by Stant Litore
Here was yet another person who was entirely alone, with none to comfort her in her suffering. Another outcast, like himself. Like Tamar.
Without thinking about it, he shrugged off his father’s coat. One-handed, he draped it clumsily about the woman’s shoulders, then patted it down. His brother would likely be furious at this use of the coat, but Koach didn’t care. He took the woman’s arm and tried to lift her to her feet. After a moment, she stood, letting him help her. Some of her hair fell across her face, dirty and tangled. She kept her eyes lowered.
“What’s your name?” Koach asked softly.
She shook her head weakly.
He frowned. “I am Koach bar Yonah.”
She touched her fingertips to her throat in response. The sound she made was caught somewhere between a grunt and a exhalation.
“You can’t speak,” Koach whispered. He felt a small thrill of fear. Zebadyah the priest taught that when a man or a woman could not speak, it was because the shedim had slipped down their throat into their body, and they could only moan, or make no sound at all, like the dead that walked. But this young woman did not seem that way to Koach. She seemed small, and frightened, and so stricken with hunger and grief that she could hardly stand. And she had remained by her dying friend, so she loved.
Koach tried to think of some comfort for her. He glanced down at the corpse. “The priest will make sure there’s a cairn for her. He won’t leave her unburied …” He trailed off; the woman was still keeping her face hidden, and he realized that it must be terrible for her that her grief was this naked. He considered leaving her there, but his cheeks darkened with shame. He had left Tamar in her father’s home for a year, not knowing what to do, and she was still trapped there. He couldn’t leave this woman alone in her anguish too.
He glanced down the shore, and caught his breath. For a moment he just stood with the woman beside him, staring down at all the people from the town and all the fish being gathered into baskets. Some men were dragging boats up toward him, and a few were settling logs of driftwood over small, improvised firepits far above the incoming tide. Bar Cheleph sat at the nearest fire, but Koach didn’t even shiver at the sight of the man who’d once beaten him into the grass. He was too swept away by the sight of all those fish and all those people. A gust of wind brought the scent to him, and hunger groaned violent in his belly. He saw the stranger his brother had been talking with, striding out now along the shore with Bar Nahemyah following him. He saw his mother walking among the firepits, pausing to speak with the town’s other women. He saw Yesse, the priest’s crippled father, seated by the nets, lifting fish in his hands and shaking his head. Yesse was hebel, too, but was allowed to be, because he was old and had served his tribe for many years. Someone must have carried him out to the sands.
Koach’s eyes stung with moisture. His own grief seemed suddenly small. The fish had come back.
“Come on,” he said, gripping the woman’s arm. He could feel the warmth of her body through the sleeve of his father’s coat. “I’ll get you to a fire.”
The woman cast him a quick glance before lowering her face again. Her eyes, shining with tears, were Hebrew.
Koach helped her down from the grasses onto the shore, her steps small and uncertain. Sand fleas darted from beneath their feet. She was shaking.
“It will be all right,” Koach whispered. “It will be all right.”
Afterward, Shimon could never explain how he came to be walking among the derelict boats with a basket of fish. Yeshua bar Yosef had spoken with such anguish and anger that there had seemed no choice but to respond. Now Shimon moved with quick steps along the boats, tossing fish into the sand. Everything inside him rushed about, as though the stranger had let the wind into his body the way a man might let wind into a house.
He heard the priest’s rough voice.
“What are you doing, Bar Yonah?”
Zebadyah stepped between him and the next boat, pointing a gnarled finger at the basket of fish. His eyes were cold. “These,” he said, “do not eat with us. They do not grieve with us. They mutter Greek prayers by our sea, they take our food. Sometimes they come up in the night and reach into unboarded windows, or tap at our doors. You know this. What are you doing?”
The windows of the house of Shimon’s heart clacked shut, and rage boiled within like trapped summer heat. At this moment, he saw no kinship to his father in the priest’s face. Zebadyah bar Yesse seemed old, shrunken, his fingers crooked and curled as though he were fighting to grasp sand. And this man, this weak, frightened man, who had once dared to strike his mother, now dared tell him how he should manage his nets.
“I am Shimon bar Yonah,” he said. “I do what I please. This is my father’s town. That is my father’s boat. These are my father’s fish.” His voice hardened. “You … are not my father. Get out of my way.”
Zebadyah’s face flushed as though he’d been struck. He took a step back. “Shimon …”
“Get out of my way, old man,” he said.
“Ezra,” Zebadyah said hoarsely. “Remember Ezra. I tremble, Bar Yonah. There are fish, but all this can be taken away in a few beats of the heart. The waters wear away the stones. You are Yonah’s son, and the town will look to you. Do not listen to that witch!”
Shimon shoved by the priest and walked on, ignoring everything but the blood in his ears and the rage in his heart. Finally, he threw the basket into the sand by one of the vagrants in disgust and turned away as the emaciated man reached into the basket with terribly thin hands.
Shimon stumbled to the last boat in the line, a boat with its hull stove in and no one sheltering beneath it. He sat down against it, closing his eyes. He could hear his own heartbeat. He breathed raggedly. The sun was growing hotter in the sky, and the insides of his eyelids were red and bright.
After a while he smelled fried musht and felt a cool cloth pressed to his head. “I brought you a musht.” It was Yohanna’s voice.
He opened his eyes against a blaze of light and then shaded them with his hand, wincing. He could hear the smacking of lips and the moans of the boat people all around him, as the fish both filled and tormented their long-empty bellies. Yohanna was crouching beside him. He handed Shimon the cloth, then passed him a sheaf that had one musht in it.
Yohanna smiled faintly. “They’re cooking these, down by the water.”
Shimon took it, felt the heat against his hand through the lake-weed. The fish must have just been lifted from the coals and wrapped moments before. His belly snarled within him as all of his hunger woke. He lifted the fish to his mouth, tore into the hot flesh with his teeth. It burned his lips.
He didn’t talk until he’d finished the fish, and Yohanna just crouched nearby, watching his face.
“I spoke harshly to your father,” Shimon said.
“I know.” Yohanna took a slow breath. “He can be a hard man to speak with.”
Shimon grunted.
After a silence, he said, “That man. What is wrong with him? He treats the boat people like they are his kin.”
Yohanna’s eyes widened. “Kin,” he whispered. “‘We are all kin.’ God of Hosts, Shimon. That’s where I’ve seen him. I knew I’d seen him.”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“The stranger. I saw him once. With Ha Matbil.”
SCREAMING IN THE DESERT
Yeshua paced the edge of the tide, heading up the shore away from the nets and the people gathered about them. His shoulders were tense, his eyes dark. The wind tugged his hair across his bruised face. The bruises did not bother Bar Nahemyah; he’d seen enough men stoned in the south to know that a man finds rocks hurled at him not when he offends God but when he offends other men.
Yeshua had a long, restless stride, and Bar Nahemyah had to strain to keep pace with the man.
“I let her die alone. I shouldn’t have let her die like that. How could I let her die like that?” Yeshua stopped to look out over the water, but his tone
was as restless and haunted as his stride had been. “I heard this town’s hunger in the night, I heard it. I heard all of you. Night and day and night again in the desert. And the father … I heard the father weeping, weeping for you.” He glanced at his hands, his face raw with grief. “I cried out, and the fish … but for what? You are still screaming.”
Visions. The man was having visions. Bar Nahemyah trembled. Since the night of Ahava’s death, the night he’d held his beloved’s body shattered and bloodied in his arms, Bar Nahemyah’s yearning for a navi, a messiah to save their ravened land, had hardened into cold steel within him. Now that steel was hard and desperate and strong. The yearning for one who would be another Makkaba, riding against those who wounded their People, but who would be a navi also, one who saw visions in the desert or struck water from a rock. Some God-sent mighty one out of the stories of his fathers.
Barabba had not been that man.
“The fish and the birds heed you,” Bar Nahemyah called to Yeshua. “You are the navi, aren’t you?”
The stranger turned. “You think I’m a prophet, Zebadyah thinks I’m a witch.” Bar Nahemyah forced himself not to look away from the intensity in his gaze. “You should worry less about what I am,” Yeshua said, “and more about what I will do.” He glanced back toward the nets. “What can’t I remember?” He paused. For a few heartbeats, there was only the sigh of the water and the distant calls of the banished gulls. “Those corpses in the water. I can hear them even now. How did they get there?”
“The Romans—”
“The Romans.” Yeshua’s face tightened. “The Romans! The Romans didn’t starve those women by the boats. The Romans didn’t throw those dead in the sea and forget them.”
“No.” Guilt settled cold and heavy in his belly. “I did that.”
Yeshua stopped and looked at him. Bar Nahemyah found his voice suddenly hoarse. “Help me make amends, navi. Israel is unclean. I would cut the rot out of its body. Barabba would cut off the whole limb, but that cannot be the way. You … you care. For every one of our People, even those under the boats. I saw that.”
“No.” Yeshua’s voice was choked. “You mistake me for the Makkaba, or for your Outlaw. I don’t know what I am, I don’t know, I don’t know, but I am not that.”
Bar Nahemyah lifted his head, and he felt the first twinge of doubt. But he was on his knees, the hope in him too sharp to permit any turning back. “Place your hand on my head, navi. I will be the first to follow you. Say one word, but one word, and I will lift this shofar to my lips and sound a blast that every Roman in our land will hear. Don’t you have eyes to see? Ears to hear? You said you have heard the screaming of our People!”
“I have heard.” The pain in his eyes was terrible to see. “I hear them even now. Even now. The part of me that grew up a child in my mother’s house suffers exile. The part of me that walked out of the desert suffers the exile of all men and women, living and dead.” He paused. “I have to get through the door. Where I have to go, what I have to do, it is on the other side of that door. That burning door. That burning, burning, burning …”
Bar Nahemyah gasped.
Yeshua’s hands and face appeared to blaze with light. Bar Nahemyah felt the heat of it on his own skin, as though he were in the presence of mighty Eliya himself, who had burned the heathen priests from the land and summoned chariots of flame. His hands shook.
Then the heat and the light were gone.
Yeshua lowered himself to the sand and sat with his arms about his knees, his face stricken. “Can’t step through,” he whispered.
Bar Nahemyah was shocked to see tears on the man’s face.
“Please,” he said. “I know you are hearing what God hears. That is what the navi does. And it terrifies you, and it should. I understand your anguish. The things I have seen, navi. Things that make me want to cut out my eyes. I have seen Roman eagles on the walls of the Temple, on the walls of the lev ha-olam, the heart of the world. Children sitting with their backs to its gate with their ribs showing. I have seen Herod Antipas’s hired dogs arrest craftsmen who couldn’t pay their last coin to Caesar, and have them tossed into pits of the dead to be eaten. I saw a woman crawl to Barabba’s feet and die there in the dust after pleading with him to free our land. She died …” He swallowed. “She died from bleeding to death, navi. She died because those desert men the Romans hire to do their killing when they’ve wearied of it had cut away her breasts. They cut out her sheath, then her tongue. And when she begged for help, she could do so only with her eyes.
“That was a Hebrew woman. That was one of my tribe. I saw her and others, strong men and weak, die begging God to send a navi, a messiah. I saw—” Bar Nahemyah choked a little. His voice went hoarse. “The earth is drenched in the blood of our People. Our People, ground into the dirt by Roman heels. Our wounded, screaming People.”
Yeshua looked up at him wearily. “If you think to add more screaming, you are no son of Abraham nor of our father who watches us from above. You are someone else’s son, not his.” An edge of anger in his voice. “This land has always been taken in violence, but it has … it has never been held so. Our fathers did not hold and keep this land safe by violence against either the living or the dead, but by the Law.”
“The Law!” Bar Nahemyah cried. He would not let this man hide, like Zebadyah, behind the Law. “The Law says a man may take an eye for an eye!”
“What will you do, Kana,” Yeshua said slowly, “when you and the Romans have no eyes left?”
Kana.
Bar Nahemyah stopped, watching the man, holding the name in his mind.
“Kana,” he breathed. The Hebrew word for zealous. “Kana. I will take that name.”
“I think it is your name already,” Yeshua said. “But put away this thirst for death, put it away, please; death will find us all soon enough.”
“I don’t understand you,” Kana cried. “Are you a coward? Do you want us, all of us, all Hebrew men, to stand with our knives sheathed while Romans walk by and strike us across our faces, knock us to the dirt and take what they will? And you … you who hear … whatever it is you hear … you who speak with a voice of … of prophecy … what will you do? With your baskets of fish? What, will you feed men in the morning who will be dead by evening?”
“I … I don’t know what the dusk will bring.” Yeshua brushed the bruises on his arm with his fingertips. “I don’t know. Only the father knows that.”
THE SILENT WOMAN
With the woman from the boats leaning hard on him, Koach approached the small fire Bar Cheleph had kindled in the sand near the tideline. He had dragged driftwood and weeds and grasses to toss into it, and now sat solitary on a log and dug out a few hot coals with a stick to make a smaller firepit, one for cooking. A basket of fish waited in the sand by his hip.
When Koach seated the silent woman across the firepit from him, Bar Cheleph said without looking up: “I made this fire, Hebel. Find another.”
“You can’t hit me, Bar Cheleph.” There was no quiver in his voice. “Not here, where my brother and kin can see.”
Bar Cheleph bared his teeth at Koach, but said nothing. He began laying the fish across the coals.
At the scent of the fish roasting, oils bubbling out from the slit in their gullets, Koach’s mouth watered. The silent woman, too, stared at the fish.
“You hide behind Shimon bar Yonah as though you are his woman,” Bar Cheleph said in a low voice.
Koach bit back his anger and took up a small stick, stabbing one of the fish. Letting out his breath slowly, he turned and lifted the fish to the woman’s lips. Her eyes, still reddened from weeping, glanced at him gratefully as she bit in. Koach found the sight sensual, and disquieting: her head leaning forward, her small teeth cutting into the fish, her gaze lifted to his. He was suddenly aware of the woman’s body beneath his father’s coat, her curves. He swallowed.
She stared back at him a long moment before lowering her eyes. He took a breath. Shak
en, he understood. Bereft of her last companion, hungry and alone, she was offering herself for the assurance of food. In the next moment she must have glimpsed his awareness of this, for her eyes dilated briefly—with fear, not with desire.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, his throat dry. “The fish is a gift.”
The fear in her eyes grew. Perhaps she had never been offered a gift before. Not being able to offer something herself, not knowing what he might want in return, or whether it would be something she had to give—this had to be terrifying to her.
Koach saw all that in her eyes, in one of those flashes of insight that very young men sometimes have.
“No,” he said again. “I just want to see you eat.”
Bar Cheleph grunted. “Take her up the shore and rut with her, Hebel. Might be the only woman you ever get. That is”—he smiled, his eyes cold—“if you can rut.”
On any other day, Koach would have fallen silent and hung his head. But not this day. He rose to his feet, his good fist clenched at his side. All the fury and helplessness of the past year—of his whole life—rushed up at once, like a wave of the sea driving a boat before it. “My hand makes fittings,” he shouted. “Fittings for the boats! So that they can get out on the water. So that the town won’t starve. I am useful! What do your hands do?”
For a moment, Bar Cheleph kept his eyes on the coals. His face tightened, and Koach knew his words had cut deep, too. Bar Cheleph worked hard at mending nets, always worked hard at them, because his right hip didn’t work the way it should, not since that Roman officer had thrown a hard cedar desk onto him in his rushed escape from the dead. Bar Cheleph could not stand easily in a boat, and he did not go out with his adopted brothers and Shimon to wrestle with the sea. Yet his arms were thick with muscle, and he had succeeded in not being hebel. Barely.