
“I have seen,” Bar Nahemyah repeated.
Zebadyah voice was quieter now, less of a shout, yet thick with dread. “What deeds have you done since Barabba took you? Who have you killed, that you have fled back to us for refuge? Were you pursued? Have you led the Romans upon us?”
“Pursued, yes.” His voice was cold. “But I lost them near the Hittim. I have no yearning to witness another night of fire and fear in my own town. No one has followed me, kohen.” His gaze flicked back to Shimon, who had a desperate look in his face. “Yet the day … the last day, when we must rise with knives against Rome’s living and its dead or die the slow death ourselves, that day is near. And I do ask you for your help.”
“We have none to give,” Shimon said.
“We have nothing to do with Barabba’s knifemen, or with you,” Zebadyah said.
“That isn’t for you to say.” Bar Nahemyah touched his fingertips to the ram’s horn. “I still hold the shofar.” The accusation was in his eyes: coward. Zebadyah’s own eyes went dark with rage. But inside, Bar Nahemyah quailed. He had come back to his own town, his own place, and in their eyes—even in Shimon’s eyes—he saw that he had come back like Barabba: stranger, killer, one outside the Law.
Turning away from the aging priest, he approached the gathered people on the shore and saw for the first time what they were gathered about. He sucked in a breath at the sight of that once-human corpse the nets had brought up, weeds tangled about its legs. It had been dragged far above the advancing tide, with a mound of stones stacked beside it ready for burial. Near it stood a strange man with lank hair and a bruised face, his eyes watery but intense. He wore a brown robe that clung, soaked, to his body, as though he had walked up out of the sea. And all around him, the nets, the nets, the fish on the sand thick as pebbles in the hills.
For a moment he forgot his desperate journey and his dread at the corpse. He walked toward the fish, his mouth open. He couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t believe it. There were so many.
“The fish,” he whispered.
“They’ve come back,” Shimon said hoarsely. “Our fathers’ fish have come back.”
The pang of guilt and hope was sharp as a knife’s twist in Bar Nahemyah’s belly. “But the fish were gone. They were dead.”
“Nothing’s ever really dead,” the strange man with the bruised face called out. He stared not at Bar Nahemyah or at the fish but up the shore at the derelict boats by the tall grasses at the tideline. “Not dead, not really dead, unless we let it be. I think that is so.”
“I am Shimon bar Nahemyah. I do not know you. Who are you?”
“Everything comes back up,” the stranger said. “Everything rises, everything rises, sun and rain and sun again, and all our dead, all our dead …” His voice fell until it was too quiet to hear.
“The town is beset,” Zebadyah cried, “by madmen and heathen!”
“This isn’t madness,” Bar Nahemyah breathed. “It’s prophecy. He’s seeing visions.” His heart beat a little faster—for he had heard something like this before, had heard holy ones in Yerushalayim city, men whom God had touched. He’d heard them talk in such a way on the Temple steps, while the alley stones behind echoed with the moans of the dead and with the hard footsteps of men in Roman armor. And now here, on this northern shore, he found a miracle of fish spilled across the sand out of some story of his fathers, and man who spoke like a navi. Hope lit like a heathen corpse-fire in Bar Nahemyah’s heart, burning away decay and despair from his year in Barabba’s caves.
“There are no more prophets,” Zebadyah said, his tone bitter.
“Ha Matbil is a prophet,” Yohanna said quickly.
“No!” The priest’s eyes were fierce. “Enough with your Ha Matbil! El Shaddai preserve me, I have no use for sons or kin who follow killers or witches into the desert and leave the rest of us to mourn alone.”
“I did not follow Barabba,” Bar Nahemyah said quietly, not taking his gaze from the stranger. “I was taken.”
“But you did not come back!” Shimon cried.
“Those,” the stranger said suddenly, before Bar Nahemyah could reply, “those, those by the boats, who are they? Who are they?”
The stranger took a few slow steps up the sand toward the boats. Bar Nahemyah saw that a few men had emerged from those broken shelters and stood in the tall grasses, gazing down the shore at the fish, some of which still flopped on the sand. The men were ragged and gaunt, their faces gray from illness and lack of food.
“Scavengers, Yeshua bar Yosef,” Shimon muttered.
“I don’t understand,” the stranger, Yeshua, said.
“They are boat people,” Bar Nahemyah said. The sight of them there, a terrible reminder of the land’s ruin, made Bar Nahemyah feel even wearier … and old.
“Other people’s poor,” Shimon said impatiently. “Other towns’. They come to us hungry like the dead, when there is already so little to eat.”
“No,” Yeshua whispered. He bent to lift a basket of fish and he nearly fell, but he caught himself, still muttering. “No one goes hungry, no one goes hungry, no one goes hungry, not this day, not this day, not this …” One arm around the basket, he took a step toward the old hulls.
“What are you doing?” Shimon cried.
At that moment several of the gulls swooped low, for Yakob and the others, listening, had let their oars fall still. One of the screaming birds flew at Yeshua’s head while the others swooped at the basket he held. Yeshua’s eyes went hot with anger and he shot his hand out against the bird and shouted, “Enough! Enough!”
A rush of heat nearly tumbled Bar Nahemyah from his feet, as though a fire had roared into existence. The gulls tumbled back, screaming and beating their wings, as though knocked aside by a hot wind. Yeshua straightened, one arm about the basket, the other outstretched and emitting heat. His eyes were fierce. His hair lifted, but not with the wind.
Another gull swooped low but veered away from his hand. Then all of them veered away, and in a moment they were gone across the water, wailing, gliding away on their white wings low over the waves.
There was silence on the sand.
Bar Nahemyah fell back, as though winded by what he had just witnessed. He stared at the stranger, at his wild eyes and his outstretched hand. The others stared also, standing as still as Lot’s wife, translated from flesh to pillar
s of salt by something they should not have been allowed to see.
SITTING SHIVA
Shimon bar Yonah stared over the water after the gulls, his face still warm from that rush of heat. Hardly breathing, he glanced back at the stranger. Yeshua lowered his hand, and then his head, his hair falling over his eyes, lank and damp with lake water. He was panting, his hands clutching the basket now as though it might somehow keep him standing.
Zebadyah recovered himself first. “Witchcraft,” he gasped. “This is witchcraft! The man has a demon. Shedim. Bar Yonah! Yohanna! Get away from him!” He stepped back. “Stones! Sons of Kfar Nahum, sons of Beth Tsaida, bring stones!”
“Wait!” Bar Nahemyah cried.
Yeshua began laughing, a quiet, desperate laughter that carried in the stillness left by the departing gulls. Zebadyah looked on in horror. “Stones,” Yeshua said, shaking his head. “Stones. So I haven’t left Natzeret after all. Stone me, stone me then. Suffer me not to live.” Without looking at the priest, he turned and walked toward the derelict boats.
But the stranger still carried the basket of fish. Shimon’s fish, fish to feed his town and kin. “What are you doing?” Shimon called after him, his heart beating in sudden alarm. When the stranger didn’t answer, he cursed. “Yakob, Yohanna, get the rest of these fish up from the tide!”
He strode after the man from Natzeret, stumbling a little, the wind suddenly fierce at his back, threatening to knock him over onto his belly. He heard Rahel call out his name, and the priest also. He did not stop. The grasses at the tideline bent in waves before the sea wind. Behind him, a rush of talk and shouting as those on the shore demanded to know what was going on, who this stranger was, whether possessed or prophetic. He ignored them. He ignored them all, a sudden fire in his heart. No. This stranger was not going to invite boat people to eat his fish. Fish from his sea, his father’s sea.
Bar Nahemyah ran up alongside him, and the town’s two Shimons went striding up from the sea together, one with a shofar about his neck, the other with fishing gloves tucked into his coat.
“Who is he, this man?” Bar Nahemyah said quickly. “He who speaks like a holy one? He sent those gulls away as easily as a boy might throw a rock.”
“I don’t care who he is. I don’t trust him.” Shimon lifted his voice. “Bar Yosef! Those fish came into shore in my boat, my nets. Whatever wonder has been done here, these fish are to feed my family!”
But Yeshua didn’t turn. Didn’t answer. He just walked along the line of the boats with that basket. He seemed to have forgotten that he held it. He looked at the boat people, and his face grew haggard with grief. Shimon hurried after, his alarm louder within him. He tried not to look at the people by the boats, tried just to barrel after the stranger, but the horrors there were such that he could not keep his eyes averted. Nor could Bar Nahemyah.
There were men and women both among the splintering and rotting boats, some lying beneath them, some sitting against the sides of the old hulls. Few were entirely clothed. One woman lay on her back, her eyes lifeless though her breasts rose and fell with her breathing. Her cheeks were hollowed; her rags had been torn from her hips, leaving her legs naked and bruised. They lay apart, where probably one of the other vagrants, or many, had thrust them open; she had not closed them. Perhaps she had not moved for hours.
Shimon and Bar Nahemyah hurried past.
By the next boat, a naked man sat by a pile of broken bones, bones too long to be those of a gull or a crane or a goat of the hills. He lacked the gray look of the other boat people, his face flushed with color as though freshly fed, and his eyes glinted as he noticed Shimon. Shimon’s body went cold; there was something in that man’s eyes that he had never seen in a man’s eyes before, and it made him fear. A fear of the gut, a fear of the hunted.
To those who slept and breathed and died beneath the boats, more emaciated even than he and his mother and brother, any flesh might be food, anything with meat and bone might be sustenance.
Yeshua bar Yosef stopped walking at last and, setting the basket down by his feet, he knelt by two women who sat listlessly against the hull of an overturned boat. One’s face was drained of life, her eyes sunken, her breathing ragged. The other—barely more than a girl—watched the first. Her eyes were moist. She held a sharp rock in her hand, dried blood at its tip. She lifted it warily.
“Don’t be afraid, talitha,” Yeshua said softly.
Talitha. Aramaic for “little girl.” As a man might call his daughter or his child-sister. The word and the tenderness in it struck Shimon. Why was he claiming kinship with her?
“I will not hurt her,” Yeshua said. “I will not … not do that. I only want to help.”
The girl just watched him silently.
The dying woman beside her stank of urine and sweat; Shimon and Bar Nahemyah hung back. But the stranger knelt by her as though he had no fear that she might touch him. The girl beside her took her hand and gripped it fiercely, and the woman lifted her head slightly and looked at Yeshua. Her face was so covered in grime that it was impossible to tell whether she was old or young, but the shape of her nose and the hue of her skin were Greek, not Hebrew, though the young woman beside her was one of the People. Shimon gazed at the dying woman in dread. She seemed barely human to him. There were footsteps soft in the grasses around them, and glancing up, he saw boat people standing on the other side of the derelict, staring at the basket of fish with desperate eyes. Bar Nahemyah curled his fingers aroundthe hilt of his knife, and the gaunt men approached no nearer.
Yeshua reached for the woman. Her companion’s breath hissed softly, but the girl did not move. Only watched him.
“Don’t touch her, bar Yosef!” Shimon cried.
“Why?” Yeshua’s shoulders quivered. His eyes were dark again with that anger with which he had hurled the gulls out over the sea. “Because everyone else refuses to?”
He parted the woman’s rags, baring her breasts and her ribs, which stood out in stark violence against her skin. Shimon drew back another step, and Bar Nahemyah closed his eyes as though against a sudden rush of memories.
“Oh,” Yeshua whispered.
“We starve and die.” The woman’s voice was dry and slow, as though she rarely used it. Her eyes seemed out of focus. “They’ve been … eating the bodies. And the dead come up from the water. We are forgotten.”
“You are not,” Yeshua said, his voice hoarse with emotion. He covered her again with her rags. She made no move to help him or hinder him, as though her body were no longer a part of her, no longer her concern. Her hands lay beside her like wrinkled, dead things. The young woman who sat with her took her right hand and squeezed it, her face pale. She hadn’t put down the sharp rock.
Yeshua watched the dying woman a moment, then seated himself beside her, not touching her, just sitting with her.
Beside Shimon, Bar Nahemyah whispered, “Bar Yonah, the women of our People all look that way, in the alleys of Yerushalayim, the city of our fathers. So many women leaning against walls, breathing, barely alive. Starving. Our own People. They look just like her. And they will go on looking that way until we shove the Romans into the sea.”
“We’ve shoved enough into the sea,” Shimon said bitterly, thinking of that terrible, beached corpse. He bent slowly and lifted the basket of fish. He could take it back down to the shore, get away from these starving beggars. The other boat people watched him. Yet he hesitated. Beside him, Bar Nahemyah stepped back and leaned against another boat. Shimon gazed at the woman, unable to look away. She was covered in her rags now, but the sight of her ribs seemed burned into his mind. It was his own nightmare: that the sea might one year yield no fish at all, until his mother and his useless brother were only skin stretched over bone, like this woman.
“Bar Yosef,” he whispered.
Yeshua did not look up.
“Bar Yosef, she is not of the People.”
No answer.
“Are you going to just sit there?”
<
br /> Yeshua took a slow breath. “I am in pain, Cephas.”
Shimon looked at him, startled.
“Great pain. Not just these …” He touched a bruise on his arm and winced. “This,” he said, lifting his fingers to his right ear. “It doesn’t matter if I wake or if I sleep. Always, always I hear screaming. You and your fathers and your sons yet unborn, all of you screaming, all of you … hurting. Sometimes it is so bad I can only stand, stand completely still, like a … like a rock, Cephas, like a rock, for hours and hours and hours.” His hands began to shake. “And I don’t know why, why none of you hear it, why not one of you hears it, why only I, only I am alone, I and the father and the father weeping in the desert. In the … She is screaming, this woman here, screaming, both of them, and no one hears. No one hears,” he whispered. “If I can comfort just her, just one of you, just one, maybe it will stop, maybe the screaming will finally stop.”
“She’s only a boat woman,” Shimon said. His voice subdued.
“What does it matter,” Yeshua said wearily. “The father made her and I heard him, I heard him, Cephas, weeping in the desert, and you cannot tell me, you cannot, that he doesn’t care. You cannot tell me that.” He lifted his face, and his eyes were bloodshot. “I have hungered and thirsted out in the desert, and I have been driven by stones, and I have been alone. So alone. No one should ever, ever be alone, Cephas. She doesn’t have to die alone.”