by Stant Litore
Sweating, he reached down and took hold of one of the dead girl’s ribs and pulled it free, breaking a length of it, snapping it away from the rib cage. He held the rib before him like a long, white knife. The body below sank slowly into the mud. Yirmiyahu wished he might murmur the Words of Going, but his throat closed and he couldn’t get them out. What right had he to wish her rest after violating her body, and when none of his deeds and none of his words had sufficed to protect her, or any of the city’s children, from this end?
“Death has come up into our windows,” Yirmiyahu whispered as he held the gleaming rib in his hand. He gazed at its jagged end and everything it portended: the wrecking of the bodies of children and women, and in them the very body of God, kicked aside and left shaking in the street by the levites and the merchants and all who ignored the hungering of famished bodies outside their houses or the bleeding of raped bodies in the alleys behind. And he thought of the defiled bodies of the dead lurching between sleeping houses, some with ribs like this one exposed amid torn and gaping flesh, glinting in the light of the moon and the stars.
How the impoverished men and women in the city had hastened to find wood to bar the one window in their home. In the early nights of the siege, when the plague was really just beginning, the windows had been open to the night air, and in the quiet hours, dark shapes had appeared in the windows, a glint of eyes in the starlight, hands clutching the sills. They had crawled through, reaching for the warm life within. Grabbing the leg or the arm of whoever slept inside the house and pulling that flesh to their waiting mouths. Men and women would wake to the shock of teeth cutting into their bodies. They would wrestle with their attackers in the dark, but it was too late. Some would be devoured while they writhed and cried out; those in the next house would cover their ears and pretend they heard nothing. Others lay feverish with terrible wounds once the dead were sated and wandered out, until they fell into a sleep without breathing and then woke with a hunger as intense as that of a dry well for rain.
Yirmiyahu ran his fingertip across the broken, jagged edge of the rib, feeling the sharpness without cutting his skin. For a moment, even in his horror, he marveled at it. He held it up, gazing at the long, graceful curve of the bone. The first woman had been made from one of these. It was a marvel. He remembered suddenly how, in the early part of the siege, he had knocked on the door of the widow’s shop near the Sheep Gate in the hot morning—for no reason other than that she had been a friend of his wife’s. He’d heard someone moving inside the booth, but no answer came to his call. Then a thump, like a body fallen. Uneasily, he forced the door and slipped into the dark booth. Something moved near him, then he saw her silhouette and knew by its movement that it was not her. He leapt backward through the door, into the sunlight, and it followed him out. It was terrible. It had the widow’s face, except that the nose had been chewed away, and one eye was gone. One arm hung broken at its side; the other reached for him.
That a body made to bear life into the world could be turned into that.
Each time he woke, dozens of times, clutching the rib, the world was still dark. And so cold. A levite, Yirmiyahu had always had a roof over his head—even if this past year it had only been the roof of Baruch’s shop—and a rug to wrap himself in. He hadn’t understood the cold before, the way your hands could clench up and stop working, the way your body shook as though coming apart. He breathed through his teeth, for his nose burned. He tried to remember the sun, the day heat that beat on his arms. Thought of the day, months before, when he’d led the children to break the granaries behind the Temple. Their bodies had run with sweat; by the time they reached the tall, tomblike shapes of the grain silos, each of the children (and he himself) had been covered in a layer of brown dust that stuck to them. Children made of earth.
Yirmiyahu had leaped up the sod ramp to the first silo, stripped away his shirt, taken up a great shovel, and broken apart the locks. A heave of his arms and the door to the silo shot open. Grain came running out, a rush of golden beads. Priests tried to stop them, rushing at them from the courtyard, and there was a bitter fight behind the Temple grounds, a more brutal fight than Yirmiyahu had ever imagined. The children kicked and bit at the priests who grabbed them, and gouged at their eyes with reaching fingers; Yirmiyahu saw a white-robed priest knock down a small boy with a blow to the head. With a scream, Yirmiyahu threw himself bodily into the priest and bore him to the ground, clouting the man’s head with his fists. There were the high shrieks of children, the curses of grown men, and the thickening cloud of dust that so many wrestling feet kicked up into the air. In that haze, an anger took Yirmiyahu that burned hotter than any he’d ever known. He lifted the shovel in both hands and swung it, slamming its blunt blade into men’s bodies. His chest was soon damp with spatters of blood. He could hardly see anything; he just swung whenever he came upon a man-sized shape, screaming words in Hebrew and other loud cries that were not words. “Elohim adonai!” he howled, “Elohi, Elohi, my God, my God!”
At last they routed the priests. The children who could filled the bowls and jars they’d brought with grain, then ran away into the streets, disappearing. Yirmiyahu leaned a moment on his shovel, fighting to breathe against the tightness in his chest. Then he staggered to where one of the girls lay moaning in the dust, her head bleeding. He tore strips from his clothes and tried to bind wounds; the dust settled slowly, the shapes of grain silos and Temple walls and bodies gradually becoming more distinct and real in the haze around him. One child died in his arms, choking on blood, trying to speak and unable to make any sounds but that horrible sucking sound of blood going into the lungs. Then the child in Yirmiyahu’s arms shuddered and was still, and later the king’s guards found the navi like that, holding that broken body.
They took Yirmiyahu, bound his wrists to a pole in the courtyard of the king’s house, and beat him. He cursed them each time a fist or a foot struck his ribs, and the blows kept coming until he hung from his wrists, something broken. He hung there and rasped. Blood dripped from his lower lip, sweat from his brow and hair. And gradually, amid the roar of his body and the desperate wheezing of his breath, he realized someone was talking to him and had been for a while. He turned his head, clenching his teeth against the pain. One eye was too swollen, but through the other he saw a thin man with a pale face and many rings on his fingers. His clothes were finely made and rich in hue, something maybe from the Sea People. His beard, which had the newness of a first-growth beard, was trimmed carefully and braided; his green eyes watched the prophet warily.
“Zedekiah,” Yirmiyahu breathed. He had never seen this man before, this man barely more than a youth. But he was certain who the man was.
The king stopped what he’d been saying and smiled faintly. “So you are listening to me,” he said.
Yirmiyahu just looked at him. A rage burned just beneath his skin, but it took too much effort even to breathe. He hung there and kept his eye on the young king.
“If it’s grain you want,” the king said quietly, “you can buy it.”
Yirmiyahu laughed shortly, then fought for breath to speak. “Half those children—are—orphans. The other half—bond slaves. The city’s children—suffer—for your pride. You revoked—the yovel—the year—of God’s—favor.” It took so much out of him, the effort of speech, and the last word fell into a sharp groan.
The king crouched, like a boy looking into a pool, and his face was only a breath from Yirmiyahu’s. His eyes were intent, but Yirmiyahu could see the fear in them. “Babylon crouches on the Mount of Olives watching us, like an old crow. Like a flock of old crows—all those bowmen with their feathered shafts. This is no time for the yovel,” he hissed. “I will not destroy you—you are a holy man, navi. But why do you stir up the people of the street?”
Yirmiyahu began to laugh slowly, then his body shook with it. Zedekiah leaned back on his heels, his face aghast; the prophet laughed, his mouth open, his body heaving painfully where he hung. Yirmiyahu felt m
oisture on his cheeks, knew that he was crying. He stopped laughing, panted for breath. He gasped out the words of God that poured through him in a sudden wild rush:
The snorting of their horses has been heard in Dan, at the neighing of their stallions all the land shakes.
They come, they devour the land and all that fills it,
The city, and all who dwell in it.
My joy is gone, my grief gnaws at me,
My heart is sick within me.
Listen, the cry of the daughter of my People
Fills the north and the south of my land.
On your garments I see the blood of your sons and your daughters. Now listen.
Now look, Zedekiah.
The dead will fill your city, and the sky filled with crows,
None can scare them away.
And they will silence in the cities of Yudah and in the streets of Yerusalem the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, for this land will become a desert.
As the last words fell from Yirmiyahu’s lips, he lowered his head, looking only at the bruises on his legs and the hard pebbles and dirt of the courtyard of the king’s house. He was empty now, and he felt a breeze pass over his skin and then through him, as though there were holes in his body. He just breathed.
“You’re mad,” Zedekiah whispered.
The prophet made no answer. After a while there was the rustle of the young king’s clothes and his steps passing quickly away across the courtyard. The rustle of fine linens brushed back from where they hung across a door. Then nothing. Yirmiyahu was aware of the sounds, but he gave them little thought. He lifted his head wearily and felt the sun on his face. His wrists ached where they were bound, but that hardly mattered to him, for all of him was an ache except for the cool empty space inside him where the words had passed through and then gone. From his one eye he watched the wide and uninhabited sky. Somewhere he heard the howl of a jackal. When the king’s men came to untie his wrists and set him free in the city, they found him sleeping.
Yirmiyahu found a new reserve of strength when the hole in his sky lightened again. He climbed unsteadily to his feet, his hands grasping the stones of the cistern wall; then, with slow steps, he began to circle the well, always with his hands on the wall before him. It was calming, these slow circles, his legs wading through the wet mud. He felt very warm and did not know why. Lifting his fingers to his lips, he found them hot to the touch. Thirst made a desert of his throat until it hurt to breathe. Still he walked in his circles, each one tracing the edges of his world. The stench in the well was terrible, and his eyes watered. At one point he stopped and gazed up at the faraway circle in his sky and screamed for help or mercy. He called out many times. He called Zedekiah’s name, and the name of one of his guards that he remembered, and Baruch’s name, and Miriam’s. Many times. His throat ached. He could not tell how loud he was calling; his voice sounded distant to him, detached from his own lips and throat.
He realized that he’d fallen silent for some time, and that the mud was sucking hungrily at his thighs as he forced his way through it in his slow circles. Without halting his steps, he closed his eyes. He kept walking. Kept walking.
On an evening very early in the siege, Yirmiyahu had burst into Baruch’s shop, his hair flying wildly about his face. The Sabbath was coming. “Quickly!” he called to Baruch, who was sitting at his scribe’s desk. “Before the sun sets—write down these words. These words, my friend!”
The days are coming when I will make a new Covenant with my People, who have broken our old one. They will hear my Law in their hearts, and I will be their God, and they will be my People. There will be no need of priest or teacher or for one to say to his brother, Know these ways of our God, for they will all know me, from the smallest child to the richest man. I will forgive them, and clasp them to me, and nourish them, and no longer remember their darkness.
“A fantasy,” Baruch told him as he shut and barred the shop’s one window. “The world will always be inhabited by the eaters and the eaten. It is how things are.”
“But it breaks her heart.” Yirmiyahu had washed his face and elbows ritually, preparing for the day’s last meal—a meager one it would be, a bowl of grains. Baruch sat and made his stylus dance across the papyrus, writing down the words Yirmiyahu had brought. Yirmiyahu glanced at him, at the speed and evenness with which his hands moved, a speed he could never match. Something full welled up inside him. The words the navi brought would save the city—they had to—and there would be so much work to do to mend the torn Covenant and make the city once again a place to which God might be welcomed, the way a man might welcome his bride to a peaceful and wholesome house, swept clean. With bowls of stew and loaves of bread readied for passing around a wide circle of kin seated on their banquet cushions. A place to feast together, a place where God might laugh with her People, even as a bride and her husband might laugh together in a good house and eat with their family before her husband swept her into his arms and carried her to bed for a night soft with their loving.
There was so much to be done. The city would be saved. Surely the city would be saved. Did not God’s words about a new Covenant promise it? Yirmiyahu clung to that, and his blood thrilled within him, demanding action. The mending must begin now, this evening—it couldn’t wait for the accord of priests or king.
“Baruch! You must call the children into the shop, the children in those streets, who are without fathers. Teach them to write as you do. Then they will not be hungry.”
Baruch looked up, startled. “Who is to pay for it?”
“No one.” Yirmiyahu smiled, this sudden hope within him as heady as spiced wine. “But you have an hour after dark, between when we eat and when we sleep—we spend it now in idle talk, or sometimes I just sit silently recovering from the words of God while you write. But this is more important than talking, more important even than the scroll.”
“More important than the words of God?”
Yirmiyahu dried his hands on a ragged cloth and spoke with passion: “Obeying the words of God is always more important than talking about them.”
“Huh,” Baruch grunted. “Huh.” His brow wrinkled in thought, his eyes glinting. “If you bring those orphans, Yirmiyahu, and if I do not need to feed them, and if they do not shit on my floor, then in the hour before bed, I will teach them the aleph-bet.”
“You are a warrior for God, my friend.” Yirmiyahu clasped Baruch’s arm, grinning. But Baruch pushed him away hastily: “Your hair is dripping on my scrolls!”
Yirmiyahu stepped back, grinning. “Where you see a child who may shit on your floor, I see a child who will one day be a great scribe, or a man of business, or a secretary to the king.”
“Huh.”
“And one day you will see the man that child became, and I will hear you laugh.”
Then they prayed and sang in hoarse voices a welcome to the Sabbath. And when the Sabbath was past, Yirmiyahu ran from the shop and went to gather up children. And of course Baruch did give the children grain to eat and water to drink, as he taught them those stark Hebrew letters that had been designed centuries ago to be chiseled into tablets of rock and not scrawled into scrolls of papyrus. Baruch could not look at their thin bodies and then hold back his grain. But often after that, he and Yirmiyahu were hungrier.
Sometimes Baruch told the children stories afterward, tales he had heard or read, tales of heroes, of David and his Mighty Men when they lived in the Cave in the wilderness. Of Benaiah, who on a day of snow leaped into a narrow canyon and fought one of the dead with his bare hands, tearing its head from its shoulders. And Eleazar the Ahohite, who stood with David, just the two of them, in a field of barley, with the dead in a circle closing round them. Eleazar and David fought long into the dusk, their spearheads flashing in the dim light, while the dead pressed in on them, hands clutching at them, mouths open in long moans. But as the moon rose, both warriors walked away victorious thro
ugh a field of motionless dead.
And there was the time that David had been encamped in the hills near Bet Lechem, when the town had been infested with the wakeful dead. Looking down at the little houses and the shambling figures in the streets, David laughed. “Oh, if someone would only bring me water to drink from the well of Bet Lechem by that gate!” And three of his men heard and fought their way into the town, felling the dead with their spears. Two of them held off the dead while a third pulled up a bucket from the well. Then they ran back into the hills, the bronze heads of their spears dripping with gore. When they brought David the water, his face went very still, in shock at what they had tried, what they had done. He rose and took the bucket in his hands. He would not drink from it, but poured it out in a libation to God. “Far be it from me before God that I should drink the blood of my men,” he said. “At the risk of their lives they brought me this water.”
The children sat on the floor and gazed up at Baruch with hungry eyes as they devoured his stories of their People, that nourishment they needed as desperately as they needed grain. Yirmiyahu, too. He felt like a child again, listening to the wild stories of their ancestors. Some evenings Yirmiyahu wondered if Baruch, too, was a kind of navi, and if the fruit of God might come to the People through the scribe’s tales, as much as through Yirmiyahu’s messages. He would have to ask Baruch to write some of these stories on the scroll.
