by Stant Litore
But God hadn’t stopped speaking, and Yirmiyahu wept as her words, terrible words, rushed through him. Ever since the gates closed, those words had been words of horror and dismay, words of warning and of pleading, words telling of the destruction that was already creeping within the city. Sometimes the recitation would end long before the sun fell, for Yirmiyahu would collapse in grief and lie on the floor, fighting for breath. Then Baruch would quietly set aside his stylus, stopper the flask of blueberry ink, and breathe slowly over the scroll to dry it. After a while he would roll up the scroll and bind it with a yellow string, then kneel beside Yirmiyahu and sit with him, not speaking, with his head bent in prayer. Sometimes, Baruch just watched his friend’s face. Baruch sat with him through the long watches, listening to the occasional scream in the streets. He would sigh and settle his legs more comfortably, set his hand on the navi’s shoulder, and wait for his grief to pass.
Some days the words came early, and Yirmiyahu would lie for long hours in a stupor on his pallet below the window, as the words of God shook him, the cries of God for her People, for her spouse who’d forsaken her, cries that tore through Yirmiyahu’s body like shrieks as he lay there. On those days, as Yirmiyahu lay twitching on the pallet, Baruch paid an assistant to take the scroll on which he’d recorded Yirmiyahu’s words and read them aloud at the Temple steps or at the gates, foretelling death to the city and pleading for the gates to open and the people to be fed—even if this meant they were fed bread and meat out of the hands of Babylonian soldiers. Baruch even paid for a guard to protect the assistant, in case the priests’ anger should turn violent as the words were read. Baruch did this to honor Yirmiyahu, the navi, who’d told him on the first day he entered his shop of his private covenant with God, a covenant he’d made the day the gates shut. His promise to her to speak to the priests at the Temple steps and to the guards at the wall each day without fail before the sun reached its noon.
One evening Yirmiyahu opened his eyes and saw the day’s last faint light through the cracks in the wood barring the shop’s window. Baruch was sitting by him, but Yirmiyahu ignored the scribe, gazed at the cracks of sunlight in the window—for a little while he did not recognize it as the shop’s window, and for some reason the lines of sunlight terrified him. He whispered:
How lonely is the city that was full of people,
How like a widow.
She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks;
she has none to comfort her.
Gazing at the broken pieces of light, he saw the dead gnawing on crippled children in the shadow of the broken wall. He saw soldiers marching through the ashen ruins of the city’s houses, their conical helmets and their spears with shining bronze heads, and they were not soldiers of the People.
A sharp slap across his cheek. He turned and blinked, saw Baruch there. Slowly he felt the floor under his body, cool under his head. Baruch was frowning. His lips moved, and Yirmiyahu focused and heard the scribe’s words: “Enough, friend. Where is your hope? Where is your conviction that the words a navi brings can change hearts? That the city can be restored? Where is your hope, huh?”
Yirmiyahu’s lips felt very dry, his eyes also. A soreness in his muscles. “I am thirsty,” he whispered.
Then Baruch grinned and grasped his friend’s arms, pulling him up from the floor.
“Why do you fight the priesthood so?” Baruch demanded after he’d filled a clay bowl with water and held it to Yirmiyahu’s lips for a while. The priests had begun threatening Baruch for harboring one they’d cast from their number, but Baruch was known and honored by the merchants and professed to fear the priests little. In any case, a few of the younger levites, a very few, had begun coming in secret to his shop during the evening dark to listen, and to ask questions of “the mad navi.”
Now the scribe gently set the emptied bowl aside, and Yirmiyahu leaned against Baruch’s desk a moment, recovering his breath. “Until there is justice in the city,” he rasped, “we are as a dry well that waters no growth. We are as parched earth, from which even God’s skillful hands can grow only withered and sickly things.”
“They’re going to kill you, you know.” Baruch’s voice was very quiet. “Someday soon.”
Yirmiyahu reached with trembling fingers and tapped the scroll with his fingertips. “They cannot kill these. They cannot kill or silence the words of God.” He caught Baruch’s eyes. “And it is these, and not I, that will nourish our starving people and open the gates of the city before everything is lost.”
“Huh,” Baruch grunted, and bent back to the work. “I fear you are wrong, friend,” the scribe muttered after a moment, his hand moving swiftly across the dry papyrus. “The scrolls are fragile, too. A mere splash of water and they crumble apart. They are more mortal than men.”
Hoshekh filled the well as wine fills a cup.
Yirmiyahu’s skin was burning a little. He slept fitfully and woke finally with sweat cold on his face and back. A fever had broken. He breathed shallowly for a while, watching the stars, praying. Then slipped back into a half sleep.
“Fear is a sickness.” He could hear her, hear Miriam’s voice. He slipped, eager as a fish into water, a fish released from a hand over the side of a boat, into a dream of that night, their last night together. She had dampened his brow with a cloth and then cleaned his wounds; it was the day he had spoken against Tophet, before the siege, the day the levites at the Temple had pelted him with rocks, pursuing him through the street before he’d been able to get through to the door of his house. And when he’d reached the house at last, they had almost torn down the door before leaving. At least they had left.
Miriam’s hands on his face and limbs were soothing, calming. “Fear is a very great sickness. It makes them weak, husband. It’s like a fever. They toss in their beds with it.
They’ll give anything up, or hurt anyone, to feel safe again.” She whispered, “This might hurt, husband,” and touched the cloth to a gash in Yirmiyahu’s leg. He hissed and stiffened as she cleaned grit out of the tear in his skin. His leg all about that gash was bruised and swollen, but the rock had not broken it. By some miracle, nothing had broken.
“They’re like the gleaner in Anathoth,” Miriam said softly as she dabbed the wound. “Hannah. Do you remember her?”
Yirmiyahu forced himself to breathe deeply, easily. “The girl with the dreams?”
“Yes, the girl with the dreams.” Miriam sighed. “She was afraid, too.”
The girl Hannah had been one of the poorest in that little farming village; her father and brother had died in a fever. They had not risen from the ground afterward; it had been an ordinary fever. But it had left Hannah without resources. In Anathoth, Yirmiyahu recalled bitterly, the Law was still followed, the Covenant still kept. As required by the Covenant with the God who nourishes, the reapers of the fields left any grain that fell and did not stoop to pick it up; they left it for any who needed it. Joining other women who were without husbands or fathers, Hannah walked the fields each harvest, following the reapers, gathering up the grain that fell, taking it back to her tiny house to feed herself during the cold months.
Thinking of those fields, Yirmiyahu was taken suddenly by a fierce longing for Anathoth, for a quieter life studying the Law and preparing for the priesthood, back before he had ever heard any voice calling him in the night. Before he had lived in this sweltering, populous city, where the streets were noisy and most people did not hear God.
The village of Anathoth had pitied Hannah, yet most people tried not to think about her—not because she was poor, but because of what she did about her dreams. At first, night after night, terrors took her in her sleep and made her scream within her little house. The village’s wise woman brought herbs and tried to calm her sleep, but the herbs didn’t work very well. “She is too sick with her fear, I cannot cure it,” the woman confessed to the town’s elders, her eyes moist with tears.
In time Hannah found her own way
of coping with her dreams. She began taking the town’s young men into her house by night; they would come to her at first in the fields at harvest as she carried grain back home, and out of sight of the reapers they would walk with her. Then they began slipping furtively into her house by night, or on hot afternoons while most of the town slept. Hannah was very quiet, and though some of the town’s women stared hard at her closed door, they heard no moans or cries within. Yet they stopped talking with her—even the other gleaners did, and Hannah would walk a little behind the others at harvest, gathering what she might, a lonely ghost of the past, hungry and silent.
One evening, shortly after he married Miriam but before they began packing for the move to Yerusalem, Yirmiyahu came home from talking with the elders about all the things he must remember when he came before the priests in Yerusalem and asked to be one of them. Yirmiyahu came in through the door into the little rooms of his house humming, and then stopped, startled. There were Miriam and Hannah, sitting together by the cookpot, making dinner. Miriam glanced over her shoulder at him and her smile caught at his heart. “I asked Hannah to eat with us, husband,” she said. “I hope you aren’t displeased?”
Another man in Anathoth might have raged at not having been asked first. But Yirmiyahu was newly married and drunk as with wine on Miriam’s kisses and her laughter and her voice. So he simply sat across the cookpot from them, looking bewildered. Miriam finished their stew, then instructed Hannah on where to find a half loaf of bread in one of the baskets at the room’s corner. As they ate, Miriam talked, sharing stories of her childhood or asking Yirmiyahu’s opinions on matters of discussion in the town; she listened to his replies attentively with soft, laughing eyes. Though Hannah was mostly silent, she smiled warmly when Miriam broke off a piece of bread and gave it to her, and once she reached out and gripped Miriam’s hand so tightly that Miriam winced.
“Why did we have a guest?” Yirmiyahu asked his wife later that night, holding her in his arms in their bed, panting softly after their love.
Miriam gazed at him, looking very serious, though her face was still flushed, strands of her hair sweaty across her face. “She has no one to hear her, husband. It hurt to see how lonely she was.”
“Hear her? She was very quiet—I don’t remember her saying much.”
“Yes, she did,” Miriam said, and Yirmiyahu remembered the smiles and the grip on Miriam’s hand. He had often seen women communicating across a street with a look or a turn of their shoulder. Perhaps women had a language that didn’t need words.
“Miriam, I am not sure,” Yirmiyahu murmured, “that she is a good woman to have in my house.”
“Because she invites men,” Miriam said quietly, her tone still very serious. “But no one has tried to stone her for it, and no one has made her leave. And the women of Anathoth ignore it and get their husbands to ignore it, as long as she doesn’t invite a man who is married.” Miriam’s eyes were soft in the dark. “We all heard her screams, husband. Something happened to her as a child. Something her father did to her. She’s very afraid to sleep without someone else near her or holding her.”
As Miriam tended him with the cloth and with her soft hands, Yirmiyahu tried again to understand what his wife was telling him. Always she seemed to have something worth listening to, but it was not always easy to understand what she meant. He thought of the white-robed men chasing him through the streets with their rocks, their round, furious, terrified eyes. He thought of the way Hannah’s eyes had often been round like that, showing their whites.
“The gleaner,” Yirmiyahu murmured. “I need to pity the men at the Temple steps. That’s what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying they’re afraid and ill, husband,” Miriam said quietly. “I don’t pity them. They hurt you.” Her voice caught, and Yirmiyahu closed his hand around her fingers for a moment. His eyes searched Miriam’s face and saw something he’d missed before, in the year since they’d settled into this little house. A little wrinkling around her eyes, and a softness in them. Yirmiyahu felt a pang of regret. In taking her to this city, he had removed her from all the women she knew. His wife was lonely here. And when she had suffered a terrible loss earlier that year, the most terrible of losses, she had shut herself within this little house, and no women had come to see her. Her husband had stayed home more of the time for a while, and had held her in his arms, but had been at a loss as to how to comfort her. Those lines around her eyes—were those loss or were they loneliness, with no one to hear her?
“I am sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry we are here.”
He tried to lift himself, groaning at the pain of his bruises. Her gentle hand on his chest pressed him down. Her eyes deep with worry in the light of the tiny oil lamp on the table. His vision had gone blurry for a moment. He saw in his mind, so clearly, the shambling dead beneath the altar at Tophet. He hadn’t told Miriam of it; he didn’t know if he could speak of it to her yet without weeping.
Miriam’s lips brushed his cheek. “Lie still, my husband.” He heard the plop of the cloth in the ewer, then the drip of water as she lifted it. His vision cleared, and he saw her lift the cloth to his face. It was cool and moist against his cheek. As she looked down at his eyes, a smile awoke in hers, and he warmed to see it. “I’ve changed my mind. On your belly, my husband.”
He rolled over with a groan and a violent ache of his muscles. She helped him, then took her hands away, and when they came back and settled on his shoulders, they were moist with oil. Her hands moved over the muscles of his shoulders and back, rubbing in an ointment that flickered with heat along his skin, then cooled after her hands passed, making him gasp. “Where did you get that?”
“From the widow who keeps her booth by the Sheep Gate.” She spoke softly, her lips not far from his ear. “I overpaid her. She looks so thin.”
“It’s wonderful, my wife.” He started to breathe more deeply, the pain in his back dulling, though the aches in his arms—where stones had struck him as he shielded his head—still burned. But then Miriam brought more oil and gently ran her hands up his arms, and her lips placed slow kisses on his back. He shivered. “That feels even better,” he murmured.
“And this?” she whispered, catching his earlobe gently in her lips, her breath moist and soft.
Before long he found himself on his back again, holding her in his arms, ignoring the aches that remained. The night had turned suddenly gentle and soft in their home, and he parted her garments, whispering to her from the People’s most ancient song of love, a song of laughter and tears, a song of the sweetness of a man’s union with a woman and a God’s union with a People who had captured her heart: “Oh my beloved, you are to me as the lily among the thorns.”
“As the apple tree among the trees of the wood,” she whispered back, “is my love among the sons.” She kissed him lightly, and when she drew away her eyes were heated. And his fruit is sweet to my taste.” She laughed, clear as a bell, and touched him. “Make haste, my love, make haste, and be like a gazelle or a young stag on the mountains of spices.”
And he moved within her, slowly, for he was still terribly sore.
He woke now, still caught in the joy of it, the touch of her skin on his, the way she held him tightly, warmly inside her. And as he drew in a shuddering breath, his eyes open but unseeing, he was suddenly back in the stench of the dead and the aloneness of his cistern tomb. The darkness around him, so different from that gentle night, was as a stab in the belly. He yearned for her. He yearned now for fresh water and sunlight on his skin and for every sweet thing he had ever known, but especially for her.
SECOND DAY: IF ALL GOD’S PEOPLE WERE PROPHETS
LAUGHTER FAR overhead; living men stood up there, staring down into the well. Yirmiyahu looked up at them, their silhouettes against the circle of sunlight. “Let me out!” he began to beg, his rasping voice echoing in the cold throat of the well.
More laughter and muffled talk. Another bundle shoved over the brink of the well, smaller
than the last. He tensed as it dropped.
This one had a gaping wound in its side and its wrists were bound. The fall broke its legs and split open its belly. Still it struggled to get on its knees in the dim light, its intestines spilling from its abdomen in a rush of guts and viscous fluid. Its eyes were wide, its jaws snapping as it toppled over and rolled toward him in the mud.
For a few breaths, as the broken creature moaned and wallowed, Yirmiyahu just leaned against the stones of the wall, watching it. His body felt heavy and cold. I have turned to stone, he thought, I am part of the wall.
This creature had been a girl, perhaps twelve winters old. Maybe less. Yirmiyahu stumbled to his feet on weak and aching legs as it snapped its jaws and fought to get close to him.
For a long moment he hesitated, stunned.
It had been a girl, a little girl.
The creature’s milky eyes were fixed on him; its mouth opened in a long growl. His heart hammered in his chest.
“I’m sorry,” the prophet whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
Stepping forward, he took its head in his hands, holding it tightly at arm’s length—the creature was very strong—and dragged the corpse to the wall. He slammed the head into the wall, hearing a crack of bone. The creature kept writhing and kicking, trying to twist its head in his hands to bite him; he slammed it into the stones again and again. He kept hitting the creature’s head into the wall until it was still at last. Then he stood over it numbly, gazing down at that shattered body, the likeness of God violated and defaced. His hands hung limply at his sides, defiled and unclean. He moaned, a sound not unlike the moan of the dead but voicing anguish and horror that the dead could never know, the dead who were incapable of regret or shame.
He gazed down, saw bits of flesh in the mud and on his clothes but no blood. No blood. The girl’s chest had torn farther open; a few ribs now jabbed out through the skin and the torn garment it wore. Yirmiyahu gazed up at the circle of night over his head. They would drop other dead in after him; there might be another, and another after that. If he was to survive, he would need more than clothing; he would need some weapon or tool with which to put an end to these unclean corpses that hungered and did not lie still. He cried out the name of his God, begging her forgiveness for the violation he intended to commit.
