by Jim Crace
Pray as she might, however, she could not entirely shut the noises out. She was certain when she stopped and listened hard that there was something, or someone, in the bushes just below her cave. She heard the small sounds that someone makes when he — of course, it had to be a he – is standing still and breathing through his nose. The snuffles, rustling of clothes, the lubrications of the tongue and mouth of someone waiting for her in the dark. One of her three new neighbours, perhaps? She had not thought of them as dangerous, though no man was trustworthy when a woman was alone, no matter who he was. She stopped her praying, and tried to breathe as gently as she could. There was more rustling, and then the someone seemed to shake a piece of cloth. It sounded like her husband flapping out the dust when he was taking off his clothes. The old man, then? The blond? The badu with the hennaed hair? Which one was naked at her cave?
Marta’s measured breathing and her stillness made her drowsy. She tried to stay awake by concentrating on the sounds outside but, finally, she could not stop herself. Her chin went down on to her chest. She fell asleep.
Thank heavens for the charity of dreams. When Marta woke and heard again the scurrying below her cave, the naked man had been dismissed from her mind’s eye. She listened to the noises more critically. They were too light and birdlike to be threatening. A man would make more weighty sounds. He wouldn’t have the patience to stay so quiet and still. A woman then? A bird? Gazelles? The answer was obvious: it had to be the little straw-boned woman with the untied hair who’d evidently dug and taken up residence in a grave-like pit amongst the poppies; the peeping, rodent face, half-buried in the ground, and looking out across the scrub with moist and fearful eyes. Marta could have clapped her hands with pleasure and relief. She had forgotten that there was a fourth companion for the night. Might she still be hiding in her grave?
Now Marta had a reason to go outside. There was a friend at hand, a mad one possibly, but one that was too small to do her any harm. Women should seek each other out. She made her way towards the entrance, steadying herself with both hands against the cave wall, and stepped into the damp earth and the bushes at the foot of the cliff. She was surprised how sombre it was, and how blustery the wind had become. Surprised because she’d always thought that country skies at night would be much brighter than the smothered skies of villages: But the night was beautiful, nevertheless, more beautiful than any night that she had known at Sawiya, possibly because Sawiya was in the basement of the hills. This scrubland was the roof. From where she stood, the moon was level with her eyes. It was the thinnest melon slice, hardbacked, translucent, colourless. Its rind was resting on the black horizon, hardly bright enough to tinge the sky. But to her left, beyond the valley and its sea, the peaks and shoulders of Moab were boasting rosy epaulettes of light. The morning was approaching.
Marta walked towards the grave. She could hear the new friend scrabbling inside. There were flapping gasps of breath, like landed fish in nets.
‘It’s all right,’ she called, a reassurance for them both. ‘It’s me. The woman yesterday.’
But of course there was no other woman in the grave. There hadn’t been since dusk. Miri was with Musa in their tent, and reunited by the blanket on their bed, her narrow, knuckled backbone pressed against his hip. Instead there was a shuffling and contented darkness in the hole. Here were the small, wet sounds that Marta had heard before. She couldn’t place the sounds – they were too moist and feathery to be a woman, no matter how tiny.
She stepped too close. She knocked a loose stone in. That’s all it took. There was a startled screech and then a gust of flapping, muscled wind as the pit made instant shapes from shadows and flung its contents in the air. It sounded like a hundred husbands shaking out their clothes. Damp bodies hurtled from the grave into the night, as headlong and as vengeful as demons hurled out of a nightmare and driven forwards by the seven winds of hell.
Marta screamed loudly enough for her new neighbours to hear, and to hear the echo, too. She dropped heavily on to her knees. Her face was wetly, firmly struck a dozen times. Her chest and shoulders took six or seven blows. She was assaulted by wings and beaks and smells. Then – almost before her scream had ended – they were gone, crying curses at her as they fled. She did not know what birds they were at first. She was too shaken. Her heart was beating faster than their wings. One of the birds had snagged its claws inside the loose weave of her cloak, and was hanging at her thigh, upside down, thrashing and spiralling. Marta, her panic equalling the bird’s, beat at it but could not knock it away. Once she had caught her breath again and steadied herself, she held its wings and feet and pulled it free. Her hands were shaking. It was a heavy, barrel-breasted bird, with a mottled throat and muddy-coloured underwings. A scrub fowl of some kind. She knelt on the cold ground for a few moments, panting, warming her hands in the bird’s breast feathers. She would not let it go. This was a gift. The evening meal, to mark the end of her first day of fasting. She held its feathers to her cheeks and lips for a few moments. It was softer than any cloth. But she understood this was no time or place for childishness. She broke its wings to stop it struggling. She ought, she knew, to slaughter it according to the rules by draining out the blood. But there wasn’t any knife – or priest – to hand. Instead, she put her thumb against its neck and snapped its vertebrae.
There was a second unearned gift as well. Once the morning light had lifted high enough for her to see inside the grave, she found what the birds had gathered for. When Miri had dug the grave for Musa, she’d gone beyond the biscuit and the stones, and cut across the underground water-seep which drained what little moisture sank into the scarp. During the night, the grave had formed a perfect cistern; cool, straight-sided, and impossible for antelope or goats to raid and empty. The water was dark brown and little more than ankle-deep, but it made the forty days ahead seem almost comfortable.
Marta was not thirsty but she knew she ought to drink before the sun appeared and her quarantine began in earnest. She lay down on the ground, with her chin resting on the outer rim of the grave, and reached down to the water. Luckily, she was a tall woman and her arms were long enough to touch the bottom. At once a few black ticks alighted on her wrists. The water tasted rich and soupy, earth-warm, not appetizing but cruelly beneficial like herbal medicine. It tasted fertile. What would Thaniel think if he could see her spread out across earth, immodest as a girl?
She was not scooping water on her own for long. The blond, summoned by her involuntary scream and by the hubbub of the birds, was soon lying at her side, toasting his good luck and drinking palmfuls. The older Jew had trouble kneeling, let alone lying on his chest and reaching for the water. He held his side, and frowned with pain. Marta scooped water up for him, losing most of it between her fingers before she could get her cupped hands, still shaking from the fright she’d had, up to his mouth. He shook his head, apologized. It would not do to let his lips or tongue come into contact with her skin. He gave his felt skull-cap to her. It didn’t hold much water but it absorbed enough for the old man to squeeze into his mouth. At first he tried to remove the scobs of earth from the felt before he drank, but he soon settled for the simple life by swallowing the water first and then picking the grit and sand off his lips and tongue. The badu was the last to come, evidently not alarmed by Marta’s scream. He could not easily reach the water either with his hands. He jumped into the grave and got down on his knees to drink. He had the manners and the narrow backbone of a goat.
There’s nothing like a desert water-hole for making good, brief neighbours out of animals that have nothing much in common other than a thirst. There is the story of the leopard and the deer, standing patiently in line while vipers drink. And the tradition amongst travellers that anyone who pushes at a well will die from drowning. Their bones will never dry. So these four strangers, gathered round the cistern, were more careful and polite than they might have been if they had met, say, at a crowded market stall, where the sharpest elbows and the shril
lest voice would get the leanest meat. Even the badu, for all his childish, knee-deep impropriety, kept to his corner and was careful to avoid the other dipping hands. There was a good deal of nervous laughter, as well. They knew they were a comic sight — unwashed, unrested, far from home, and with the rankest water, hardly clean enough to irrigate a field, slipping through their fingers, down their chests and legs. So, once they’d filled themselves with water and were sitting on the rocks waiting for the sun to come and dry their clothes, they had no reason to behave as if they were entirely strangers. Like fellow travellers sharing tables at an inn, and knowing they would share the same uneasy stomachs in the night, they had to talk. They’d come into the hills for privacy, perhaps. But there were customs to observe. Customs of the water-hole. Customs of the road. And for the men, the awkward and restraining customs of language and demeanour forced on them by the presence of an unaccompanied woman. Who knows how these three might have spoken and behaved if Marta, handsome and imposing, her throat and arms and ankles close enough to study and to touch, hadn’t been there? Who was the viper? Which the leopard and the deer?
Marta knew that she was disconcerting. Men stared at her, even in Sawiya where she was no longer any novelty, as if her presence made them uncomfortable. They stopped their work to watch her walking down the alleys towards the well. She could hang the sickle and stay the saw. The same men watched her coming back, balancing a filled pitcher of water on her shoulders. They hoped to see her arms lifted above her head. Her breasts would spread high and flat across her chest. Any man that watched would know that her stomach was still unburdened by a child, and – for reasons only understood by men and cockerels – that was arousing. But Marta misread their stares, and stared back at them, meeting eye for eye. Why should she feel ashamed? If they grinned or whispered amongst themselves, then she could guess exactly what they said and why they smiled. She was for them a fruitless tree. ‘Poor Thaniel,’ they must have said. ‘No sign of any crop this year. Two barren wives. Too much to bear.’
Poor Marta, though. Despite her boldness in the alleyways, she was embarrassed by herself. Her sterility. Her size, which she considered to be too manly and ungainly. Her undernourished heart. Now she was embarrassed even more, in front of strangers. Her inadvertent scream had brought them running from their caves. It was as if she’d summoned them. Now she was exposed. Her hair, uncombed inside its scarf. Her wet and dusty clothes. The earth and water on her face and chest. A married Jewish woman of her age was not accustomed to spending any time alone with men, apart from family or priests. Even Thaniel, her husband, did not spend much time with her on his own if he could help it. Thank god for that. So she was not comfortable to be displayed for strangers in this way. She tucked her feet out of sight, behind the hem of her tunic, wrapped her arms and shoulders as modestly as she could inside her cloak, hunched her shoulders like a raven so that her tunic hung straight down as a curtain and hid her body, and sat a little distance from the men. She put her hands on to the edges of her tunic and found the seeds that she had stitched inside the hem some years before, a good luck charm. There were ten seeds, each one an unborn child, each one hardened by the passing months. Five daughters and five sons, a balanced set of dowries if all of them survived. She ran them through her fingers like prayer-beads on a bracelet, counting them up to forty and then back to nought again. She counted secretly. She did not move her lips. She tried to turn herself to stone. She’d have to be discrete for forty days. She’d have to keep her distance from the men. The priest was right: it had been wilful, perilous and unbecoming to flee from home into the wilderness. No one had warned her, though, how fired and animated she would feel.
The old man did not worry her or even interest her, despite his frailty. He was a Jew. She’d met his type a hundred times before. Her uncles and her older neighbours were like him, meek and pompous all at once, slow to walk, quick to talk, and made babyish by any pain. This was her husband in old age. The blond one, though, was odd and beautiful. A foreigner, she thought. A disconcerting foreigner to dream about. She’d seen that colour hair before, amongst the legionnaires and sometimes on the merchants coming from the north. A perfume-seller’s hair. It was the colour of honey. His neck and cheeks were as brown as beeswax. She watched him from the corner of her eye, not wanting to be seen, but not finding any reason to look elsewhere. He sat cross-legged, self-consciously, his legs entwined, almost in a braid. He had a staff, made out of twisted wood, with perfect curls along its stem, which he held across his lap. He ran his fingers round the curls. He was a handsome man, she thought. More than handsome. Statuesque. She wondered if his body hair was blond …
Marta did not like the badu much. He’d jumped in the cistern with no regard for anybody’s cleanliness. She did not trust the way he squatted on his heels, rocking like a crib, twisting his hennaed hair between his fingers, and ready to spring up. He was too small and catlike, with far too many bracelets on his arm, she thought, to be much of a threat to her. But there was something devilish and immature about his face. If he had any body hair, it would not match his hennaed head.
Marta had her numbers and her seeds for company. She watched the men, and waited for the sun to warm her up. The badu did not speak at all. He dropped pebbles in his mouth. But the old man was glad to talk, and the blond, though he hardly turned his head, seemed resigned to listen. The old man did not whisper, but spoke up loudly – in self-conscious Greek – so that everyone could hear, perhaps. He gave his name, his place of birth, his trade. He was Aphas the mason, from Jerusalem. He reported on the complications of his journey to the caves, his attempts to light a fire, the discomforts of the night. All unimportant, unrevealing, reassuring facts. What other intimacies than these should be exchanged by strangers in the wilderness? Finally, when no one offered to reply, he turned towards the badu and asked for his name and his place of birth. But the badu only smiled – bad teeth, wet pebbles – and shook his head. He didn’t want to give his family name, perhaps. He did not know his family name. What badu did? Or else he had no Greek. Aphas turned to Marta now and, with a chuckle at the badu’s silence, tried to implicate her in his amusement. ‘Some chatterbox,’ he said. He almost asked her name, but then had second thoughts. Was it polite? One could not simply ask a woman’s name, or say, ‘Who are your husband’s family?’ or ‘Why have you come here alone? What do you want?’ Instead, he tapped the blond man on the knee – an old man can assume such intimacies — and said, ‘Yes, yes? Let’s hear.’
The honey-head, as Marta had thought, was from the north. He knew some Aramaic and some Greek, though many of the words he used were unfamiliar. Unlike the gabbling stonemason, he spoke as if he had eternity. She didn’t recognize the name he gave for his home town, but she knew his own name well enough. It was Shim. An almost Jewish name. Though he was no Jew, he said. His grandfather had been a Jew, however, who’d left the valley of Jezreel in one of the dispersals, sixty years ago. Now he’d come back to the land of his forebears, Shim said, to seek something that he could not name. ‘Perhaps there is no word for it. As yet.’
‘To meet with god,’ suggested Aphas, keen to show he was a man of culture.
‘No, no, the word “god” is hardly strong enough for what I seek.’ He would not look at the old man, but only concentrated on his staff and his own voice. ‘My god is not a holy king, an emperor in heaven. He’s immanent in everything. In things like this …’ he shook his staff, ’ … and in the human spirit. He will absorb us when we die. If we are ready. But first we have to find that something for which I have no word …’
‘Enlightenment’s a word …’ ventured Aphas.
‘Enlightenment comes to the ignorant. That is their candle in the dark and their salvation from the sensual impulses and appetites of public life. But for myself, I am looking more for … Tranquillity, perhaps. That’s not so easy to acquire.’ He rubbed his fingers on his thumbs, as if his words were cloth. ‘I can encounter god at home. I can find e
nlightenment in tiny things. I do not have to leave the house. But here …’ again he felt the cloth of words, ‘what better place to look beyond enlightenment and god for nameless things than here, in caves, far from the comforts and distractions of the world?’ Aphas nodded all the while, though men like Shim – scholars, mystics, sages, ascetes, stoics, epicureans, that holy regiment – were a mystery to him. Why punish your body voluntarily when the world and god would punish it in their good time? It would not do to argue, though, with someone of Shim’s undoubted class and dignity. ‘I’ve understood,’ he said, although to Marta’s eyes, he looked alarmed. ‘I know it, though there is no word for it …’
‘As yet.’
He had not turned his back on god, the emperor of heaven, Shim continued. Not on one god. Not on any of the gods. But he was Greek in his beliefs. He worshipped every living thing. ‘I worship this,’ he said, picking up a stone. ‘I worship those.’ He pointed at the birds. ‘I worship this.’ Again he turned the spirals of his staff.
