by Stant Litore
All of them about to die.
And in that moment, in all their faces, Shimon saw himself, saw the horror that had eaten away all his life and left him only a husk. Between one beat of the heart and the next, he saw himself, and forgave.
He forgave Zebadyah the priest for hiding beneath his boat.
He forgave Kana his rage and his tossing of the dead into the sea.
He forgave his father for dying, for leaving him to raise his brother alone and to fish on the sea without guidance or aid.
He forgave himself.
For every moment he’d wakened shivering from the dream country. Every morning he’d brought home not enough fish. Every night he’d sunk like a stone beneath the water of his anger, his helplessness.
Because neither the priest nor the zealot nor his father nor he nor all the town together were enough to put their dead their rest. To hold in his heart the bitterness of so much wrath, and not forgive—it was as though a puddle of water were to hate itself for drying beneath the sun’s heat in the month of the lion, the month of desert. The pool of water was not sufficient to withstand the sun that would devour it, and he was not sufficient to withstand the rising tide of the town’s dead, of so much unforgotten history and pain and hunger.
In the next moment he might die, or not. But he could no longer hate himself, or his brother, or his people.
Shimon dropped the oar and flung himself to the floor of the boat beside Yeshua. He grabbed the man’s shoulders and shook him, screaming, “Rabboni! Rabboni!”
None of them were sufficient.
But he had seen the stranger from Natzeret call a dead man back into his body and give him rest. If they had any hope, any chance of burying the dead, that chance was with Yeshua.
“Rabboni, my master, wake, or we perish!” Shimon cried. “Please!” He screamed his plea, desperate for the need of one small man on a small boat to sound louder than wind or water or the shrieking past. How was it that God heard prayer? Or that any human being heard another’s cry for help or for love, when each day, every hour, every moment our minds are deluged by the cries of everyone around us and the cries of those in our memory, the thousand cries screaming within us?
“Please!”
Yeshua opened his eyes and blinked back water from his lids.
“Master!” Shimon shouted. “How can you sleep! The dead! The storm!”
Yeshua swept his lank and soaked hair out of his eyes, then reached for Shimon’s hand; Shimon took it, and Yeshua surged to his feet. He looked out into the storm, his eyes dark against the night, though whether with fury or grief, Shimon couldn’t tell. He released Yeshua’s hand. There was a shriek, and a moving shadow that must have been Miriam throwing a net over one of the dead that was clambering into the boat. Yeshua stepped past her. Wood cracked behind him, and a spar swung loose from the mast toward his head; he lowered his head without glancing back, and it swung by. He placed one foot firmly against the gunwale, standing even amid the pitch and heave of the boat in the storm, even as the dead grasped at his ankles, his shins. His hair flew about his face, dark in the wind. Shimon gazed up at him in wonder and dismay.
Screams from others in the boat.
Then the sun’s heat was all around him and passing through him, and this time there was no light but only heat, heat, heat, as though the world might burn away and leave nothing but flakes of ash beneath the cold stars. Shimon cried out and heard the others’ cries and the wailing of the dead and the howl and crack of the storm. He saw the empty eyes of the dead all about him glinting in the dark, their hands reaching for him. And pressing on his body and his heart … the weight, the kavod, surely the same glory that the kohannim taught filled the Temple at times and made its pillars creak. The unbearable weight of God, the lightest press of whose fingertip might crush the land.
Shimon cried out, falling back.
Yeshua spoke, and his voice was soft as wind in the grass, soft as sunlight on still water. Yet Shimon could hear it in his very heart, hear it above all the noise of the world’s wreck.
“Shalom,” Yeshua said. “Shabbat shalom. Be at peace.”
Zebadyah the priest had taught that the land had always had history, even before there was land. God had not made the world from nothing, as idle thinkers among the Greeks taught, but from the turmoil and wrack of the tovu vavohu, the whirling chaos, the dark materials that were without form or shape, the great waste of the sea upon which no light shone and in which drifted the debris and detritus of uncounted things that had not yet been shaped into anything living or beautiful. Sundered pieces that made up no whole, drift that clashed and crashed in the dark.
And because peace, because any bringing together, any settling of history’s chaos into a new and meaningful story begins with words spoken and words heard, in the beginning God had whispered a few words into the rush of that primeval sea. And there was land amid the waters, and light.
The sky broke into pieces. Spears of sun pierced the clouds and fell into the cold sea, each of them doused in the water with a hiss so quiet only the malakhim could have heard them. For one wild moment, the eyes of the dead shone in the sudden light, so many sightless eyes, so many empty faces on the dark waves. All their mouths were open, their jaws slack. Shimon found that he was weeping, and he didn’t know why. Only that, in this light, with the heat and the weight of Yeshua’s power pressing him back against the opposite gunwale, all those staring faces were no longer a thing of terror but of sorrow. His face was wet with his tears.
Then all the eyes filled. He was looking out at so many of his dead rocking on the sea. The midwife he’d seen eaten on that night of the dead, she was there. And the eyes of young mercenaries who had rallied to Rome for coin or glory from far ends of the earth, and the eyes of young men and old men, and of women who had known men and women who hadn’t, and of those who had borne children and those who had recently been children. All of them were there, all of their dead. Their spirits looked out of their white faces for one last instant, all those souls peering out as if in second birth. Harrowed from the dark waters, the dark fields of the sea.
Bar Cheleph whispered, barely more than a breath, “They aren’t there. Amma, abba. They aren’t there. Oh God, they aren’t there.”
The eyes closed—one pair, then another—and the dead slipped back into the water. All of them falling back into the crash of the waves. The last to go were the ones clinging to the gunwale, but their grip slackened and then they slid away, too. Shimon saw one hand remain for a moment, ghoulish and pale. Then it was gone.
All of them, gone.
The wind stilled, the rocking of the boat slowed. A quiet creaking where the broken spar still swung from the mast. Then even that went still. The Sea of Galilee went quiet as a pool in the rocks. Shimon glanced over the side, his hands shaking. The water was clear as the first water ever made. He could see far beneath the boat. Not to the bottom, but for just a moment, he thought he could glimpse the pale shapes of the sinking dead. Then nothing.
Silence over the water.
“Shalom,” Yeshua whispered again. “My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give. My peace I give to you.”
Peace.
Gazing out over that still water, Shimon realized for the first time that a hunger for peace could raven the body and gnaw the heart almost as sharply as a hunger for fish could chew at the belly. That hunger could waste you away, day after day after day, until you were thin and empty as a corpse, though you still walked and moaned, grasping for something you needed, though you didn’t know what it was.
Peace was more than stillness. More than sleep. More than numbness, more than the absence of conflict.
Peace was consolation and wholeness. Peace was two men breaking bread together, forgiving an old quarrel. Peace was a mother holding her infant up to its father for the first time, or a mother opening her eyes to greet her child after long illness. Peace was two lovers in each other’s arms after a long, good night
. Peace was an open door and a wall torn down. Peace was a cephas, a rock lashed by the waves yet unmoved. A rock people could stand on.
Kfar Nahum had starved for peace. He had starved for peace. He looked at his brother’s face and saw the same shock of recognition there. His mother sank down to the bench and put her face in her hands. Yohanna and Yakob—their eyes were wet. Kana was gazing at the water as though he were looking at the face of God. The girl Miriam stared at Yeshua where he stood, her face bathed in awe. Bar Cheleph was looking at the others’ faces, even as Shimon was, and their gazes met.
How strange, that they were all in this one boat. The son of the town’s most renowned fisherman, his crippled brother, and the man who’d beaten him. Two women, one of them an outcast. Priests’ sons and a trained killer and a stranger who could call up out of the water the living and the dead. All here, on this little bit of wood on the surface of the sea. Shalom.
Yeshua stood still while the boat rocked on water older and deeper than the dreams and the yearnings and the breathing of human beings.
His voice was soft above the waves, and sad as rain before dawn.
“So little faith,” he said. “All of us have so little faith.”
He turned to them then. His face burned briefly, and glancing at his eyes was like looking into the sun. Yet Yeshua’s hands shook, and after a moment he sat slowly against the gunwale, tucked his knees against his chest, and closed his eyes. The light went out. His chest rose and fell.
The men in the boat and Rahel and Miriam of Magdala watched him sleep, their faces awed and troubled. Silent, but their silence no longer that of the fishers on the lifeless sea. And beneath their boat, the dead drifted at last in that same silence. All of them still beneath the irrevocable weight of a glory that could not be understood or named, only witnessed. So many bodies carried beneath the waves on currents no men knew, drifting to final sites of sea-burial marked and noted by none living, and whether God might remember them where they lay or whether their souls had gone to great rooms in God’s house, none could tell. Unless perhaps that one man resting now against the gunwale, that man of sorrows whose eyes burned with a fire that consumed his memory to ash and whose coming had tumbled the houses of their town and all their lives into an architecture new and unpredicted. Yet perhaps not even he could tell, not even he.
FINIS
SETTING OUT ON THE WAVES AGAIN
This is the most difficult novel I have ever written, and I am not the same man I was when I began it.
As I wrote of Rahel’s illness and her healing, and of her child’s disability, my own infant daughter took ill. She was diagnosed with epilepsy and cortical blindness. She spent two of her first twelve months hospitalized for seizures.
I sat in that hospital by her bedside, in the cold of winter. It was warm enough in that carefully sterile place, but I felt cold. I felt angry. I felt exhausted, and determined. The wind that rattled the windows one night seemed to hurl against the hospital glass all the moaning horror and shrieking of the shedim.
Now my daughter is improving, and we are on the other side of that time together. Yet those nights by her bed are recent in my heart, and they hurt. I don’t know what this past year has meant, only that the love I now hold for those I call my own is fiercer than anything I have ever felt. I have learned that hope, which I had thought small and delicate like a moth in the night, can be hard as steel, a blade with which you cut your way through a press of moaning and hungry foes.
Without the help and encouragement and quiet strength of a great many people, I would have made it neither through this past year nor through this novel. I name them here, because they were with me in the boat when the sky went dark: Ever Saskya, Andrew Hallam, J. R. West, Tim and Susie Grade, Brian and Lara Hedberg, Max and Tamara Siler, Jan and Jim Buntrock, Bill and Dottie Amann, and many, so many, in my community and my workplace. My editor, Alex Carr, did not blink an eye when I told him that I was staying up nights with my daughter and that this novel would be longer and harder to write than I’d thought. Jacque Ben-Zekry and many of her friends at Amazon Publishing—including many I know only by name—were there to encourage me. My house is filled with children’s books that they sent to my family by the box, to let us know we were loved. Novelists Rob Kroese, Elisa Lorello, R. J. Keller, and Sarah Paquette sent my daughter what must surely be the world’s largest pop-up book. Don McQuinn sent me the kindest note. Kevin Kientz grieved with me, and Amit Mrig had my back. Clarence Haynes read my novel with compassion and insight, and encouraged me. Aunt Dee, who I think had rarely let a day pass in the last few years without grinning, called often with words of hope or joy. She passed away the same week that I finished this manuscript, and we miss her. And we will always remember her.
My wife Jessica went through the storm with me and I with her, both of us lashed to the gunwale and howling our defiance to wind and sky. Little River gave me her laughter and her shrieks of joy, and hours watching Doctor Who together. And Inara, my youngest, faced needles, medical tests, medications, and sleepless nights with a grin on her face that could cure even Shimon bar Yonah’s despair. I am a blessed man.
To all of you, my readers, I offer this book, with my thanks for casting the nets with me. Let us see what comes up. Whether scant fish to feed us or teeming millions to break the nets, in either case this life we live is our fathers’ sea, and ours. Each night we will take our boats down to that water knowing that whatever happens, the night is ours to live.
Stant Litore
August 2013
THEY FACED THE DEAD
You’ve met them before, or you think you have. You have seen their faces in stained glass, or in prints of da Vinci’s Last Supper. You’ve heard their names recited in children’s nursery rhymes or in your fathers’ prayers—Jesus of Nazareth and his companions, who in the first century AD changed forever the way our world confronts the recurring threat of our restless and ravenous dead.
Yet if you who read this are to remember those who stood against the walking corpses—if you are to do more than remember, if you are to know what they knew, grieve as they grieved, burn with fury at what angered them, or smile at what warmed their hearts—then you must know them by their own names, not our English ones. And you must meet them in their own boat, the wood of the oars cold even through your gloves. Or on the shore with the fierce wind off the sea in your face. They are:
IN HEBREW OR ARAMAIC IN ENGLISH
Shimon/Cephas Simon/Peter
Koach Andrew
Yohanna John
Yakob James
Shimon bar Nahemyah/Kana Simon/The Zealot
Yakob bar Cheleph James son of Alphaeus
Miriam of Magdala Mary Magdalene
Yeshua Jesus
There they are, the first of them. And this is the first of their stories.
Koach
Entire libraries have been written about Simon Peter, but relatively little in recent centuries about his fierce brother. Yet the apostle Andrew has often been a figure of fascination. Today he is held to be the patron saint of nations as diverse as Scotland, where he brings victory in battle against overwhelming numbers; Malta, where he is associated with a rich harvest of fish; and Russia, where he is recognized for farsight and prophecy. The third century devoted an apocryphal text entirely to him: The Acts of Andrew. Other texts describe him, late in life, traveling among the nomadic tribes north of the Black Sea, teaching them the sharing of bread, and leading them to stand against the dead that in the later part of the first century lurched out of the Caucasus in great numbers. Overshadowed in history’s eyes by his brother Simon Peter, Andrew yet possessed courage and compassion every inch as deep as his older brother’s heady mix of loyalty and guilt. And he, no less than his brother, changed the world.
No Hebrew or Aramaic name is remembered for the apostle we know as Andrew; “Andrew” is from the Greek, and it means strong or manly. It means Vigor. In reconstructing the events of 26 AD, I have chosen to
use the Hebrew word for strength and vigor—koach (the first syllable rhymes with bow, the second with the Scottish loch)—as Andrew’s original name, speculating that the Greek recorders may later have translated it.
Koach was of course a physically weak man, and the vigor that others saw in him was a strength of the heart. The Hebrews regarded physical illness and weakness as a sign of evil, a blighting of the People; the Greeks and the Romans saw it as the outward sign of an inner malformity of the soul. Yet even in these cultures, the man Koach was able to achieve such stature through the strength of his heart—for he did not believe that the condition of his body was an impediment to his mission—that even the Greeks who loved beauty and feared its opposite consented to call him Andreas, the Manly. In this story we encounter him as still hardly more than a youth, though even then, he was a formidable youth.