by Stant Litore
Yeshua lowered his head. All around him, Shimon could hear the boat people whispering, “Fish, fish …” Shimon clenched his teeth. But Yeshua said nothing more. He was sitting shiva with that woman. Sitting in silence, mourning her own death with her.
The woman’s breath rasped. Shimon realized she didn’t have long, and this shiva would be short. He shook his head and stepped away, taking the basket with him. He would not stay to watch her die—that would be too much like his nightmares—and he would leave this man to his madness. There were fish to gut, to fry, to eat and store. A long day. Yet as he walked back down the line of boats with the gaze of the boat people on his back, guilt sat heavy in his chest.
Why should he feel that? These were not his kin.
When he‘d been a child and the fish were plentiful and the boat people less near to starvation, some of the fishers had made a custom of tossing a few glistening musht out of their boats onto the sand as they came in to shore. Seeing the beggars fight over the few small fish, some of the fishers had laughed. Still others tossed none at all, but fended the vagrants away from their nets, with the blunt ends of fishing spears if need be.
His father had been one of those.
Shimon’s belly growled, and he glanced down at the fish, some of them still opening and closing their mouths. Some of them motionless. The scent of them. His hunger woke like a beast within him. He shuddered; perhaps the whole town was turning into boat people.
He reached the last of the derelicts and leaned against it, breathing hard. He closed his eyes a moment but opened them immediately because in that brief darkness, he’d seen dead faces rising from the water again, dead fingers reaching to grasp him.
Shimon gave the boat a hard kick, needing some way to assuage the storm within him. The long-disused hull gave a little before his foot, and there was a startled cry from under the boat.
Shimon froze.
“Who is that?” he shouted.
This time there was no cry, no sound even of soft breathing. No one slipped out through the tight gap between the gunwale of the tipped boat and the ground.
“Come out!” Shimon dropped the basket to the grass at his feet. “I know it’s you.”
Again, no answer.
Shimon took the gunwale in his hands and lifted, gasping at the strain. For a moment the boat didn’t move, but then he managed to heave it slowly up and tip it, letting it fall back onto its keel with a crash that brought cries from a few of the boat people behind him.
The young man beneath the boat … was Koach.
SHIMON’S BROTHER
Koach had begun to dream of horses.
Even now there was a bulge in the left side of his shirt, where his mother had sewn for him that hidden inner pocket. He had concealed a wood-carving there, small enough to hold in his palm. A horse, strong and sleek as Barabba’s, carved of cedar. He had dreamed sometimes of Barabba’s stern face and the flashing hooves of his steed, but he had also dreamed of the scene Tamar had told him of: Barabba riding furiously from their town, his horse faster than wind or bird. A horse might carry him away from here, he and Tamar together, to some place that did not hate them.
Often, he rode horses in his dreams.
He had taken to visiting the boats on the shore where they were harbored by day. He studied how they were made, and learned which ones were damaged, which ones had fittings that had cracked or were under strain. He spent weeks at this, climbing beneath the overturned boats and reaching up and learning with his fingers. He went early and returned early, feeling his mother’s eyes on him as he left the house and fearful of being caught by the town’s other youths, now that Bar Nahemyah had been swept away from the town.
He began carving fittings for boats, leaving them, one at a time, on the doorstep of the nagar’s shop attached to Benayahu’s house. He did this many times. One day, as he approached the door, Benayahu opened it and gave Koach a hard look, then glanced at the fitting Koach held.
“You have a skilled hand.”
Koach sucked in his breath and tensed to run, fearing the man’s anger at his presumption and his gift, already feeling the blows to come. Benayahustood in the door a moment more, his silence full with thought. Then he turned and went inside, leaving the door open. An invitation, or a reprieve. Koach wondered which. He gathered what courage he could, then strode to the door and ducked into the shop, into a dim interior rich with the smell of cedar curing.
Benayahu was there. smoothing a long plank by the flickering light of an oil lamp. The shop had a window but it was boarded up so tightly that barely even a chink of sun made it through. He was a man who had lost too much to the dead.
He didn’t look up to acknowledge Koach, but with his foot he slid a block of wood and a knife across the floor toward him.
For several beats of his heart, Koach was all but overwhelmed with an urge to take Benayahu’s hammer in his one hand and drive it into the man’s brow, such was his fury at this man who left bruises on Tamar’s body. The man had turned his back to Koach, bent over his work.
Koach forced himself to breathe calmly. He was here to be near Tamar, to find some way to help her. Striking her father and getting himself stoned would not help. His face hard, Koach sat on the floor. He set the block between his knees and got to work.
From that day, Koach had assisted Benayahu with his carpentry. He had found a use at last, a wall to build between himself and the name Hebel. And he was good at it. He didn’t know how many fishermen in the town realized it, but within the year his craftsmanship had appeared on half the boats on their shore.
Benayahu was a strange man, silent and moody like Koach’s own brother, his eyes often dark with guilt and violence barely restrained. He rarely said a word, just gestured to show what he wanted Koach to do. Sometimes he took a tool out of Koach’s hand, without touching him, and showed Koach how to use it correctly. There was no affection in his face at those times, only a cold determination. The man had no son, and no other apprentices in his shop. Except for his daughter, he lived alone, and he must have lived with the certainty that when he died, his skill would die with him.
Sometimes, after he put his tools away, the aging nagar went to stand by one wall of the shop, where thick Hebrew letters had been carved into the stone. It was a name, a woman’s. The nagar would just stare at the letters. Then he would turn and pass through the inner door into his house, leaving Koach in the shop. The lock would slide shut with a hard, bronze clack. Koach would stand there, his hand clenched, shaking with helpless anger. Because those were the evenings that ended with Tamar being beaten.
At first, Koach tried to think of some way to speak with Benayahu about his daughter, but he could not find that way. He had also hoped for a chance to speak with Tamar herself, but he caught few glimpses of her by day. The door between the shop and the house was kept shut, and Benayahu did not invite him in. Nor did the man leave his shop; each day he brought a waterskin in with him before Koach even arrived. Once, only once, Koach glanced up to see the door open the smallest crack, and Tamar peering in at him. In the next moment, Benayahu struck the side of his head. Tamar’s eyes widened and she shut the door swiftly.
“Look at my daughter again and I'll throw you in the sea with the dead, hebel boy," the nagar said, his voice quiet and cold. Those were almost the only words he had spoken to Koach since the first day.
Koach lowered his head, nodded. He unclenched his left hand, rage hot in his heart. His face ringing.
The beatings had become worse, so that some nights Tamar did not come to the rooftop but only lay shaking in her bedding in the atrium, where Koach could barely see her.
They could not shout to each other from rooftop to rooftop, but over the nights of that year, they made for each other a secret language of signs and gestures, and with movements of their hands they sang silently to each other of love and need. His need to be useful to one other person, to be loved by one other. Her need to be free of her father’s house. A h
and pressed to the breast meant: My heart. You touch my heart. A flapping motion with one hand meant: How I wish we might fly away like birds. Fingers pressed to the lips meant: I wish you could kiss me.
Having found no way to speak to her father, Koach began to dream, by night and by day, of carrying her away from that house, as Samson or some mighty one of centuries past would have done. But he was not Samson, nor mighty; his very name was a lie.
By day in the shop, he’d glance down at the fittings he was carving, his thoughts feverishly intense. He lacked strength, but he had skill. The nagar had seen that; others might also. There were Greek towns across the sea where there was no Law and no priest. He didn’t know how the Greeks would look on a cripple, but surely they needed skilled woodworkers. If Tamar would fly away with him, perhaps there was some place, somewhere he could carry her to.
At last, a night came when he stood on his roof, shrugged the concealing wool from his shoulders, and, gazing across at her body, beautiful as the curve of the moon, and at her eyes that were so strangely calm after her pain, he decided he would tell her what he intended to do.
They would meet by the boats, but they would go on foot, the long walk around the shore. He couldn’t row a boat, and the town had no horses.
THE BOAT PEOPLE
The boat tipped and the sky opened hot and blue above him. Koach blinked up at his brother’s face.
“What are you doing here?” There was nothing polite in Shimon’s voice, and something in Koach hardened when he saw the contempt and frustration in his brother’s face.
Koach was lying in the sand beneath the boat, wrapped in a heavy water-coat that had been their father’s. Rahel had woven Shimon his own coat for the cold nights on the sea and had given this one to Koach, the only protection he had from his dead father. But it was too large for him, and often he felt small and childlike in it.
Koach rose, an ungainly move that involved pushing himself up with his good, left arm and then hopping to his feet.
“I’ll go home.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice.
“Why are you out here?” Shimon said again.
“I was waiting.” He didn’t meet Shimon’s eyes, concealing the wound in his heart.
He had slipped down to the boats after dark, after his brother had gone out to sea and his mother had given herself to sleep. He had waited, and waited, until the day crept beneath the gunwale of the overturned boat and it was too late to slip quietly back. Then he could only lie there while gulls called somewhere above the wooden roof of the boat’s keel, their lonely, forlorn cries giving voice to the fears of his heart. And when the shore had echoed with the startled shouts of the town’s men, he had lain still and silent beneath the boat, touched by no curiosity.
She hadn’t come to him.
Perhaps she’d realized that the young man she’d been dreaming with could never cast a net for her, never catch fish, never bring home food for the fire.
Now he’d been discovered, and his face was dark with shame. A boy with no bar ‘onshin, no betrothed, with dreams he hadn’t earned. A boy who had thought, for one year of longing and desperation, that he could be a man.
“Waiting for what?” Shimon demanded, towering over him, as he always did.
The look Koach turned on him was resentful. “What do you care?” Koach cried.
“You.” Shimon started to step away but then turned back, every line in his body tense.
“Bar Yonah,” a quiet voice said, and with a shock, Koach recognized Bar Nahemyah—Bar Nahemyah who’d been gone so long—walking toward them through the boats.
“Stay out of this,” Shimon said. To Koach he said, his voice quiet and cold, “Every night I risk my life and my neck for you, to feed you, and I cannot even keep you safe in my own house! Get out of here. You shouldn’t be here. Raca—you have never been anything but a dead weight, something I have to look after, house, clothe, protect—and you give nothing back. There’s no place for you here, among the boats. Run home.”
Koach couldn’t bear to see any more of that old disappointment in his brother’s eyes. As he backed away, he saw the stranger rise to his feet, a few boats down, a look of pain in his bruised face. Slouched against the hull behind him sat a woman as gray as a corpse and a young woman beside her, her shoulders shaking. Koach stared at the girl; she was weeping without sound, the way Tamar did.
“You’re always ashamed of me,” Koach said. He didn’t look at his brother. He just blinked quickly and then walked away from them all. He heard his brother call his name.
“Give him a moment, Bar Yonah.” Bar Nahemyah’s voice.
Koach walked on unchallenged until he was a little way up into the tall tideline grasses, pale blades that brushed his cheeks in the chill wind.
He was not crying.
He didn’t cry anymore.
This moisture on his face was only drops of the sea carried to him by the wind.
Only that.
For a while he gazed bleakly at the cracking, battered houses ahead. He could walk up there now, to Benayahu’s shop, as on any other day. He could pretend nothing had happened, draw his shame about him like a coat, growing smaller and smaller inside it. Or he could stand at the door of the house and call for her. But that would shame and endanger her, and himself. And what could she say, what could she tell him that he didn’t already know?
The voices behind him grew louder, more heated. “Your brother,” the stranger was shouting. “That was your brother, your brother, your own brother. And you call him hebel and raca? How can you … how can you do that? My own brothers … my own …” His voice choked, and it took him a moment to speak again. “What is wrong with you? Do you even know how blessed, how blessed you are, that you have a brother, you have kin in your own house, your own roof, people who sit with you to eat …”
Koach glanced over his shoulder, saw the stranger gesture wildly toward the shore. Following the gesture, Koach realized for the first time what was happening there. He walked back through the grasses, aghast. All those fish. All those nets spilled open on the sand. All those people, the fisher’s wives and their older kin and even a few from Kfar Nahum itself, men who worked in small shops and not in boats. All of them gathering up the fish. Koach stared down at that crowd of baskets and bins, speechless.
“None of you stand near each other,” the stranger was shouting as Koach approached, “not even brothers! And all your boats … all your boats on the water, none of them calling out to the others. Just silence, that silence over the water …”
Koach listened. The aloneness in the stranger’s voice was familiar to him.
“If you were one of us,” Shimon said, “you’d understand—”
“I want to understand!”
“—but you aren’t one of us.”
“I know!” the stranger cried. “I am unhomed! They threw me out. I came back from the desert and told them what I’d heard, what I’d heard, what I still hear, what I keep hearing, and what woke me weeping in the night, the truth, the truth, I told them the truth, and they threw me out.” The stranger’s voice was quiet and nearly choked with pain, yet his words carried. “And I ran, Cephas. I ran. All the way here. And I am exhausted and I am hungry and I am afraid …”
He was interrupted by a loud, prolonged rasp, something unlike any other sound Koach had ever heard. An alarming sound. He turned to look. It was the woman with the gray face, the woman sitting against the cracked and beaten hull. Her breast fell once more and then did not rise. Koach saw the light leave her eyes. One moment her eyes were those of a living woman. The next, they were empty. It was like looking to see your reflection in a bowl that has no water in it, no mirror.
She was gone.
The wind in the grass.
The stranger gazed at her body with horror. “No,” he whispered.
Even Shimon seemed shaken, as though the malakh ha-mavet, the angel of death, had brushed his shoulder as it passed.
“N
o.” The stranger went pale. “I told her she didn’t need to die alone.”
Shimon murmured, “Bar Yosef …”
“No,” Yeshua cried. “No! All of you screaming and screaming and screaming and none of you hearing! Do not talk to me, Cephas! Just do something about it! Please!”
The stranger bent and lifted the basket of fish from the sand, and thrust it into Shimon’s arms. The broad-shouldered fisherman staggered back until he caught his balance.
“Help me,” the stranger pleaded.
“Bar Yosef, our own families starve.”
“No, no one will … no one will starve, no one. There will be so many fish.” He sounded as though tears might come. “Please, Cephas. Feed these women and these men, Hebrew or Greek or whatever you see, just feed them. Please.”
The man backed away, his face still stricken with horror. Then he turned and all but ran through the grasses, away from the boats, his pace desperate, the wind tearing at his hair.
“Wait!” Bar Nahemyah called. He ran after the stranger.
Shimon stood shaken, staring after them, still holding the basket. As though the woman’s death rasp was still too loud in his ears, in his heart. Koach could see the horrified recognition in his brother’s eyes: the boat people weren’t supposed to be like that. Like people. Like men and women who might weep for each other and then die hungry and alone.
Shimon exhaled slowly. “You and I, we will talk later,” he muttered, then walked slowly away down the line of boats, the basket in his hands, with some of the boat people shuffling after him or stumbling to their feet as he neared them.
With his brother gone, Koach only felt empty. He was hebel again, useless as a bit of a driftwood washed up among these grasses.
Numbly, he approached the two women, one alive, one dead. The younger woman glanced up at his approach with grieving, tired eyes. A sharpened rock slipped from her hand to the sandy dirt, as though she simply didn’t care anymore. Her face was wet with tears, but her crying was silent and she barely trembled with it. After a moment, she leaned her head on the dead woman’s shoulder.