by Stant Litore
Koach could neither step through nor let the rug fall and walk away. He could not move. His heart beat so fast from his run into the town—like that day Barabba had hunted him and Tamar had pulled him into her father’s house, onto that very bedding where she now stood, stinking like fish left to rot on the shore. Koach kept looking at her wrists. He should step forward, he should unbind her. He should hear her whispering to thank him for coming to help her, at last, after the years of being beaten and broken with none to step between her and her father. He should help her now.
But his mind could not grasp the strangeness of this scene. This girl who had kissed him, tied in her own house. Reeking.
He heard a soft footstep behind him, at the outer door. A hoarse whisper: “Koach?”
His mother’s voice.
The corpse standing on the bedding turned its head slowly, its eyes glinting in the dark. It hissed.
Gasping, Koach lurched backward, tripped on the edge of the rug, and fell, tearing the rug aside, letting in a flood of sunlight. Even as the floor knocked the breath from him, he caught a nightmare glimpse of Tamar’s body stumbling toward him, one foot caught in linens, her arms trapped behind her, the dull sheen of her eyes.
Rahel screamed. Her cry held not only fear for her son but anguish, as from some night of grief years past yet horribly present.
The next moments were confused, like things witnessed during a fever. For an instant the dead girl was on top of him, her breath cold as winter on his throat. Her teeth snapped near his skin, her body shaking with a low growl. Then the weight of her was gone and he was rolling to the side and there was another scream from his mother, a scream that cut into his heart.
Koach scrambled to his feet and saw his mother and the girl grappling. They rolled on the floor and his mother was on top of her and drove the heel of her hand down against the corpse’s chin, driving her head back. The neck didn’t break, and the corpse lunged up, snapping its teeth at her, its jaws closing on her hair. Rahel gasped and fell back, pulling the corpse with her; there was a flash of metal in the sun, a knife in Rahel’s hand, pulled from somewhere within her clothes. She pressed her arm to the corpse’s throat, keeping it at bay while she sawed swiftly through her hair near the scalp above her right ear. It bit toward her hand and she jerked back, dropping the knife. It rattled across the floor.
Breathing in quick gasps, Rahel scooted backward away from the growling dead, kicking wildly as it lunged and grasped at her. Then Koach grasped his mother’s arm. With a strength that startled him, he pulled her to her feet, his body hot with adrenaline. For an instant her gaze met his, her eyes wide. Then they ran.
They rushed out together into the atrium, with the corpse right behind them.
“Tamar, please!” Koach cried, glancing over his shoulder.
She was stumbling after them, snarling, her arms bound behind her, her hair wild about her face, her eyes glazed with death.
Mother and son ran to the outer door. Koach gasped her name under his breath, over and over again: “Tamar, Tamar, Tamar—”
They burst through the door out into the street, and turning Koach saw the girl staggering after them, lurching across the threshold, her wrists still behind her, her jaw distended in a snarl of hunger.
Rahel stumbled, and Koach tore his hand from her grasp.
“Koach!”
“No,” he gasped.
He couldn’t leave Tamar like that.
Even as he faced her, he heard running footsteps, a few shouts. Men from the shore, and a few women. Bar Cheleph was there, and Yohanna. Their faces were pale.
The dead girl turned its head, taking in all the living, and then lurched toward them. But it stumbled and sprawled on its face.
The townspeople formed a wide semicircle, keeping back while the corpse thrashed in the dirt. It lifted its head and its jaws gaped open, a low groan of hunger.
“Tamar,” Koach whispered.
She had torn her dress in her fall, and Koach could see glimpses of her body. He recalled those nights on the rooftop, gazing at each other. His belly heaved and he twisted to the side, falling to his knees and retching into the dirt outside her father’s house.
He knelt there, vomiting up everything he could and then vomiting up empty air, uncaring if the body of his love reached him or not, everything coming apart inside him. An arm around him and a murmur in his ear told him Rahel was with him, but he didn’t turn to her. He just shook and shook and spewed out his insides.
A sandalled foot stepped past him. Koach glanced up in a haze, saw Bar Cheleph limping toward the corpse where it twisted in the dirt, having rolled onto its back. Bar Cheleph held a hooked fishing spear in his hand, perhaps taken from one of the fishers gathered silently about them. Anger had contorted his face. It was as if, seeing this dead girl bound in the dirt, helpless to seize and devour, he saw a moment at last where he might release his rage. His fury at his parents’ deaths, at his town’s, at all that had been taken from his People by the living and the dead. He lifted his foot and drove it into the corpse’s face with a feral cry and a cracking of bone beneath his sandalled heel.
“These things!” he shouted. “They eat up everything, everything we have, everyone we love.” The crowd watched him and the dead girl, mute in their horror or in their catharsis. Their eyes glazed with a particular kind of lust, a need to see violence done. Koach got to his feet, breathing hard, just as Bar Cheleph bent over the corpse and drove the spear down through its breast. The dead girl spat and hissed, one side of her face crushed in, her wrists trapped beneath her, her body twisting and writhing in the dirt. Her head jerked up and her jaws snapped, but the fisherman was out of her reach.
Bar Cheleph stared down at her face, his own contorted. He twisted the spear in her body, his weight on it holding her pinned to the ground.
“Stop!” Koach cried.
Without thinking, he threw himself at Bar Cheleph, slamming his small weight into the man’s side and grabbing the spear with his hand to wrest it from him and pull it free of Tamar’s corpse. Bar Cheleph gasped as the breath was driven from him. He backhanded Koach savagely, knocking the boy to his knees. A sigh from the gathered men and women, as though they were witnessing violence committed in a drama, as the Greeks do.
“Leave him alone!” Rahel cried, and struggled against two women who held her back.
It took Koach a moment for his vision to clear. Then he saw Bar Cheleph looming over him, his face cold. The corpse spat and twisted on the ground, trying to get at either of them.
“Get back to your mother, Hebel,” Bar Cheleph snarled.
But now Koach’s body was hot with his own anger, and he was wild with his own grief, which was no less than Bar Cheleph’s. Koach glanced at the dead girl’s face and his eyes were dry. Hebel. Useless. He had not been able to help this lovely girl who had kissed him, this girl who had protected him from the Outlaw, this girl who had been kind to him. He had not saved her from her father’s blows. Nor from this.
Bar Cheleph turned his back to the boy, wrenched free the spear, and drove it in again. The corpse uttered no sound of pain, only frustrated, animal hunger. It threw its small body from one side to the other, but could not free itself of the spear, nor lift its arms to catch at the warm, enticing life above it. Whether it could hear the drumbeat of a living heart or the ocean sound of Bar Cheleph’s blood or the wind of his breathing—whatever it sensed that made it yearn for meat and flesh—it could not reach him. The girl’s lips gaped wide and it screeched, a sound that cut into all who were listening like the crack of a Roman whip. And the screech went on and on, a primal demand for life and food, a demand that could never be satisfied.
That screech wrenched Koach into motion. Maybe he had been hebel, but he could not allow himself to be useless to her now. Groping with his hand in the dirt, he found a jagged stone a little larger than his hand.
Koach got shakily to his feet. Bar Cheleph ignored him; he was merely the useless, unclean
boy that he had beaten aside. The man’s whole attention was on the screeching corpse. Koach looked down through a blur of moisture at the stone he held, something heavy and solid and final.
He had to do this.
There was no one else.
“Forgive me,” he whispered.
Koach bent quickly over the corpse, startling a cry from Bar Cheleph. Tamar’s body lunged at him, her jaw gaping. With a cry, Koach drove the stone down into her head. He screamed her name once, then fell silent but for a small, choked sound.
WOUNDS FROM THE DEAD
Silence in the street.
“My son,” Rahel whispered.
But Koach didn’t answer. He just crouched over the body of the young woman he’d loved, the woman who had touched him so often in his dreams as he lay in the quiet hours in his bedding. He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed raggedly. The stone fell from his limp hand, a soft thud into the dirt.
No one spoke. No one moved. Rahel swayed a moment on her feet as though feeling faint, but she didn’t approach. Bar Cheleph took a few unsteady steps away, looking on, wild-eyed.
Koach opened his eyes and, against all Law and custom, he pressed his hand to the dead girl’s cheek. Her skin was cold. So cold.
His chest clenched in on itself. Pain, a new pain. He had known fear and rejection and grief, but this was a new loss. She was someone he had loved, someone whose heart had mattered to him, someone he had yearned to protect. Gone, torn from her life as savagely and quickly as a fish might be ripped from the sea.
“Tamar,” he whispered.
There wasn’t much left of her face; he had destroyed her with that blow from the rock. His hands began to shake.
She hadn’t forsaken him.
She had never intended to miss their tryst.
While he had been reviling her bitterly in his heart, she had been in that room, dying. He leaned back on his heels and just breathed. Just breathed. Then he took from his pocket the carving he’d made for Tamar, the wooden horse.
He turned it over and over in his hands, feeling the smooth length of its limbs, the intricate carving of its mane, the small roundness of its eyes.
She was dead.
She had tried to eat him.
But more than that, she was gone. The shedim within her corpse had eaten her heart and her soul, leaving only hunger behind, only that.
Koach didn’t know how long he sat there, turning that carving in his hands as though it were the only thing real left in the world, the only thing that wouldn’t fade away and die. But at last he tucked the carving gently into the bodice of Tamar’s nightdress, giving it to her as he’d meant to. Then he rose to his feet, while others around him murmured. He stepped up through Benayahu’s door and into his atrium, hardly aware of his own movements. He found the small knife his mother had lost and brought it back to the body. No one took a step toward the corpse; no one bothered Koach as he knelt by Tamar and turned her gently to her side. Then he sawed at her bonds, one-handed. She must have been bound by her father, who had then fled his fevered daughter and his house when she stopped breathing.
Or even before she stopped breathing.
But no, there was blood on her mouth; she had risen and bitten him. But how had she been bitten? How? Her father had kept her so tightly locked away. Had she started down toward the boats to meet her lover, then been set upon by some corpse out of the sea? Run home then in terror, bleeding? Or had something crawled into their house? Had she eaten a fish that had nibbled at a corpse? Could such a thing make the fish unclean, and the one that ate it unclean? If so, why wasn’t the whole town defiled? How had this happened?
The cords snapped with a quiet, rasping sound, and Koach set down the knife, his hand trembling. He lay Tamar on her back again and rose to his feet, breathing hard. She had been bound. That man—that man who had beaten Tamar, night upon night upon night—he had just tied her like a slave and left her here. Clear in his heart he recalled all the times Tamar had walked painfully to the roof after a severe beating. He recalled his own fantasies of killing her father, of driving a fish hook through his breast, of taking a boat and slipping out to the sea by night with her, to seek some far town on the other shore, some place where he would not be shunned for his withered arm, some place where a cripple might find a way to feed and shelter the woman he desired. He recalled the beatings he had seen, how he had seen them—and done nothing. Now it was too late.
There was a bellow, and without turning he knew that his brother was forcing his way through the onlookers. “Koach!” Shimon cried hoarsely. “Koach!”
Koach didn’t answer. His fist was clenched at his side, his other hand limp and useless. He felt Rahel’s hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it away.
“Koach!” Shimon shouted again. Then a grunt as he shoved someone out of his path. “Let me by!”
Koach glanced back then and saw his brother break free of the press, all those faces drawn with horror. Bar Cheleph had faded back into the crowd; Koach caught a glimpse of his face, flushed as though with shame.
Shimon stopped; the two brothers faced each other. The rage in Koach’s breast went out like a candle at a breath of the shedim, a gust of wind in the night. He looked from his brother’s face to Tamar’s, her lips still pulled back as for a snarl or a screech; her fingers still half-curled into claws, her chest completely still. Koach unclenched his own fist, and fatigue settled over him like heavy mud. His hand began to shake.
“I am not strong enough to carry her to the tombs,” he said.
Shimon glanced at the rock that had fallen from his brother’s hand and then at Koach’s face. This was his younger brother, the feeble one, whose very birth had failed the hopes of his family. Yet what he saw now in Koach’s eyes struck him to the heart. This was no boy looking back at him with tears in his eyes; this was a young man. In his face Shimon saw graven both the stubborn strength of his father and the ferocity of his mother, to defend his own. A hot pool of regret settled in his belly—regret for his words earlier, by the boats.
Grimly, Shimon shrugged the heavy water-coat from his shoulders and lay it on the ground beside the girl’s corpse. Then he took the fishing gloves from his belt and put them on. He took hold of the body and rolled it into the coat. “I will take her,” he said, wrapping the coat about her like a shroud. He pulled the hood over her face, shutting away that feral grimace, that blood-stained mouth.
His brother watched him silently as he lifted the girl into his arms. She was light, as though he held only a few coats. Neither of them said anything. What was there to say?
A hand gripped his shoulder. “I will help, Bar Yonah.” That was Bar Nahemyah, his gaze fixed on the dead girl.
“No need, Bar Nahemyah.”
“Call me Kana,” the man said softly. “It is a long walk—”
He fell still at Shimon’s look.
Shimon turned toward the crowd, who stood between him and the walk out of this town to the tombs of his People. He could feel Koach’s gaze on his back. The sun overhead seemed too cold. After a moment, those gathered parted to let him pass, standing aside, staring at him as though they were witnessing some holy rite. Bar Cheleph leaned back against the wall of the house opposite Benayahu’s, his face lowered. As Shimon passed his mother, whose face was flushed as from exertion, she lifted her voice softly and began to sing the Words of Going, the most ancient of songs, the keening lament for the dead. The sound made Shimon’s eyes burn; he could never hear it without recalling the singing on the hill the morning after most of Kfar Nahum died. The grief of the town’s women, carried to him on the air as he cared for his mother and infant brother, as he ran down to the sea to watch for his father’s boat.
Having passed through the crowd, Shimon looked back. He saw his brother still standing alone where the body had lain, with that haunted look in his face. Then Shimon could not hold back his fury. The last of the day’s numbness broke, and all the anger of a fatherless son poured out, and in that
moment he knew the breach in the wall of his numb grief could never be repaired, never be shored up again. Though his heart was naked and torn with pain, he faced the men and women of his village. His gaze swept them all, and some of them ducked back as though he had struck at them. Bar Cheleph didn’t look up.
“The Romans,” he said in a voice cold as the tomb, “say we are a small people. Would you prove them right? Do we defile our dead? This is not worthy of our fathers. It is not worthy of our town. It is not worthy of our People. You are small men, and you shame me.” His face quivered with emotion; then he got it under control. “My brother, who you call hebel, he is the only one today who is koach, the only one whose heart and will are strong.” Shimon spat in the dirt before their feet and glanced at Bar Cheleph, who didn’t look up. “I am ashamed of you,” he said.
Bar Cheleph’s shoulders tensed.
Then Shimon turned and carried that dead girl from his town.
Koach lowered himself to his knees and touched his forehead to the earth, oblivious to his brother’s receding footsteps and to the whispers around him. “God,” he murmured, “let me sleep and find that this is only the dream country.” His shoulders shook, but he did not weep. He heard his mother’s voice fall silent. He heard some walk by him and depart. He paid none of them any mind, just pressed his face to the dirt. It was like something deep inside him was lost and he couldn’t find it, didn’t know what it was, didn’t know where to start searching.
He heard Bar Cheleph, his voice anxious. “Bat Eleazar, I meant no offense to your son.”
By which he meant Shimon.
Koach didn’t hear his mother’s reply. He whispered, “You killed her.”
Stillness.