Quarantine

by Jim Crace

  Jesus was determined that he would not be consumed so easily. He shook his head and stamped his feet and beat his shoulders with his fists until all thoughts of water went away. He would not let his hunger and his thirst lay traps for him. The spirit had to beat the flesh. I am not hungry, he told himself. This is not thirst. The dryness and the stomach pains are false. I do not want to eat. It is the nourishment of home I miss, not bread and water. It is the nourishment of god I seek, not wine or meat.

  That’s what he told himself, but in his heart and in the middle of the night he was less certain. He was plagued by thoughts of rolling back the days, back to the shepherd’s where he’d left his overcloak, back to his father’s carpentry, a chisel in his hand, back to the times when he was small and unremarkable and prayers had been more comforting than food or sleep. Here, in the scrub, his prayers were fickle; sometimes a single verse would strengthen him, but more and more he found no courage in his prayers. The cave had swallowed them. The precipice diminished them. The darkness muttered to itself without pause but was not listening to him. At those times, he turned away from prayers and concentrated more on finding some reclusive strategy by which he could survive his quarantine.

  First of all, he set himself what Achim the psalmist called ‘the Task of Not’, the discipline of wanting nothing from the world. Seek wakefulness instead of sleep, the psalmist said, and pain instead of comfort. If you are offered apricots or galls, then put your fingers in the bitter dish. And look only for the peace that’s found in wretchedness and not the peace that’s found in love. There were hermits even in the Galilee that lived to Achim’s recipe: they put ashes in their mouths; they would not let themselves sit down, even at night; they broke their finger-bones with rocks; they stripped themselves of clothes and walked about like animals. Jesus had seen such men himself. He’d watched them hardly flinch when they were stoned by villagers.

  Jesus, then, would be an achimite. He had to look for peace in wretchedness. He took a young man’s pleasure in the prospects of his suffering. There was no other choice but to embrace discomfort as a friend. The scrub had offered him few hospitalities, little sleep, no love, but it could readily provide all the suffering that he might seek along its paths, and show him torments in a thousand shapes. He could not bring himself to smash his hands, not yet. He would not break his fast, even with dust or ashes. But he could at least be naked like an animal. Angels go naked, he reminded himself. He hardly wore any clothes, and only those for modesty, but he removed the few that he had – a tunic, and a cloth, the prescribed undergarment of the Jews – and took them to his rocky perch and set them free like doves, the poor man’s sacrifice, to wing their way down to the valley floor where Musa’s donkey lay without a shroud. The words of Achim called to him again: Come for me now, come for me in a thousand days, for I am naked, I am yours, and all I had is thrown to the wind.

  Jesus – naked on the precipice, his garments irretrievable – felt both foolish and triumphant all at once, and even briefly aroused by his own nakedness. What would his parents say? What would his neighbours make of him? Look at their Gally now. He had reduced himself to flesh, when he had expected and boasted that the fast would subjugate his flesh and cause his spirit to be clothed in gold. But Jesus really felt no shame. There were no witnesses. The air and sun were satisfying on his skin. He was a child again, and he had entered into Eden.

  It was not long before his body grew too hot to stay for long in Eden, and the first of many headaches started. He withdrew into the cave where the borrowed light and temperatures were more forgiving, at least by day. He leaned against the inside wall, the perfect achimite, until his arm went numb, and then he squatted on his heels. Not sitting, quite. It was a compromise. He muttered resolutions to himself, rocking with each word, although his feet were cut and painful. He bore the cramp and deadness in his legs as if they were a blessing. But he gave up on Achim within a day, although — too late – his clothes were gone for good. The darkness undermined his appetite for wretchedness, and he had reached the point in his fast when he was vulnerable.

  Now he made himself more comfortable, and did his best to drive all thoughts of Achim from his mind, although the psalmist’s songs were thumpingly insistent. He devised a second strategy for himself, to deal with quarantine, to conquer thirst. It was more kindly and more homely than the Task of Not. He would not embrace discomfort, after all. That was a vanity. Instead he’d be a resting camel, aimless and unthinking, and with no memory or hope to complicate his life. Every boy in the Galilee who’d ever run out of his yard at dusk to watch the caravans arrive knew that a camel could travel with its panniers full without water for ten or twelve days before its hump began to hang. A resting camel with no pack to carry could stay for twenty days at camp with nothing in its mouth but teeth and tongue and still be fit enough to canter with the herd. A fatted camel, if it kept out of the sun and stayed down on its haunches, could survive a quarantine without water. It would, like Moses, have just enough strength to carry a stone tablet from the mountain-top to the water-hole, where it could be refreshed. Was not a man a finer and a stronger creature than a camel? Could a man not go as far and further without water and last the forty days, unthinkingly, like a beast? Jesus nodded to himself. He’d be a resting camel, yes, and not go anywhere. He’d stay down on his haunches. He’d not expose himself to heat or sun. He’d not explore the precipice or even sit out on the rock to feast on Moab and the sea. He’d stay inside the shaded halo of the cave by day, seeking out the coolest air and asking nothing of the thriving sunlit, moonlit world beyond, except that it should rescue him from memory and hope.

  That did not last. Jesus had another strategy. I’m like the canker thorn, he told himself at other times. I have no need of sap. I’ll spread my skeleton across the rock and root myself into this marl. Sometimes he was a camel and a thorn at once.

  Again, particularly at night when he was cold and desperate for voices, Jesus turned back to his prayers. Old friends. He’d force himself to be more disciplined with them. No matter that his friends were fickle. He was not fickle, nor was god. He prayed out loud without fear of offending any of his family with his fervour. If he could not excel at prayers, then no one could. But no one – not a priest, a saint, a prophet from the hills – could pass the countless moments of the day engaged by prayer alone. There always came a time when the repetitions made his chin drop on his chest, so that he woke with a falling shudder after just a moment’s sleep. At other times he simply could not concentrate. His worshipping became more conscientious than spontaneous. The prayers lost weight, like ashes in a fire, and floated off. Sometimes he stopped the verses halfway through and caught himself paying more attention to the dirt beneath his nails or an old woodworking scar across his hand than to the holy words. Sometimes a prayer became a conversation that he half recalled. He called on god to answer him, but all the voices that he heard were from the Galilee, a cousin’s voice, a neighbour talking harshly to his wife, a peddler calling out his wares.

  Most of all Jesus was disrupted by the silence of the cave, the depth of night beyond the entry, the scrub’s indifference. Perhaps this silence was another test, he thought. Like hunger was a test. And boredom, too, and fear. Instead of prayers, he tried to concentrate on god in other ways, by listing all the prophets that he knew, the holy books, the laws. He repeated all the alliterating finger songs he’d learnt when he was small, each joint an attribute of god, the wise, the merciful, the generous, the enemy of sin … He took to marking patterns and holy signs on rocks and on the ground and touring them each day to run his fingers round their shapes, so that these dusty journeys of the fingertips became his wordless prayers. And that was comforting. He took it on himself to pass the time by marking rocks with all the words he knew.

  He had taught himself at home to recognize a few words in written Greek script, more words than anyone else in his family. He could read and write his own name, and the name of god. He could rough
ly translate the inscription on the local temple stone which promised death to gentiles if they strayed into the inner court. He knew the meaning of TI.CAES.DIVI, the truncated Latin on the tribute coins. It designated Tiberius to be an Emperor and God. A blasphemy, the priest had said. The priest had little sympathy for Rome, although when it came to collecting tithes he much preferred their silver blasphemies to the copper ones.

  Jesus also knew the scripts for a dozen or so words in Aramaic. He liked their timber squareness. They were shorter and less angled than the Greek or Latin; no vowels. The marks were simpler and more cheerful, doing all they could to bend in natural shapes. They’d been designed by holy carpenters, not masons. Their corners had a little curve to them, the work of planes.

  After his boyhood years of study at the temple school, steadying the scrolls and holding down the parchments beneath the pointing finger of the priest, Jesus had learnt to match some of these Aramaic shapes to sounds – the little candelabra of the letter sha, the lightning strike of enn, the falling plough sign of the kaoh. He liked the places on these parchments where scribes were changed. The one who’d stitched his way across the page with wary, threadlike marks passed on his verses to the playful and untidy one who let his muddy sparrows leave their tracks in undulating lines. Then came the scribe whose writing always toppled backwards, as if the meanings of the words were riding faster than the shapes which soon would fall on to their spines.

  This was a happy ignorance for Jesus, only knowing a dozen words amongst so many thousands. He would not want to read as easily as scholars, he told himself, for that would only help to split the meaning from the sound, to divorce the music from the shape. If he could read like his priest could, by simply dragging his forefinger underneath the script and speaking every word he touched as if these were not verses but an endless rote of errands to be run, then the scriptures might become little more than strings of tiny tasks, a list. There’d be no mystery. But in his ignorance, he could both listen to the words of the reader and marvel, too, at the unspoken narrative of shapes, or concentrate not only on the script but also on the spaces in between. God was in the spaces, he was sure. God went to the very edges of the page.

  Now, at the entrance of his cave with all the light of day removed, only the voice of the priest was missing. There was still a scroll for him to sit beneath. Jesus could look into the stars and see such spaces and such shapes as he had followed in the temple, spread out across the boundless parchment of the night in silver verses; again, the little candelabra, the lightning strike, the falling plough, the wary, undulating, toppling constellations which were the work of just one scribe. The sky was like the scriptures, written down in Aramaic too.

  So Jesus took great care in marking down his list of words. It was a sacred act, and one which brought the vastness of the scriptures and the sky into his cave. He cut the three square Aramaic letters which signified the name of god in the soft clay walls and scratched them on the harder entrance stone. He made a temple of his cave. He consecrated all the surfaces. He marked his own name, too, but lower in the clay and smaller than the name of god. He’d not scratch in the truncated titles of the caesar — TI.CAES.DIVI — but he attempted to reproduce the Greek warning to all gentiles that they risked their lives by coming too close. He wrote it where it would be seen if anyone came too close, in the weathered earth at the entrance to the cave. He hoped that anyone could read. He faltered after seven of the twenty words. The shapes were blurred. He used to know them all by rote, but now his memory was failing him, like his bladder. It was an empty bag. He finished off his warning to the gentiles with the Aramaic enn and sha and kaoh. A word that made no sense, but Jesus found the letters comforting. The lightning lit the candles, struck the plough.

  When he had finished writing out the word for god, laying claim to every stone and any flat face of clay which had room enough for lettering, he chose something simpler to occupy his mind. He took up his pointed writing rock and scratched a basket of three circles in the sun-dried floor, just inside his cave, and cut the circles into quarters with a cross. It was a rough grid on which to play the mill-game. This was how bad boys avoided temple lessons, hiding in the medlar trees, and playing on the mill-board for prizes of dried grapes, with sacrilegious forfeits for the ones that lost: put grass snakes in the priest’s side room; steal walnuts from the temple tree; rap on his door and run … And this was how old men killed time until the time killed them, sitting with their backs arched in the shade, above a mill-game board, waiting for their girls to serve a meal or for the moon to send them home. Jesus searched for tiny stones to act as counters – six blackish-brown, six white or grey – and spent the day as best he could in opposition to himself, testing all the blocked and ambushed routes around the grid. He’d never been much good at the mill-game when he was young. He had not practised. He’d prayed instead. He could not see the point of games.

  Now he had all the practice that he wanted. He could enjoy the dodging conflict of the little stones, the way they tussled for the cross-roads of the board, and did their best to flee the outer ring and hold the centre ground. There was another sermon there, he thought. Outside the temple gates on market day, raised on a cart. The mill-game as a symbol of the world, with god its inner circle and the stones as pilgrims hunting for the centre of the cross. It was a holy game.

  He could, therefore, persuade himself not to mind the guilty times when he abandoned prayers, when he lost heart in the repetition of the scriptures. Instead, he contested with himself in the mill-game and played both parts, the winner and the loser. Indeed, it seemed the game itself was a sort of prayer, with just one supplicant and no one to respond except himself. The mill-game worshipper, alone in quarantine, could not presume the company of god. Nor could the man at prayer. Both of them had to play both roles, and be in opposition to themselves and make all moves, and lose and win in equal part. God would not show himself. He would not sit cross-legged on the far side of the board, replying to each move of Jesus’s with his own stratagems, drawing in his breath when he seemed bettered, crying out when he had Jesus trapped, dispensing charity and hope and forfeits when he had placed the final stone inside the cross. He would not simply run up like a dog whenever Jesus prayed.

  It was no comfort, knowing that the winner was the loser too. Jesus could not sleep, even though he had relented in his disciplines and allowed himself to lie naked and depleted on the ground, out of the draught, his shoulder as a pillow. His skin became as cold as clay. Where were the camel and the thorn? He rolled into a ball, his knees pulled up towards his chin, his thin arms clasped around his shins, his backbone bumpy like a rabbit’s gut. It was the fourth night of his quarantine, and he was weak.

  17

  Marta wanted female company. Aphas and Shim could look for wood and maintain the fire at night. The badu could make traps for birds – his only skill, it seemed. But there were female tasks they would not do. They did not think it was their place to fetch their food from Musa, or cook it, for example. Marta could do that. Once her stomach had begun to settle, she was glad to have their errands as an excuse to flee the caves. Of course she had to pray, but her devotions did not take up much time. She was an indecisive worshipper of god. Her liturgies were brief and shy. Once she felt safe and strong enough to leave the perching valley of the caves, she took to hurrying each morning down the valley to the tent, where she could bargain with Musa for some bread or dates or curd. She hired a reed bed-mat from him, which she could soften with a cushion of sand. She’d get half her money back if she returned the mat at the end of quarantine unmarked, he said. Sometimes she bought a little stiffened goat’s milk in a pouch, as well, and some of Miri’s sweet cake. To eat in secret after dusk, not to share.

  ‘I feel responsible for you,’ Musa said, when she stood at his bed end one morning to offer her respects and money. ‘A landlord and his tenants are like cousins. Brothers, sisters, even. And now you worry me. Look at yourself. You’re losing wei
ght,’ he said. ‘And that won’t do. We have to keep you plump and strong. Don’t be like her. My wife’s a stick.’ He turned his head towards the curtain and the rattle of the loom, and called out to his wife, ‘Feed her, Miri. She is my guest. She is my sister for today.’

  ‘I mustn’t eat,’ Marta said. ‘Not now.’

  ‘Who’ll know?’ he asked. He wasn’t pleased. He wished that he could pull her to the ground and make her eat. He’d stuff her mouth with bread, not clay, and pick the crumbs off with his tongue. He turned away from her, and fell back on his cushions. An insult to a visitor. ‘You do not have to be our sister for the day if you don’t want. The choice is yours. Be thin.’

  The thought of Marta — thin or plump – made his mouth go dry. The fleshy twist of leavened dough, tucked in his lap, began to uncurl, bake and form a crust. Patience, patience – she’d be his within the forty days. She was alone. Who, or what, could stop him going to her cave one night? His plans for Marta kept him busy for a while. But otherwise, he only thought of being in the market-place, the centre of the crowds again. He wished that he could simply clap his hands and be elsewhere. He’d leave tomorrow if it were possible, except he could not make his escape out of the scrub until those three fools at the caves would put his bags and tent on to their backs and take him to the river valley. He was the warder of other people’s quarantines. He was the prisoner, as well.