by Stant Litore
Those watching gasped, an almost sexual sound.
Yesse’s eyes were wide, his hair adrift about his face. “I … I …” He glanced about wildly.
“Yes.” Yohanna’s voice was choked. “You are standing. You’re standing, grandfather.”
Yesse stumbled—as though his legs were numb from sitting too long—and Yohanna leapt forward, catching his arm, but Yesse shoved him away with a furious and wiry strength. “No,” he said. His grandson stepped back, and Yesse recovered his balance. He took another step. This one was stronger.
Yesse kept his gaze on his feet. Then he laughed, a short bark. He glanced up at Yeshua with watery eyes. “You are the navi,” he breathed. “The navi who will save Israel. All my life I have waited for you. All my life.”
Yeshua’s eyes were guarded, as though he were holding up his last shield against the yearning in Yesse’s eyes. “I want only to sit by a fire, by a fire, and eat fried fish and talk,” he said. “Or work with the wood, the cedar and terebinth in my father’s shop. Only I can’t stop the screams. I can’t, I can’t stop my ears.”
The house of Rahel bat Eleazar filled with people and with activity. Men lay baskets of fish about the olive tree, and others threw fish over the coals. Rahel herself crouched with a knife—a spare from her supplies, not the one she had used against the dead—and she slit open one of the fish and pulled out its heart. This she set on the scented fire, and then leaned back and closed her eyes a moment, breathing in the redolence of it and, with it, the hope of safety for her house.
The silent woman—the woman from the boats—slipped into the house last, her face pale and so thin. But Koach only looked away. He cast aside his small knife and stepped out through the door. He needed to breathe a moment, and the atrium was too full of people; he didn’t dare slip through them to his secret place. It would be like revealing that place to the whole town. So instead he leaned against the doorpost, his back itching from dried sweat. He felt something against his shoulder and stepped away from the post, saw a hole in the wood amid a corona of splinters, where one of the iron nails had been torn out.
Koach touched it with his finger, felt the sharpness of the splintered wood. Heard again Bar Cheleph’s cry, Board up the house! Board up the house!
“He is afraid,” he whispered.
For years, Bar Cheleph had seemed a giant to him: a fierce and brutal man with heavy fists. But Koach was not so much shorter than Bar Cheleph now. And he had seen Bar Cheleph’s eyes. The man was only afraid. Terrified. Trying to live in a world that had tried to eat him.
The thought troubled Koach. He glanced back toward the street. And so he was just in time to see Zebadyah round the corner, hobbling toward him at a pace quicker than most men stride. Yakob was behind him, a net slung over one shoulder, his eyes anxious.
But Zebadyah’s eyes …
The old priest had a wild, helpless look, as though he were staring over the edge of a sea-cliff a mere breath before plunging in a long fall toward the deep. He all but ran to the doorstep, his hair wild about his face, bringing with him the heavy scent of wood smoke from the burning of the boats. Before Koach could step out of the way or say a word, Zebadyah grasped his weak arm and with strength like a bear threw him to the side. The priest rushed into the house as Koach struck the ground with his hip, cried out in pain, and rolled into the street.
EPISODE 7
KANA
Halfway up the hill, Tamar’s body—which at first had felt as light as a bundle of dry twigs—became heavy in Shimon’s arms. The sun overhead burned hot, and sweat slickened his face; Shimon clenched his teeth and kept placing one foot before the other. Though he longed to stop and rest, he did not want to hold that defiled, coat-swathed body cooling in his arms even a moment longer than he had to. He wanted to be done with it. And—
And he could see, so clearly, the grief in his brother’s eyes, the anguish as Koach gazed up at him and asked him to perform this duty that he could not. His brother, who had never asked him for help before. His brother, who always asked to help. His brother, whom he had always rebuffed, knowing he would be useless at the nets, at the oar, at the hauling of the boat down to the sea.
That look in Koach’s eyes haunted Shimon. Tore at his freshly opened heart. Though he placed each step with care over the rocky ground, Shimon shut his eyes a few moments against the sun, shut his eyes against the turmoil in his heart. The sea wind blew at his back.
So he did not see anyone approaching, and no scent forewarned him. The first warning he had was the weight of a body slamming into his right side, carrying with it the sickly sweet smell of rot.
His eyes flew open; he cried out as earth and sky tilted. Tamar was knocked from his arms. Shimon had a confused glimpse of her hitting the ground, her limp body rolling free of the coat. Then the earth slammed into his back, a jagged rock cutting his shoulder. Everything above him went dark; the silhouette of a human head blocked out the sun. Hands clutched at his face and shoulder, the fingers so cold. Shimon shouted and kicked, his own hands scrabbling at the thing’s wrists. The creature’s weight fell on him. It snarled. Shimon stared up into the dull sheen of its eyes, like unpolished iron.
Shimon had a terrible flash of memory; he was on his back in the sand with his father’s corpse looming over him. Then he pushed the memory away with a shout and drove his knee into the corpse’s gut. It didn’t even notice. It hissed just above his face, its breath on his cheek cold as the sea. He drove the heel of his left hand hard against its brow, his right hand peeling its fingers away from his face.
The corpse bit into his sleeve and worried at his arm like a wolf, trying to tear away the wool and get at the warm, vulnerable skin beneath. Shimon cried out and kneed the corpse in the groin. It just kept tearing at the cloth with its teeth, growling. Panic ran cold through Shimon, like ice water pumped from his heart out to every part of his body, freezing him more with each heartbeat. All the world constricted to that face, those dull, empty eyes, the snarls from its throat. It was stronger than him, and it was going to eat him. Only a thick woolen sleeve held away his death. He was shaking.
Shimon had a momentary sense of someone looming over him and the corpse. A large hand gripped the corpse’s shoulder and pulled the creature off him. Shimon had just time to draw in a shocked breath before glimpsing a flash of bright metal, the curved tip of a knife catching the corpse beneath its chin and then sliding smoothly up until the hilt of white bone pressed against the thing’s chin, sheathing the knife in its head. The knife tip emerged from the creature’s brow. The corpse jerked once and then went limp.
The man who had stilled it rolled it aside, and the body lay in the grasses, unmoving. Bar Nahemyah—Kana—stood bending over it. With a grunt, he set his sandalled foot against the creature’s collarbone and then gripped the hilt and wrenched his knife free of its dead flesh. As Shimon scrambled back, kicking himself away from the corpse, and got unsteadily to his feet, Kana wiped the blade clean on the tattered remains of the corpse’s garments. Shimon watched the blade; it was easier to look at that than to look at the dead.
“That’s a Roman knife,” he breathed.
The curved blade was nearly the length of Shimon’s forearm between the elbow and the wrist.
“They call it the sica,” Kana said quietly, stepping away from the corpse. “You catch the bottom of the jaw with the point—or you catch the bottom edge of the helmet, if you are stabbing a Roman—and you set your palm against the hilt and shove hard. Drive it up through the jaw and into the face. All the way to the scalp. One swift strike, and the corpse falls still. Then you do the next. And the next.”
Shimon gazed at him in horror. The name he’d heard Bar Nahemyah claim—the name Kana, the zealot—rang in his mind, a name of knives and dread.
Kana began cleaning the blade on a tuft of grass. “The kanna’im have taken to carrying these. The fighting priests. You can’t imagine it, Shimon. What Yerushalayim is like now. The poverty. The sti
nk in the alleys. The dead. The Romans keep them down. Sometimes. The other times, we do.” His voice went hoarse, as though he were holding back some great torrent of feeling. “We are the People, Shimon. The people of Yehuda tribe, the last of the Hebrews. The other tribes are dead. On all the earth, only we know the Law and the Covenant. Only we can keep this land, our land, free of the dead. The Romans bring hunger and slavery, and finally a weary death for us all.” Straightening, Kana gazed down at the corpse.
“I said I didn’t want your help,” Shimon said. “Why did you follow me here?”
“I needed to talk with you.” Kana’s eyes were intent. “It is coming, Shimon. A dark time. You could help stop it.”
“Your killers in the hills don’t need me,” Shimon muttered.
“I need you. This town respected your father. Revered your father. Your father, who stood against both Rome and the corpses that walk.”
“My father is dead.”
“But you live. And whether you like it or not, Shimon, Israel needs you. All men who are still true to the Covenant in their hearts wait for you. You could lead the fishing towns of Galilee to rise up. You could do it. They know your father’s name.”
But as Kana spoke, Shimon gazed at Tamar’s body where it lay in a fumble of limbs like a crumpled spider. The stink of that corpse was worse now. One hand lay bent, and something had fallen from the sleeve. The object drew Shimon’s gaze: a small wooden horse, no larger than a clay cup, an object you could hold in your hand. The intricacy of its mane, the small eyes and mouth, the lines of its flanks—this was something his brother had made.
Shimon crouched beside the dead girl. He picked up the horse carefully, ignoring Kana’s frown. The small wood-carving felt cool in his hand; with an inward shiver he realized it had been nestled against the cold flesh of the dead. Yet he did not drop it or hurl it away. He held it, looked at it—the first time he had really looked at one of this brother’s secretive carvings. He suddenly felt … heavy. Old. The burden of his People, his Law, his God, his heritage a weight on his shoulders. He didn’t want to worry about the Law, he didn’t want to revere his God or the traditions of the father who had betrayed him by being so long absent. He didn’t want to fight each night for scraps from the sea to keep his family alive, fighting alongside other men’s brothers because his own was too weak. He certainly didn’t want to seek trouble with the Romans, or even to acknowledge that they existed on days other than those on which Zebadyah collected what few goods the town had to send to the tax collectors in the Emperor’s City. He wanted only to sit in his boat, cast the nets and pull them up, and be silent like the water.
But he had made Koach a promise.
He would keep that promise.
“My brother is strange,” he said. “But he is my brother.” He turned on Kana. His voice heated. “What you’ve said, Barabba has said all this before. And right after he said it, he rode down my brother in the street. My brother, Bar Nahemyah. He tried to drive a spear through my brother’s body. So you tell me, ‘Kana.’ What place will there be for Koach, for my kin and my blood, in this new uprising of yours?”
Kana was silent, his face cold with remembered pain.
“I have devoted every night of my manhood to the netting of fish, to the boat, to bringing home food for my family. And you would have me throw them away? It is more important to see that my kin eat than it is to hate the Romans.”
“The Romans hate you, brother.”
“Let them.”
“Your father hated them.”
“My father is dead,” Shimon nearly shouted. “I am going to his tomb. He is dead, and we here in Kfar Nahum are all fatherless sons. Get out of my way, Kana.”
Shimon rolled Tamar’s corpse gently back into the coat and lifted her from the earth. He made to stride past the other man. Kana stepped out of the way but said quietly, “You can’t sleep forever, Cephas.”
Shimon stopped.
“Some day the Romans will want more taxes than Zebadyah bar Yesse can send. Some day, there will be nothing left, not even what you have now.”
“What did you say?”
Kana looked at him strangely. “I said—”
If Shimon had not been carrying a corpse, he would have shoved Kana violently in the chest. Rage surged hot and wild like the sea inside him. “I am Shimon. God of our fathers, what do you all want from me?”
He began striding up the hill. He could see the kokh, the tomb in which his many dead kin slept the long sleep. Kana called after him: “Cephas is the rock. We want you to be your father’s son, the man our People need. The man you were born to be!”
HIS FATHER’S TOMB
Once he reached the tomb Shimon did his work quickly, for that place forced memories on him that he did not want. He lifted the girl’s shrouded body and slid her feet first into the empty shelf to the left of his father’s. The sunlight in the entrance to the kokh was pale, but the dimness of the tomb was not creepy or unnerving, only quiet. This was a place where the wind did not enter, a place where no shedim shrieked or whispered or demanded entrance to the human mind and body. Shimon slid the girl into the hole in the wall, onto the long stone shelf inside the hill, until only her hair was visible.
In this very tomb, Shimon’s brother had been born; here, Shimon as a youth had held and comforted his mother as she bled from the birth. Everything that defined their family was here. The birth. Their father’s body. And now this girl Tamar had a place on these cold stone shelves. Shimon gazed down at her contorted, still face. In the synagogue, Zebadyah had said once that God spoke a word, a secret word, into the ear of each child at the moment of its birth. And that this word, which each of them forgot as children but remembered when they had grown into men and women—though perhaps they had to spend many nights listening for it before they heard it again, spoken anew—this word was God’s hope for their lives. Shimon wondered what word had been spoken into this girl’s ear. Surely that word, that hope, had not been that she would be beaten by her father or devoured by the dead. Shimon thought the word must have been his brother’s name. If the dead had not come to Kfar Nahum that night, if their father had not died, if the town had not been destroyed, if the corpses had not been dumped into the sea, if Koach had been born with two strong arms like a man, then he and this girl would have been together. Shimon had heard it in his brother’s voice.
But whatever word God had spoken into Tamar’s ear, she would never hear again. And whatever word he had spoken into Koach’s ear, hearing it now would only bring his brother the sharp misery of joys glimpsed and gone.
All his heart a growl of grief, Shimon stepped toward the door of the tomb. Hesitating, he glanced at the shelf in the wall on which his father lay. He wrestled with himself, part of him longing to go to the shelf and pull his father’s body free of it and see his face. He imagined unwrapping the burial linens, imagined hesitating before peeling free the final layer, fearful of seeing those eyes open but unliving, fearful of hearing again that terrible moan. But no, the face within would be still and shriveled tightly to the bone, preserved like the mummies of Kemet, though not so well. His father’s eyes would be closed. The Greek pig-eaters placed coins on the eyes of their dead, to pay the boatman to ferry their souls over the last river; the Hebrews brought to their dead only spices and song. At his father’s burial, Shimon had had neither. He had stood shaking and silent while his mother sang the Words of Going, the memory of his father’s lurching over the shore still fresh and vicious in his heart.
Shimon stared helplessly at that shelf. Out of some chasm in his heart, rage welled up, hot as fever, until he shook with it. Rage at his father for leaving him standing on that shore, leaving him alone to care for his mother and his infant sibling. Rage at that other father in heaven who had turned his back when the Romans descended on their town. When the dead came down from the hills. When the dead devoured or blighted the fish beneath the sea. His father who had left them all like children outside the wa
lls of a house, to eat what scraps they could find. Rage at both his fathers, who had proven too weak or too disinterested to help. And neither of them had been there to tell him that he was man enough to handle what would come, or to teach him how to.
And, finally, rage at the newcomer, the fish-caller who spoke so glibly and easily of fathers, and who thought that filling the nets could erase the pain and death-cries of a People as easily as an incoming wave might erase footsteps in the sand.
Shimon turned and strode from the tomb, breathing hard. Outside, the day was aging fast and God’s sky was empty but for a crane winging slowly northeast toward the high ridges of Ramat ha-Golan. A slight breeze stirred the grasses on the hill, but Shimon did not fear it. He gazed down at the town at the sea’s edge and saw it suddenly as he had never seen it before: a cluster of ill-organized stone houses about a tall synagogue, but with no wall, no shelter from the wind or from strangers out of the hills. Vulnerable to the dead and the living alike. Zebadyah was right. They should cast this man out. And Kana too. They should wall everything out, forever. They had lost too much. Let them cling to what little they had left, though it be only rags, though it be only empty nets. When had anyone outside the small atriums of their houses ever cared for them? The Romans preyed on them—though now from a distance. Barabba would prey on them, in his own way. Threshing and Rich Garden and Tower pretended they did not exist. Maybe they didn’t exist; maybe the apparent survivors of Kfar Nahum were only ghosts, shedim without bodies, but too recently dead to realize it.
GREATER THINGS THAN THESE
“Rahel!” Zebadyah cried. “Rahel!” Forgetting in his panic that her name was not his to use or to call, he sprang through the door, hardly noticing that he’d hurled Koach aside. There was only the terrible thought of Bat Eleazar—of Rahel, oh Rahel—lying cold as stone in her house, as cold as his own dead wife so many long years before. His breath heaved; he had run through the ruined outskirts and past the tanner’s shop and through the square of the synagogue, where some sat with baskets and were gutting fish, unaware of any shadow of the dead. Rahel, Rahel, beautiful Rahel. He had wanted only to keep her safe, to honor his lost brother, to … to hold her. To think that she might be gone. Worse, that she might come back. That she might rise to rend those about her with her teeth and nails. No. Not Rahel. Not her. God of our fathers, not her.