by Stant Litore
His nostrils flared—it seemed to Yirmiyahu in that moment that a reek of decay was rising from the street, the same reek he had smelled above the pit on the hill. It was thick; it nauseated him. Even his own skin stank of it. “There is no peace, do not talk about peace!” he cried. “We are People of the Covenant! If the least of us falls on the desert road, we are to turn back and lift him onto our shoulders before we walk on. If any women hunger in the field, we are to leave some food behind for them to glean. Yet in our city, this very city where our God consents to dwell with us, you don’t look outside your windows. You hear the scream of a woman violated in the alley and you cover your ears. No man is taken and stoned for that defilement. You hear a child crying from an empty belly and you go to your inner room and eat, humming to yourself to shut out the noise. You don’t look outside your windows. And now death, death has come up into our windows! Why can’t you hear it? Our pact with God is rent and torn, a rending made terribly visible to us in the tearing of flesh in the teeth of the unclean dead.” He raged now, and the merchants’ faces were white. Yet the priests listened with dark, furious faces; he met their eyes, screaming out his words, challenging them, demanding that they respond, that they act. What veil did they wear over their eyes? How could the city’s suffering and peril be so hidden from the eyes of these sightless men?
“Levites!” he cried. “Men of my caste! How can you wear those garments? God’s garments, given to our father’s fathers when they vowed to bring the suffering of the People before God and bring God’s mercy and nurturing back to her People? To reach one hand to our God and with the other lift our People from the dirt—that is our calling! You care only for collecting tithes, and keeping the People quiet and unafraid. They should be afraid! Don’t you understand that the things we do here will drive God from the city?
“How dare you come to this Temple in those garments! How can you not stand naked before us today, forbearing such clothing while any one of our People in the city is naked? For every woman and child stripped in some street or alcove of this city, God in whose likeness they were born is stripped and bruised. For every child taken up the hill to the pit, you throw God, too, into the hole. You stand by while she is defiled and beaten and thrown to the dust, and you stand here about these steps wearing her clothes! Hooting like owls in the ruins of this covenanted city: Peace, peace, we have peace! We have God’s clothing; we wrap ourselves in it and look holy. We have God’s Temple; we dwell in God’s house that we’ve taken. We are satisfied. We have everything we want from God; let her cry in the street, for we have what we want from her. We are secure. We are safe. We have peace.” Yirmiyahu screamed: “What is this peace?”
That was when one of them—he did not see who—hefted a rock from the dusty ground and hurled it at him. Other stones soon followed, hard and brutal.
Fear is a sickness.
To treat it, Yirmiyahu kept wandering alone and unsteady through the wide streets of his memory, only sometimes noticing the reek of the corpse or the wet, clammy mud around his legs. It was still dark at the bottom of the well, but he could sense the lumpy shape of the dead body rotting beside him in the mud. His feet were swollen and numb, his tongue large inside his dry mouth. He rested against the wall and had conversations with people who weren’t there, though his lips barely moved.
Sometimes, smelling the dead in the well, he thought he was smelling the decay from the pit on Tophet. He shuddered in the dark. Once he pressed clenched fists to his temples and moaned.
His own efforts at the gates and at the Temple steps had not stopped the smoke from rising above that hill. After his flight through the streets, pelted by stones, and after sending his wife safely from the city the next day, Yirmiyahu had begun talking with the guardsmen of the walls, the younger ones, hoping to recruit some of them for a raid on the summit. If his cries at the Temple could not put an end to the sacrifices, perhaps a few swords might suffice. He was desperate; the anguish of what he had seen clutched at him, making it difficult to breathe when he thought of it.
Most of the guardsmen wouldn’t listen to him, some because they were afraid of the priests. Others because there was no threat to their own children, and they did not want to see the need. Still others because they had seen dead in the streets and the heathen way of appeasement appealed to their minds. But a few were beginning to hear him, he thought.
Three weeks passed. Then one morning, even as the sun rose over the wall, something happened that drove Tophet utterly from his mind.
Yirmiyahu woke to the sound of clinking metal and shouts from the wall. When he wrapped a brown cloak about himself and stepped out into the street, people were screaming; there were many, many people in the streets, the olive farmers from the Mount and the barley farmers from the river valley, all rushing into the city. “They’re shutting the gates!” the refugees cried. “The king’s men are shutting the gates!”
Babylon had come.
Yirmiyahu stood on the edge of the street by the gate as the people streamed past, his hair lank and unwashed about his face, and terror took hold of his heart and squeezed it, so that he sank back against the wall of a house. A vision filled his mind, sights of what might be, of what evils the actions of this day might bring. Terrible images of the restless dead gnawing on bodies, many, many of them in the streets. Then God’s words came, rushing wildly through him, a river, a torrent, a flash flood of speech, of warning and outcry. He screamed the words, right where he stood, even as the people flowed past.
At last he stepped out into the middle of the street, fighting the people who buffeted him, clawing his way toward the city’s main gates, screaming in a fever of horror, desperate to be heard by the king’s men, the armed men slamming heavy beams across the gates. “Death, death has come up into our windows!” he cried, as he tried in vain to force his way through the crowd. “We must yield the city! We must yield the city! Or the horses of the east will trample beneath their hooves only the bones of the dead! Open the gates! Open the gates! Do not lock the People in with the dead! Do not do this thing! God will leave the city! She’ll flee the city!”
The siege shut about the city; small camps of tents sprung up to watch each of its gates, the sun bright on so many helmets and shields. Bowmen moved in and out of the tents and their horses whickered, so many horses, more perhaps than the land had ever seen. In the city for long months, people hungered while the priests rationed out grain to those who could afford it. There were famished, slouching dead in so many streets and ill-lit corners. Yirmiyahu heard their moaning through the boarded-up windows of the scribe’s shop where he’d taken to living, having sold the house where he’d lived with his wife as soon as he sent her away.
There was rarely a day during the siege when Yirmiyahu could hold silence for long; the words came so fast and so forcefully that he was like a twig in a river. It was as though God was weeping behind her veil in the Temple, rocking in sorrow over the Ark while the dead ate in the streets.
Wherever Yirmiyahu stood in the city he could hear her. In the scribe’s shop, he would stir at times from a trancelike state to find that he’d been spilling God’s mourning, desperate words from his mouth for hours. He would reach up to touch his cheeks and find them wet.
If Yirmiyahu had been like the Temple levites, a man of the city rather than a man of the country—if he’d seen God as a masculine and potent deity rather than a bringer of fruits, if he’d seen God as one who protects the People rather than one whom the People protect, if Yirmiyahu had not heard her weeping, if he’d been as a deaf man, if he hadn’t been her navi, he might have been embittered toward his God. He might have blamed her. He might have shrieked at the irony of Babylon’s arrival—as though God had taken action where her People refused to, closing the tomb at Tophet by encamping an army between the hill and the city. If the men and women of Yerusalem wanted to feed the dead now, they would have to offer their own flesh.
But Yirmiyahu could hear God’s keening in t
he Temple, and he knew that her People had abandoned God and not God her People. It was the king’s greed, and the complacency of the priests and merchants who advised him, that had kindled the wrath of the great cities in the east. Perhaps God who sobbed now in her Temple had been as alarmed at their coming as anyone in the city. Yirmiyahu didn’t know; he only knew that God’s lament for her People was violent and overpowering, and it wrenched his heart.
When he rose in the mornings and washed his hands and arms up to the elbows, then his face—in those early mornings of the siege while there was still much water in the city’s wells—he comforted himself with the thought that he’d been right to send his wife away, that the anguish in her eyes when he broke covenant with her was atoned for by her distance from their beleaguered city, by her safety in her parents’ home in Anathoth in its quiet river valley, days from this starving place, this place of tears.
“The granaries are emptied. You know this. There is no food left, and only the dead are eating. Surrender is the only way to preserve the lives in this city.” Yirmiyahu pleaded with Zedekiah the king. Long months had passed, and terror had grown in the city. Still Yirmiyahu had beseeched the priests and the guardsmen, had begged outside the doors of the king’s house for the gates of the city to be thrown open. The guardsmen had exchanged pale glances at their posts.
Perhaps thinking that so many feet of earth might serve to silence the navi where threats seemed not to, the king finally tossed the prophet into a cell beneath his house. There, in the dim light, as weeks passed, Yirmiyahu learned for the first time what hunger really was, how there could be a hole in the belly, a hole with teeth around it, threatening to chew up your insides into one great empty place, one that your mind might fall into and never come back.
When the king came to visit his cell one night, it took such effort even to speak, to do anything but groan. “You have known me a long time now, Zedekiah. You know that I do not lie to you, though you don’t want to hear me, though you wish to believe I’m mad. Please. There is so little time left.” He tugged at his bonds. “Let me free. Let me speak to the people of the city at your side. We can still change what is coming.”
“What is coming, what is coming?” Zedekiah began to pace, working himself into a rage. The whites around his eyes showed his fear. “Why do you always bring these words, navi? You weaken the hearts of my men on the walls. They need to hear words of victory, not your talk of futility and disaster.”
“The city will die if you don’t yield the gates,” Yirmiyahu groaned. “Why won’t you understand?” He gazed at the king with sunken, weary eyes. He was a young king, a rash young man—he must have still been a boy not long before. His face was strong with his will, but his eyes were filled always with fear. Fear lived in Zedekiah’s skin. Regarding him, Yirmiyahu was certain that whether the king sat or stood, walked or lay down, he must feel the bite of that fear at all times.
With cold dread, Yirmiyahu thought of what was occurring outside the king’s house. How the guards now stayed on the city walls, slept and ate there without coming down, or if they did, descending only into the walled, secure courtyard of the king’s house. The same courtyard that held a well that was no longer giving water. Outside that walled courtyard, the people of the city locked themselves in their own homes, or went through the streets armed with whatever implements they could find: a shovel, or a tailor’s stick, or even the beam from a weaver’s loom—Yirmiyahu had seen two men carrying one of those, with a veiled woman following them through the streets, as though they expected to swing the massive beam together and crush the heads of any lurking corpses that stumbled into their path.
“I will not give up this city,” Zedekiah shouted. “This is my father’s city, and his father’s. It is the greatest city in the world. I will not give it up. Beseech your God to protect us!”
“She will not,” Yirmiyahu whispered. “You have broken Covenant with her.”
The young king hissed. “I have given monthly sacrifices at the Temple. The levites fatten on my tithes. Why shouldn’t God defend us?”
“Sacrifices,” Yirmiyahu murmured, sweat stinging his eyes. “She is so weary of sacrifices.”
Zedekiah thrust his pale face into Yirmiyahu’s. “Listen to me, you fool,” he breathed. “Ours is a strong and prosperous city; we have trade routes with every nation of the earth. I will not let it fall.” Zedekiah’s voice shook as he spoke. “Our fathers’ fathers lived in tents, Yirmiyahu. In tents. Wearing coarse wool and living off milk and gathered roots, like animals. Look at us now, look at all our fathers built. In my palace there are purple fabrics from Tyre and Sidon, ointments from Kemet. We have markets, scribes, educated men who chatter in the evening at our gates. We have strong men on the walls and strong gods to protect us. I have no intention of surrendering this city. I have three sons and I will leave this city to them intact. With its walls standing. And you, navi or no, you are going to rot in this cell where your words can make no man’s heart quail, until Babylon marches home.”
Yirmiyahu was silent a moment, weariness heavy on his shoulders. “Purple fabrics,” he murmured. “Men who talk at the gates. The Pharaoh of Kemet said such things as these to our Lawgiver, about the cities of Kemet. Yet Kemet was not given the Covenant and the Law. We were. No nation, though it have decorated tombs taller than mountains and all the world’s perfumes—no nation can be called great if some of its people starve, or are sold to beds in other cities, or are forgotten, or sacrificed to the dead to make a few men feel safe.”
And then words, God’s words, filled Yirmiyahu’s ears and his chest, as though God had heard the king and was crying out her reply, until her navi gave in and murmured her words aloud:
What use to me are perfumes from Sheba,
or sweet cane from far countries?
Your burnt offerings are not acceptable,
Your sacrifices do not please me.
He caught the king’s eyes with his. Zedekiah’s eyes were pale with restrained fear, Yirmiyahu’s were bloodshot, exhausted. “God is leaving the city,” the navi groaned. “She cannot stay—the Covenant is shattered; God’s ears are violated with the screams of her People.”
He closed his eyes, leaned back against the wall, as a vision—a terrible witnessing of the future—poured into his mind with the words. “This is no great city, O king. And I—I have seen—I have seen with my eyes—how your resistance will end. God sees what will happen; it is before her eyes day and night. So many deaths. So many. And as many nights as the gates are closed against Babylon, closing all of us inside, those many nights the dead gather in your streets. You must—must—lie down, let the king of Babylon place his boot on your neck. Otherwise, what is left of the city when he takes it will be burned with fire, its walls broken like the walls of Yeriho, our People felled like an oak or a terebinth, leaving only a stump behind.” He opened his eyes, saw Zedekiah’s horrified face, the king’s hand making the sign against evil. “Your wife will be put to death after the soldiers of that foreign land touch her. Your sons, Zedekiah, your three sons will be killed as you watch, knives to their bellies. And the king of Babylon will cut out your eyes, wanting your sons’ deaths to be the last sight you remember in your long life as a captive.”
“Be silent!”
Yirmiyahu laughed bitterly and felt the laughter would break him apart. “Do you think I haven’t tried to be? I am silent and my bones groan within me, I cannot sleep all the night for the roaring of the words rushing through me. I cannot be silent.”
Though his eyes were open in the shadow at the bottom of the well, Yirmiyahu lay in an exhaustion that resembled sleep, his body shivering in his improvised coat of defiled and tattered cloth. His mind moved, slow as kelp in the Middle Sea to the west, into other dreams of the past.
For Yirmiyahu, that year of the siege had been a bitter struggle, one fought over men’s hearts and with no weapons keener than words. When he was not in a cell, he spent the year at Baruch’s shop. The
sunlight through Baruch’s boarded windows had been a blessing, as had been the silent way Baruch cared for him and took down the prophecies and warnings he spoke. In Yirmiyahu’s memory, clear as a lake bed seen through unrippled water, Baruch the scribe sat behind his desk with a papyrus scroll spread before him. Baruch: his name meant “blessed,” and he was: a man who could afford bread and who knew how to read and write Hebrew letters with a speed and facility Yirmiyahu himself lacked. Baruch was bald, so that the sunlight shone on his head as on a warrior’s shield. His little shop sat against the northern wall and the light came through a window on the south, at the shop’s front. Baruch slept in a little room upstairs, and Yirmiyahu slept on a few blankets before the desk, ever since he’d sent his wife away and sold his small house.
Often in the hour before the sun dropped beneath the south wall and cast them into night, Yirmiyahu would pace across the shop—four strides each way—and pour words from his mouth like water from a ewer. When God sent the words like a river, the navi could not dam or channel it; it rushed through him. At times he nearly shattered apart with the force of the emotions sweeping through him.
A voice is heard in Rama
cries and bitter weeping
God is weeping for her children
she refuses to be comforted
for they are gone
Baruch’s hand moved with speed and certainty, sketching with his stylus the angular shapes that were letters, the gift God had given to the Lawgiver many generations before, that her words might be heard whenever the Lawgiver’s scroll was read.
