Quarantine

by Jim Crace

  Aphas knelt as best he could, and strained to listen to his landlord’s slowly fading words. ‘Go with my Miri, uncle. Keep her safe, for there are brigands in these hills. And wolves, bad wolves. A woman should not be alone out here. Call him and her.’ Now Shim and Marta were summoned. She knelt a little distance from Musa’s side, her head cocked to hear what he wanted from her. Shim, though, was reluctant to kneel down at all. He worried for his ankles and his little toe, despite his landlord’s sudden, devastating illness. But Musa found the strength to raise his voice: ‘I beg you, one of you, it doesn’t matter which … Stay in your cave tonight, and bring me water if I call. Say prayers for me if I should die. Take care of Miri and the goats …’ He struggled for some breath. ‘The other one of you. This is my final wish. The Gally saved my life before. Go down to him while there is any light. Stand on our rock where we have stood so many times. Call out until your voice has gone. Stay through the night and pray to him. Say that I’ll die unless he comes. Have pity on a man … Which one of you will go?’

  He meant, of course, which one of you will stay. He knew it would be Marta, naturally. An unattended woman could not stand out on a rock, past midnight, praying to a madman in a cave. There was a risk, of course, that Shim would be the one to stay behind. Then Musa would go to his cave at night and smash his yellow head in with a rock. A secondary pleasure.

  Everybody gladly did as they were told. Aphas and Shim would rather go down to the tent and to the promontory than stay with Musa. Let him die or let him recover on his own. They did not want to witness either. Aphas thought how comfortable he’d be, sleeping on rugs for a change. Miri thought of the hours she could spend, in candlelight, tying knots on to her mat. Shim had reclaimed his curly staff, almost as soon as Musa had fallen to the ground. He liked the idea of a private vigil on the promontory, wrapped in his thickest cloak, alone at last with Musa’s very stupid boy – although, of course, he’d not call out too loudly to the Galilean or press too hard for him to come and minister to Musa. He had no faith in shepherd boys. He did not want a miracle.

  They hurried off, the three of them. They ran away.

  Marta shrugged. She didn’t really care that she was left behind. Another night of quarantine, so what? She was the least resentful of them all. Musa’s stories softened her. She couldn’t really fear a man who was so captivating, and so sick, and who had fathered Miri’s child. If only Thaniel had been able to tell a tale like that. If only he were not so dull. Perhaps she would be pregnant, too.

  Musa kept away from Marta. He played with time and let the woman go about her evening tasks. He heard her footsteps, smelled her fire, heard her coughing in the smoke. He did not bother her. He was at peace. The cave was warm enough. Its floor was soft. He slept. He’d wait till night. They were alone at last, or only separated by the earth between their caves.

  There was the badu left, of course. An easy person to forget. After everyone else had received their whispered instructions from Musa, he had come and knelt inside the cave. He’d felt his landlord’s forehead and shaken his head as if to say, This illness is bad. You stand no chance; or, This is Nothing. I’m not fooled. Get up and go back to your tent. He’d pressed his cheeks, his hair into Musa’s face. Musa could have bitten him. He could have smashed his hennaed head in with a rock. Instead, he whispered in his ear, ‘Enjoy your run, you monkey boy … Keep out of sight.’ But, really, Musa didn’t care about a madman such as him. He was too small to intervene between such large adversaries.

  22

  It would have been the perfect night for Musa’s death, if he’d been truly ill or if some god, fooled by the noise that Musa made, had decided that the time had come to put an end to him. The sky was mourners’ black. No stars. Nor hardly any moon. What little light there was was muffled in the stacks of mist, which made the outline of the hills seem less solid even than the clouds. A passing world, but heavens everlasting. The earth was insubstantial and the sky was hard.

  On such a night, death could have crept in unobserved, rubbed its fingers over Musa’s eyes and passed his heavy soul up into the heavens without betraying its stern work by casting any shadows in the scrub. If he’d cried out, ‘It touches me,’ in those few moments when the vapours of his life were pressed out of his flesh and mixed in with the clouds, no one would have come to cling on to his chubby toes and plead, ‘This man is merchandise that can’t be touched. We will not let you take this man from us.

  The badu was awake all night, it’s true, but he would not come to Musa’s aid. He would not and he could not hear the vapours and the flesh divide. Marta was only dozing, possibly, but she was meek and sensible enough to stay inside her own cave for the night, whatever noises she could hear. Musa might call for help from his small family, as he had done before, ‘Miri, Miri. Come to me, quick, and save me from …’ A dying man could reasonably expect his wife to battle for his life. But Miri was too far away to care that he was calling. She and the old man, Aphas, were sleeping better than they’d slept for many days, out of hearing, in the tent, and for the moment unconcerned about her husband’s fate, except in dreams.

  Only Shim, far out on the promontory, cross-legged, transcended by the darkness and his own alarm, was sifting every sound he heard. A tumbling stone. The dry bronchitis of a stirring wind. A roosting bird. He was the only one of them to hear the nudging and the cussing of the clouds as death and its grey carriage went voyaging across the night. If he prayed at all at hearing it, he only prayed that death would stop at Musa’s cave and not descend on Shim. Let Musa die, he thought. His time is overdue. The world will be a better place if Musa’s life is short. But I have value in the world, and work to do, and there are still ten days of quarantine to serve. My time’s not come.

  Yet Shim would not deceive himself for long. His view was Greek, of course. Death wouldn’t intervene to make the world a better place. He’d be a fool to think it would. Death is a servant sent to the market with a list, and far too dull to have discretions of its own. And death is economical, as well. It only barters for the unprotected and the weak, because they’re cheap and easy to obtain. Death wouldn’t tire itself with Musa, not yet. He was too young and strong and irredeemable for death. He was too large. He would refuse to die, however ill he’d seemed, however tightly he had held his sides and writhed in pain. There was not much chance that Musa would be dead by the morning. He’d be alive. Shim knew it in his bones, though he hoped otherwise. What if that illness was a sham, a trick, to carry out some deathly, stern work of his own?

  No, death would not grapple with Musa when there were easy pickings such as Aphas, old and cancerous, to choose instead. Or Miri, even, weakened by her child. So many pregnant women died before their time. Death liked the price of them. They were a bargain, at two lives in one. Or Shim himself. He was not well prepared to struggle for his soul. He felt so weak and undefended in the night; no roof, no courage for protection. Death could easily help itself to him, drop its talons on his shoulders like an owl and lift him from the rocks. Or else, more likely, death would come out to the promontory not as an owl but in Musa’s shape to seize him by his ankles and bring its fifty fists down on his head. Why else had Musa sent him there to pass the night alone, so cleverly, except to separate him from the rest and murder him? No one would know if he were dead. Musa would only have to roll the body off the precipice – no need for volunteers to drag it to the edge – and go back to the cave to resume his illness. He could tell his neighbours that Shim had had enough of fasting and had fled. Or Shim had tumbled in the dark. Or Shim had achieved such deep tranquillity that he’d transformed himself into a stone.

  So, for the first part of the night, Shim cowered on the promontory, expecting Musa to arrive and making shapes of Musa from the darkness. Musa, silent. Musa, huge. Musa, running on his toes, with flames and serpents at his fingertips. Death with Musa riding on its back. Musa, black and swift, invisible. Shim had never known a night so dark and still and full of possibil
ities. But he was not terrified for long. He heard the cussing and the nudging of the clouds diminish. His fear diminished, too. The sky grew quieter for a while. Resting, and digesting. If death had come, Shim thought, then it had passed him by. But he was sure that someone else had died, close by. He smelt it in the air. What would he find when he went back to join his neighbours in the morning? Was Musa safe? Were Marta and the badu spared? Had death sniffed round the tent where Aphas and Miri were sleeping, and taken both their lives or one?

  It was almost midnight when the lightning came to pierce the clouds and let the avalanche of thunder-claps come tumbling to the earth. The sky was only threatening. A mummer’s show of strength. It meant no harm. The rain and the scrub had reached an understanding when the world was made to let each other live their lives as much as possible in peace. The clouds came down to sniff the hills, to scratch their bellies on the thorns and rest their weight on this warm land before the weary battles of the night. They could not help spilling just a drop or two, enough to make the tent reverberate and Shim to wonder whether he should flee back to his cave at once or — better — join the others in the tent, if any of them had survived.

  But these clouds were only passing through. They would mostly take their waters north across Sawiya and Jerusalem into Samaria, and to the Galilee. They’d rather wet the leaves of oaks and terebinths than waste themselves on thorns; they’d rather wash the dust off myrtles, brooms and asphodels. Before dawn the first raindrops would kick up Galilean soil on to beans and onion sets in deep-ploughed fields, and splash the red-black earth from summer barley roots. Jesus’s brothers would bring the chickens in and lie awake while the rain beat down on their flat roofs and broke up the lime marl which they had laid across the planks and joists and reeds, to keep their rooms rainproof. Someone would have to use the cylinder of stone when it was light to roll the marl back into place. Not me, they thought. It’s not my turn. Not me.

  But in the scrub, the native marl stayed almost dry. The clouds and lightning moved away, banging on their shields. The sky grew soft with moonlight once again, and then sharp with stars. And with the stars, the wind came in, glad to range around the empty forum of the sky; a gladiator, looking for a fight. It was an angry wind. See me, it cried. I’ve chased the clouds away. The thunder and the lightning have run off. I’ve stripped the night of any warmth it had. There’s nothing I can’t do to you.

  This wind had no agreement with the scrub. They were old enemies. The scrub exposed its rocks and ridges to blunt and bruise the wind. And in return, the wind picked up the dust and thorns and threw the loose stuff of the scrub about, and tore the dead wood from the trees like some mad boy. But on this night the wind was not prepared to settle for dead wood. It pitched itself against the scrub. The brittle trees could not withstand the wind at all. A tree can only bend so much, and then it snaps or comes up with its roots.

  Shim would have stayed much longer on the promontory had it not been for the wind. There was enough moonlight now to give him the courage to remain outside all night. He’d like to prove himself against the darkness. He’d like to be a colleague of the stars. And then – if anybody looked across at dawn – they’ d see him as a tranquil silhouette, sat on his rock against the rising purples of the day, half flesh, half stone. A noble sight – more noble, surely, than the Gally, hiding in his cave. Then Shim would walk up to the tent, the low sun at his back, the shadows of his body and his staff cast out in front of him like cloaks thrown down by worshippers to make a path. He would take his time. His steps would be reflective. His face would not betray how long the night had been, how close he’d come to death. My husband’s dead, the wife would say, with any luck. Or, Aphas passed away. Or, there’s been an accident; the badu fell and killed himself. A lion came. There’d be a funeral, and Shim would be the one – who else? – to lead the rituals and then to recommit his neighbours to their last ten days of quarantine. They’d all defer to Shim until the end.

  Except there was a cruel, defiant wind, and it was cold. Shim could not stay a moment more. It was not safe or sensible. He had not come on to the promontory because he’d wanted to, he reminded himself. He had been sent. He had been tricked. ‘Call out until your voice has gone,’ Musa had said. ‘Stay through the night and pray to the Gally. He saved my life before. Say that I’ll die unless he comes. This is my final wish.’ Then die, thought Shim. That is my final wish. He would not pray as he’d been asked. Who’d know? Instead, he only whispered at the wind, as it attacked the precipice, ‘Gally. Fat Musa says he’s dying. Says you’ve got to come and save his life, up at the caves. Have pity on the man, he says. There now. That’s it. I’ve done. Go back to sleep.’

  Shim wrapped his cloak around himself and left a little after midnight, when the wind began to loosen stones and earth around the promontory, and sent them sliding down the slope into the silence of a fall. He was surprised how hard it was to walk. The wind picked on his knees, and lifted up the cloak around his head. It bruised his cheeks and ears.

  It was not easy climbing in the dark, but at least it was obvious at first what route he had to take. Each of his steps should go a little higher than the last. He fell forward and felt his way with his hands. But once he’d reached the flat top of the precipice, he lost all sense of where he was. The air was even more blustery than on the cliff, and even though the night had sharpened he could not see the outline of the hills. His eyes were watery and almost closed against the wind. He squatted on the ground, and felt about him with his staff. The storm was strong enough to blow him down to Jericho. He tried to remember which direction it had been coming from while he was sitting on his rock. It was, he thought, blowing roughly in line with the precipice, hugging the cracks and rifts and stretch-marks of the valley sides, as if the valley had been shaped itself by wind. So, if he kept the gusts blowing on his left cheek, then he was bound to walk inland, away from the cliff edge. He felt his way like some blind beggar with his feet and staff. His hair was tugging at his head. His face was struck by bits of leaf and thorn, and stung by dust. His clothes and straps reached out towards the waters of the north.

  He might not have found the tent at all, if he hadn’t stopped to shelter, curled up in his cloak, behind a rock. He’d spend the rest of the night right there, he thought. It was not cold enough to freeze. There was no rain. The rock provided some protection. He ran his staff along its base and into any crevices he found. He might not be the only creature which had taken refuge from the wind. He hugged himself. He was surprised how much he missed his cave; his neighbours even.

  It was not long before he heard the cries beyond the wind, a woman’s voice, a man’s, six goats’, the buffeting of cloth. He gladly left his rock and battled with the wind towards the sounds that could be mistaken for the vast percussion of the stormpressed, canvas billows of a ship. He could almost taste the salt, and hear the panic of the conscripts on the oars. And there, at last, was Miri clinging to her flattened tent, a little fisherwoman hanging on to sails with broken rigging, amongst the snapped and wayward masts and poles. Her house of hair, so flexible of build and lifestyle, had bent before the wind too much.

  Aphas, a shadow, darker than the night, was too slow and weak to grip the tent cloth firmly enough. He ran around at first, grabbing everything that moved, a length of rope, a tumbling loom, a bolt of cloth, some clothes, a round of bread. But when he made a pile of them, they only rolled away before he had a chance to find a rock to weigh them down. He did not try again. He was too old to set himself against the drumming antics of this wind. He found some shelter amongst some rocks. He didn’t care what happened. He’d rather die than spend a night like this.

  Shim had to hurry now. It didn’t matter if his steps were not reflective, or if his face betrayed how long the night had been. He was no tranquil silhouette. He was at best a moving shape, two bending legs, a flagging cloak, but one that ran to Miri’s aid and helped to pull the untamed tent cloth in, and tugged the ropes and tent
poles out of the flying darkness of the night. At last they made a pile of goat-hair cloth, the four sides of the tent, the roof, the coloured curtain that had divided Musa from his wife. They lay on it, spread-eagled, deafened by the flapping edges of the cloth. What could they do? They waited for the light to drive away the wind.

  A metal pot set off across the scrub, between the maddened goats, its flight powered by a fist of wind. It was a tuneless, leaden bell which tolled itself and found new notes on every rock it struck.

  23

  The Gally knew what wind this was. This was the wind on which to fly away. Its gusts and blusters came looking for him in the cave, bursting in like rowdy boys to shake him from unconsciousness. Get up, get up, it’s time to go.

  He had prepared for them. His fast had made him ready. Perhaps he’d served his thirty days just to be equipped for the wind. Quarantine had been the perfect preparation for his death. His body was quiescent and reduced; dry, sapless, transparent almost, ready to detach itself from life without complaint. A wind this strong could pluck him like a leaf, and sweep him upwards to the palaces and gardens that angels tended in the stars. It was a wind of mercy, then, for all its bluster, sent by a pliant god who was prepared to bend the rules. His god, praise god, had not insisted on the forty days. He had not left Jesus in his coma, wasting and unclean, until the final moment of his quarantine. He’d taken pity on his Galilean son. Come now.

  It seemed to Jesus, when he woke and put his hands out to the wind, that he was already dead and living it. Those family faces which he had summoned as his allies and his witnesses, that woody workshop in the Galilee, the fields, the boys, the shady corners in the temple yard, were only feeble memories. Another person’s life. A story told by someone else. Those pigeons trapped amongst the vegetables would not be freed by Jesus any more. There was no future there for him. No fleshy future anyway. He had surrendered food for dreams. He’d traded in his flesh for everlasting holiness. What would his parents and his neighbours say if they could see him now? They’d say he was a very stupid boy.