by Stant Litore
“You killed her,” Koach said. Louder. Lifting his face from the dirt.
Bar Cheleph looked shaken. “She was already dead, Hebel.”
“You killed her.” His voice a hoarse whisper. “You never even saw she was hurting. That she needed help.” His chest went hot. “You all killed her.”
Bar Cheleph drew back, as though wishing to flee. Yohanna, who stood near, took his arm and murmured something in his ear. Around them, a few other faces went ugly. Koach braced himself, every line in his body taut and furious, but before either words or blows could fall on him, he heard a low gasp.
“Koach—”
Turning, he saw his mother swaying on her feet. Her face had gone gray, her eyes a little glazed. She held her right hand pressed to her left arm just below the shoulder, and with a shock Koach saw that her sleeve had darkened beneath her grip.
“Koach—I don’t—I don’t—”
Her voice was faint.
Then her eyes rolled back, and with a slow, terrible kind of grace, she slumped to the ground as though between one heartbeat and the next her body had been emptied of her spirit.
WHAT HAPPENED AT RAHEL’S HOUSE
Koach was by her side at once. He pressed his left hand to her brow, and paled. She was burning.
“No,” Koach whispered.
Slowly, as his heart beat brutally within his chest, he drew Rahel’s sleeve up her arm. The underside of the sleeve, between wrist and elbow, had gone dark with blood.
Then he found it: a bite in her arm, just above the elbow. Flesh had been torn out of her arm, and only the thickness of the wool sleeve she’d pressed to the wound had prevented it from spilling her life’s blood already to the earth at her feet. Now that she had fainted, it ran down her arm in a rush like red water, darkening the soil beneath her. With a cry, Koach pressed the sleeve quickly against the wound again, holding it there with his one hand. His eyes burned; she had concealed the bite from her sons, had not wanted them to know she was about to die.
About to die.
His legs gave out beneath him; he found himself sitting by her, everything a blur to him but the wound on her arm and the pressure he held against it. Tamar, Rahel. The waters wear away even the stones, and nothing is left.
Yohanna crouched by him. His voice came from a great distance. “—have to get her inside. Make her comfortable. Let me help, bar Yonah.”
He glanced up at the older man’s face, saw the pity in his eyes, but it was like looking at a reflection in the water rather than at something real.
“She needs you to be strong, Koach. Strong.”
Strong. His name, Koach. The word for strong.
He heard his breathing, loud in his ears. “Yes,” he whispered. “Inside.”
Yohanna placed his arms around Rahel and lifted her, his face strained; Koach got his arm around Rahel’s legs and did what he could to help carry her; people gave way as the two carried Rahel awkwardly toward the door of her house, so near Benayahu’s. At the doorstep, Koach set her legs down and fumbled a moment with the latch on the door, then swung it open, putting his shoulder against the heavy wood. Yohanna carried Rahel through, and Koach followed, his heart pounding, panic rising dark and shrieking in his mind.
As he caught the door with his good hand and began to swing it closed again, he found Bar Cheleph on the doorstep.
“I’ll help,” Bar Cheleph said quietly, his face dark with shame.
Koach shut the door in his face.
Yohanna carried Rahel into the atrium while Koach ran and gathered up blankets from her room. He made a small bed by the olive tree, then left Yohanna to lay his mother there and hurried for water from her ewer. When he came back, he found Yohanna pacing. Rahel lay with her eyes closed, her fingers moving restlessly over her blanket. Small whimpers came from her throat, each of them like a shock of ice to Koach’s heart.
“She’s going to die,” he whispered. “She’s going to die.”
“I have to get the navi,” Yohanna said, his face pale. He bolted toward the door.
Koach heard his steps. Heard the door sway open, heard it slam shut. He sank to his knees by his mother, a bowl of water in his hand. Some beast was clawing its way up his chest, tearing him. An old beast, the helplessness. He was hebel again. His mother was dying, dying the worst of deaths—the one where the body staggered, lurching, to its feet once it no longer breathed. His eyes blurred. His brother wasn’t here; there was only him. And he could do nothing.
He took her right shoulder and shook her gently. “Amma,” he moaned, “amma.”
Her breathing was shallow. Her eyes opened at his call, making him gasp, but they didn’t focus; they seemed to stare past him, at the open sky.
“My son,” she rasped.
He fumbled, found her hand, clutched it fiercely. His throat was dry. “I am here, amma. I’m here.”
“My son, your father would have loved you.” She began to shake, as though she were terribly cold, though her face shone now with sweat. “I kept you too safe. I was so—afraid—for you. He would have seen how strong you were. He would have been proud of you.”
“Amma,” he whispered, pleading.
“Tzelem elohim, my son. Your face is God’s face; you are his likeness. What does your arm matter. Your face is—so beautiful. Tell Shimon …”
She fell silent.
“What? What do I tell him?”
But she didn’t say anything more. Her breathing was even shallower. Koach watched the tiny rising and falling of her chest, cold with fear.
He didn’t know how long he sat there watching her die. He didn’t care. In all the town only Rahel and Tamar had spoken to him as to one who might be respected and loved. And perhaps Bar Nahemyah. Now he would be alone. He’d thought he was alone before. Now he would truly be alone. What hopes he’d kept secret had been crushed, what people he’d leaned on had been torn from him.
Breathing against the tightness in his chest, Koach tucked Rahel’s blanket about her. That took some doing with only one hand, and for a moment he glanced down at his lifeless arm and hate seared through him, self-hate, hot as a furnace. He struck his chest with his left hand, because the pain of that small blow distracted him and jarred him back to the present, to the things that needed to be done. He got up, went to the little room that was Rahel’s during the winter, took down his father’s tallit from its peg, and brought it back to her. He lay it folded beside her, then took her right hand and curled her fingers around its edge. His father could not be here, at his mother’s last breath. There was only his son, only one of his sons, the worthless one. His father’s shawl was the only small comfort he knew how to provide.
A heavy knock at the outer door startled him.
But he didn’t rise until the knock came again, and Yohanna’s voice called: “Bar Yonah! Bar Yonah!”
Numb, he went to the door and opened it. Yohanna stood at his doorstep, and with him stood the bruised, haggard beggar-man he’d seen on the shore, the man who was as alone as he.
Yeshua looked past him, toward the atrium. He looked exhausted, his eyes bleary.
“Will you let us enter?” Yohanna said softly.
Koach hesitated. Once you invited someone over the threshold, they were no longer a stranger. They were your guest, as fully under the protection and provision of your roof as your own kin. You were bound to them, and they to you.
But he had strength neither to argue nor to shut the door. He could hear his mother’s ragged breathing in the atrium behind him, and that quiet, desperate sound to him was as loud as shakings in the earth. He nodded tensely.
Yeshua stepped by him, without a word. Yohanna followed, gripped Koach’s good shoulder, then shut the door for him.
As if in a dream, Koach followed the other men into the atrium. The stranger seated himself by Rahel—gently, as though she were sleeping and he didn’t want to wake her. He just sat by her in silence, as Koach had moments before. There was sorrow in his face.
/> Seeing that, the heat of Koach’s fury returned. His mother would not live long. He understood what was coming, as much as any young man could. He didn’t want anyone else here, certainly not any stranger to their town. Why had he opened the door?
“Why did you bring him here?”
“He is the navi,” Yohanna said softly.
For a moment, the word stirred Koach despite his fear. A word of hope from remembered stories. Rahel’s stories. Always when the dead had risen to devour the People, there had been a navi, one anointed to counsel and preserve their tribe. Elisa, who had called the very malakhim of heaven down in chariots of flame to scorch the unclean dead from the earth. Yirmiyahu, who had faced a corrupt king and begged him to shatter the gates that locked in the living with the dead. Daniyyel, who had prayed an entire night unharmed in a cave of walking corpses.
But how could this man, in his ragged brown robe, with those bruises on his face … how could he be the navi? Koach peered at those livid marks on his skin, and his throat tightened. They were so much like Tamar’s bruises. This man had been beaten, like her. He was a man someone had failed to defend.
“I know him now,” Yohanna said. “I’ve seen him before. I couldn’t remember where at first. It was last summer, with Yohanna ha Matbil in the wilderness about the Tumbling Water. I was there.” He was quiet a moment, and when he spoke, he did so quietly, as though fearing to disturb either Rahel or the stranger. “We light few lamps and we live in the dark and we try to sleep, Bar Yonah. We don’t want to remember. Your brother seems content to sit in the silence, to sit shiva until his last breath, but this silence grew too heavy for me. So I left. To live with Ha Matbil beneath the open sky. I was there on the Night of Five Hundred Mikvot, when so many were immersed in the river to be cleansed. Nothing I’ve said about that night is an untruth. People’s faces shone as they rose from the water. Men, women. And the moon was full and the stars as bright as they were for Moshe in the desert. And I heard the singing, I heard it. The malakhim, the angels of God, calling to each other in the dark, from one hill to the next. Like something important was happening in the land, a blessing, at last. That night we did not hear the moaning of the dead but the singing of angels.”
He fell silent for a moment, but Koach didn’t say anything. He was barely listening. He watched the rise and fall of his mother’s breathing. In his heart, he stood in a dry, bleak place, where Yohanna’s words were little more than the wind in the stones.
“At sunset before the song in the night,” Yohanna said slowly, “a man came walking down to the shore. Yohanna immersed him in the water. And after, as the man walked from the east bank out into the ravines, Ha Matbil pointed him out to me and to the other men who were with us, and he said—I remember it—There is the olah, the lamb of our God, who takes away the evil and the uncleanness from the world. A navi has come like one Israel has never seen, and I am not worthy even to tie his sandal-string.
“That’s what brought the hundreds. It was a mighty sign, Bar Yonah. That night they came to the water. So many. Hundreds. All of them kneeling before Ha Matbil, confessing all they had done and all they had seen and not stopped, every uncleanness they had witnessed or made happen in our land. And Ha Matbil gave them to the water and brought them up again. To each one of them he said, The time of God is near. Be ready. It is near. And oh, Bar Yonah, what we heard. What we heard. Ha Matbil, he looked at the hills, at the singers none of us could see. He saw what would come—like a navi. And he said, It is near.” Yohanna looked rapt. “Your brother thinks this man from Natzeret has one of the shedim eating him from within. But I think he is of God.”
“This.” Yeshua spoke suddenly, though he did not lift his gaze from the rise and fall of Rahel’s breathing. “This. This is what the father wanted me to see. What he whispered in my ear, out in the wind, in the rocks, in the wind in the rocks. It has to be, it has to be. This. This is what I have to do. This …” His voice trailed off. Yohanna stared at him intently.
“She’s dying,” Koach choked.
“She is dying,” Yeshua said. “And I am dying, and you are dying, and those women and men out by the boats are dying. We are all dying, dying, dying …” The stranger traced his fingertips over Rahel’s arm, over the torn edge of her skin. She didn’t stir. “But not today. No more dying today.”
With fingers as gentle as though he were touching a lover, Yeshua opened Rahel’s right eye and gazed into it a moment. Her eye was very round and very dark, but she gave no sign that she was aware of him. Koach tensed—that a stranger should touch his mother!—yet he found himself waiting, waiting for he didn’t know what. Breathless.
Yeshua’s voice was soft and distracted, as though he were talking to himself, or to someone who sat right beside him, someone only he could see. Koach held himself back, tense.
“My mother … she told me once that our father did not promise a life without pain,” Yeshua murmured, closing Rahel’s eye. His words were slow and spoken with terrible clarity. “Not without pain. Only that he would weep with us. Only that his heart would break. Only that he would take each moment of suffering, each death, each, and hold it in his hands, and … and bring from it something, something even more beautiful than what was lost. A forest of cedar grows from a field of ash, and each seed, every seed must fall to the earth, fall and fall and crack open and die before it can become a barley plant.” He touched Rahel’s hair, stroked it a moment. His gaze never left her face.
He began singing softly, words in the dialect of old desert Hebrew, and after a while he hummed them, as though he needed his mind elsewhere and could no longer spare any of it to make articulate words. He moved his fingers carefully over Rahel’s arm and hummed that quiet desert melody, one Koach had never heard before—though hearing it, he could imagine men and women of his People singing it or playing it on flutes as they stood at the doors of their tents, long before they came to this land.
Koach watched like a man gazing over the brink of a cliff, his heart thunderous inside him.
Then Rahel sighed softly and closed her eyes, and the stranger moved his fingers back and forth over the inflamed bite, kneading her torn skin as though shaping clay with his hands. The bite closed, and then, a moment later, it was gone. Simply gone. The olive skin of her arm was smooth and unbroken as though it had never suffered so much as the press of a thumb.
THE SCENTED FIRE
Rahel drew in a shuddering breath, and her eyes opened. For a moment they remained glazed as with fever, and then they cleared. Her eyes focused first on Yeshua, and a light came into them as though she had stepped out of the desert to find her door open and a banquet in her home, with friends waiting for her whom she’d thought long dead. Koach had never seen such a look in her eyes.
“At last,” Rahel whispered.
Yeshua didn’t speak. There was a sheen of sweat on his face, as though he were the one who had wakened from fever. He lifted his fingers from her arm and sat back, his breathing ragged.
The word “amma” caught in Koach’s throat; he sat staring at his mother. What he had just seen could not be; he didn’t dare move, didn’t dare find out if what he’d seen was real or if he was only sitting in the dream country, deceived in thinking himself awake.
Then Rahel’s gaze flicked toward him, and she breathed his name.
Koach let out a cry and flung himself down at her side, putting his good arm around her. “Amma!” he cried. “Amma!”
“My son, my son,” she wept.
Yeshua and Yohanna were forgotten. Koach wept openly against her shoulder, enveloped in the scent of his mother’s hair and the sharper scent of the blood that was drying on her clothes.
“What happened?” she rasped. “What … I was … burning up. I was bitten, unclean. Son, what has happened?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and just held her.
“Ah, Rahel.” Yeshua’s voice. “Rahel, Rahel.”
The stranger stood unsteadily. In a moment Yohanna was
at his side, offering an arm for him to lean on, but Yeshua pressed his hand against Yohanna’s chest and then stepped away on his own. His face had gone white and his eyes were wild like a man staring into the great emptiness of the desert, an emptiness that perhaps not even God could fill, an emptiness that devoured all things, all peoples.
“I need air,” he whispered. And he moved out across the atrium, almost stumbling on the way. Yohanna hurried after.
Rahel was shaking. “I was dying,” she breathed.
“You’re all right, amma. You’re all right.”
She drew in quick breaths. “Yes. Yes, I am.” She lifted herself onto her elbows. “We have a guest, son. Help me up. We need to get him food and water. Help me.”
Yeshua sank against the wall of the atrium, breathing shallowly. Quickly Yohanna swept up one of the blankets from Rahel’s bedding, and drew it about the stranger’s shoulders. His voice was a low murmur. “Rabboni, it will be all right. Just breathe.”
Yeshua coughed. “Water.”
Yohanna brought him some in a clay bowl from the ewer at one corner of the atrium. Yeshua’s hands shook when he took the bowl, but he drank deeply. A little water trickled from the corner of his mouth, making Yohanna acutely aware of his own thirst.
Yeshua lowered the bowl from his lips; the water sloshed in the bowl, cupped between his calloused hands. “I should’ve … should’ve asked for … for wine, not water.”
“You healed my kinswoman, and my friend’s mother,” Yohanna said softly. “I will bring you all the wine in Kfar Nahum if you ask it.”
Yeshua glanced down at his hands. “Healed,” he whispered. “How, how did I do that?”
“You sang,” Yohanna whispered back.
“I asked,” Yeshua said. “I could hear her, hear her hurting, hear her dying. I could hear it so loudly. And I asked, I asked, I called out … Like with the fish. Like with the gulls. Like with …” He groaned. “For just a moment I remembered. I remembered everything. Everything. All of it, all of it from the desert. Every word, every …” His eyes glistened. “What I’m to do, and why, and what I am. And now it’s gone, all of it gone. Why can’t I hold onto it, Yohanna, why?” He squeezed his eyes shut. “All those nights, those nights with my back to a rock, a rock in the desert. All the screams in my ears. And it’s hard, so hard, to recall anything else but that moaning, that moaning that won’t stop, that will never, ever stop …” He swallowed. “Help me, Yohanna. Help me up. Help me stand.”