by Stant Litore
Shimon stood in the door, not knowing what to do. His face flushed as he watched the small life suckling at his mother.
“Your brother,” Rahel said after a moment. She sounded hoarse and breathless, as though she had been weeping. “This is your brother.”
Rahel bat Eleazar had given birth alone, without any midwife to assist her, and though she had been blessed with a clean birth and a living baby, she was left weak and shaken. Obeying the words she whispered there in the shadows of the tomb, Shimon took up a fold of the blanket she lay on and pressed it between her thighs to stanch the blood. Weakly she touched her hand with his, pressing slightly, and Shimon held the cloth to her. He listened to the sounds his brother made. He listened to Rahel’s breathing, heavy in the dark. And he listened to the cries and moans from the town below. Whatever entered his heart as he listened to these things, as he sat where no man or boy was ever permitted to sit, between the knees of his mother at the place of birth—whatever this moment did to his heart, there was always a quietness in him, for all his life afterward.
When his mother slept and Shimon was sure that no blood had soaked through the blanket, he left the cloth bunched up and pressed to her as best he could, then took up the waterskin his father had left there for her—it was empty now—and slipped out of the tomb. He knew his mother would thirst when she woke, and he knew there was a spring farther up the hill, where he and the other boys used to go and watch the moon rise over the sea. Standing on the slope, he glanced once at Kfar Nahum’s stone houses and the dark murmur of the sea behind. Some of the fire had been put out, though it still raged near the synagogue. He could just see dark shapes against it. Somewhere a man was screaming, high-pitched and desperate, in Latin, words Shimon didn’t know. He heard moaning still, but thought there was less of it.
Shivering, he turned his back and crept up the hill, bending low so that his silhouette would not be seen against the stars. Halfway to the water, he stopped—not because he had seen or heard anything, but because something had coursed through his body, cold and sharp, a shock of instinct that he could not have described or understood. He dropped and pressed his belly to the dirt, breathing in small gasps of fear.
A moment passed. Then another.
The man far below was still shrieking his incoherent Latin words.
Then, somewhere near, the slide of a foot over the soil. Shimon tensed.
Now a step. Then another slide, the sound of a foot dragged across the dirt.
Shimon’s heart set up a panic beat in his chest. He lay trembling.
A dark shape slouched by perhaps a stone’s throw from where he lay, just a moving patch of night where no stars shone, a man’s shape or a woman’s, hunched forward, one arm hanging uselessly at its side. Shimon held his breath, and his heart was like all the shouting since the world began, ready to give him away. Yet the corpse didn’t hear it; it just dragged that one foot behind it, swaying as it walked downhill. The reek of it reached Shimon and he gagged; he covered his mouth and nose and fought with himself to stay silent.
The screams in the town seemed faint now, drowned beneath the roar of blood in Shimon’s ears, but he could still hear them. He could see again the midwife being eaten, the midwife who might have helped his mother. He could see again the blood on his father’s hand. A mad urge seized him, to leap to his feet and shout and throw himself at that corpse, perhaps with a stone in his hand. To make that shambling, violent corpse know that this town it meant to consume had people in it, men and women like Shimon’s father and mother, people who lived and loved and breathed. To smash the stone into its face, if that’s what it took to make it see.
But he didn’t leap up.
He held still. He clenched his fist about blades of the coarse grass, as though holding himself to the ground.
The corpse was moving down the slope now. It tilted its head back, drew in a long breath that Shimon could hear in the dark, and then it moaned. A low wail of need and demand that wrenched at him. It was the sound of a man whose tongue had been cut away, and then his mind, and then he had been left on the shore of the sea with no sight or sound of his wife and children and all his kin, but only the need to find them and clasp them, crushing them to his body with strong, stiff arms and consuming them in his need. That low moan of a man who didn’t know where they might be found or how he might come to them again. Such profound and despairing need as Shimon had never heard in a human voice. He shivered in the grass.
The moan went on and on, far too long. Longer than a living man would utter any cry, long past when the lungs would burn, for the corpse voicing it felt no pain or anguish of the body. Or if it did, that was as the bite of a flea beside the pain of its solitude and hunger.
Then the moan fell and the corpse passed on down the hill. The sounds of its feet faded into the noise from the town and the chill breeze carrying the unbodied shedim through the grass. Its shape was distant now but dark against the glow of flame and easily seen.
Shimon lay breathing a while, recovering. He knew he had to be brave. Brave for his mother and her baby. All at once, he got up and ran forward at a crouch. He rushed; he had to get the water and get back into the tomb before any other corpse appeared on the hill. The momentary urge for battle had faded; after hearing that moan so near, he dreaded any further encounter with the dead.
And he wanted to be there when Rahel stirred. He could not let her wake alone in the dark.
EPISODE 2
“I AM ALIVE”
Rahel was already awake when Shimon returned; he heard her breath catch when his shape filled the opening to the tomb. Then heard her relax when he called, “Amma,” softly. For a moment he hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at a night filled with stars and the sound of the sea and the glow of flame, the houses of his father’s town burning far below at the edge of the water. Distant moaning, screams. Fewer now. Anything might be happening in the world outside the tomb. The Romans and the people of the town might be spearing the last of the dead, or the dead might be eating the last of the living. No way to know.
He felt vulnerable and exposed. He ducked into the tomb. Went to his mother and knelt by her, held the waterskin to her lips and listened as she drank. She did so in small swallows, and took a long time. Then her fingers touched his hand weakly, and he pulled the skin away, set it aside.
“Your father,” she said hoarsely. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell her about the blood he’d seen on Yonah’s hand, the raggedness of his father’s breathing. His throat closed against the words. To speak it would be to make it real, to make his fears become truth.
Rahel shut her eyes tightly and clutched her infant closer to her, and a tiny, almost inaudible sound of misery came from her throat. Shimon closed his eyes too, not wanting to see her pain, not knowing what to do.
After a while, Rahel whispered in the dark:
Though the fig tree does not flower,
And no grapes are on the vines,
The olives give no oil
And the fields no barley
The flock does not come home to the fold
Nor the herd home from the field,
Yet I will cry out in joy.
Her voice trembled, yet she did not allow the silence of the tomb to swallow her song. The song of Habakkuk, a navi of their People in years past, one of those blessed or cursed with the gift of seeing things that usually only God saw. A song he’d made at a time of war.
I will cry out in joy,
I will take joy in my God.
God is my strength;
He makes my feet like the deer’s;
He makes me walk in high places.
“How can you sing that?” Shimon said suddenly. “How can you?” His hands were shaking. “Everyone’s dying. I saw—They’re being torn apart.”
Rahel looked at him in the dark. “Oh, Shimon, Shimon. I am alive, I am alive, I am alive, and my sons are alive.”
And she began whispering the words again. Shimon turned his back, overwhelmed with the night’s horror. He glanced up, saw the round openings in the tomb wall into which the ancestral dead had been slid feet first onto their shelves in the dark and the silence. There were corpses there, many. His father’s father and his wife, and their parents, and theirs. And many of their brothers and sisters whose faces had been forgotten but whose names remained, chipped into the stone beneath their places of rest. He reached up to the lowest of these shelves, ran his fingers across the deep Hebrew letters, worn by time yet still readable if there were only enough light. His hand still shook a little at the memory of the corpse walking down the hill, at the memory of its cry of hunger, yet the silent dead on their shelves above him and all around him did not frighten him. Their silence and their presence was strangely comforting. Death had visited the People again and again over the long weeping of the centuries, yet the People lived.
“Would you like to hold him, Shimon?”
His mother was lifting the small baby in her hands, holding him out.
“It’s all right,” Rahel said, seeing him hesitate.
Swallowing, Shimon took the boy in his arms as gently as he might a sacred scroll, terribly aware of his brother’s fragility. Yet as Shimon felt the small weight of his brother’s body, the warmth of him, something blossomed open inside his heart. Settling the boy into the crook of his arm, he freed one hand and touched the child’s face, first the tiny brow, then the soft cheeks, feeling his brother’s warm vitality in the dark. His throat tightened and he wished to squeeze his brother to his chest, but he didn’t for he feared hurting him. After the horrors he had seen this night, this warm body in his arms was a miracle, as though God had reached through the door of the cave and touched the world, in this one place, at this one moment.
He ran two fingers over the boy’s hair, which was fine and sparse. Then he touched the boy’s left arm, marveling at its smallness. He found the boy’s hand and felt the small fingers close around his; he drew in his breath. That firm grip, and the soft glint of the eyes in the dark. Shimon wished his father was here, that he might hand him the baby and see the two of them together, but also he was glad that it was he who held the child and who got to look into the little boy’s eyes. Those eyes were as bright with life as though they were God’s eyes, looking out of that tiny face at a darkened world.
Solemnly, Shimon touched the boy’s right arm, and gasped. That other arm was so thin, and the boy didn’t move it at Shimon’s touch. The arm hung limp at the baby’s side.
“Amma,” Shimon whispered in the dark.
She looked at him. Shimon saw her eyes and the faint glow of distant fire on one side of her face.
“He’s broken,” Shimon whispered.
“Hand him back to me, Shimon.” No urgency or surprise in her voice.
Gently, his hands shaking from the fear that he would drop the boy or break him further, Shimon handed his brother back. Their mother held the baby to her breast, and Shimon looked away. A sense of crushing disappointment settled over him, a fierce pressure on his heart. To have a new life, a new hope offered in one moment and then torn away in the next, to find that his brother, like everything else this night, was maimed and broken—
“He is your brother,” Rahel said quietly. The baby made no sound of suckling, just soft breathing; perhaps he was falling asleep, pressed to the warmth of his mother, his whole world her living flesh, unknowing of any dead outside or of any hunger but his own. “Whether he is broken or not, he is your brother. Shimon, never forget that.”
Shimon didn’t move; he just stared into the dark.
“Shimon?”
A moment later: “Shimon?”
He glanced at his mother. She had suffered this night. Though his insides burned with wrath, he leaned over her and pressed his lips to the baby’s head, felt the softness of the infant’s skin. He did not even hear the distant cries in the houses burning by the sea. Rahel turned the baby toward him, and after a hesitation Shimon felt for his brother’s heartbeat. Found it, so much faster than his own, and in all the lethal night there was no other sound.
ZEBADYAH
Dawn found the last men and women of Kfar Nahum laying the bodies of the dead outside the town in long rows, both Hebrew and Roman, and shrouding them in white linens. When the linens ran out they used blankets, or coats, or whatever they could find. Most of the legionaries had perished, and those that hadn’t had fled into the hills—that left many, many dead. The charred and broken houses of the town reeked of them.
A few of the living women took ashes that were still warm from the ruins of the houses and the Roman tents, and put the ashes in their hair. Then they knelt by the corpses and keened, as other women had done before them on many battlefields and in many burned cities throughout the long centuries of their time in this land. Zebadyah the priest ignored them at first, searching the dead for the face of his father. As he passed, men and woman lowered their heads in weary reverence, but Zebadyah turned his gaze away from them. There was sand in his graying hair and his white robe had been torn and soiled by his flight when the Romans broke the door of his synagogue and by the long night hours he had waited hidden beneath one of the boats out above the tideline. There, with the boat’s keel for his roof, Zebadyah had covered his ears against the screams of his people and the wailing of the dead in their hunger. He recalled, as in a nightmare, a whisper in his ear out of the air, when the Romans first began pulling people from their homes: Go. Go quick. Hide. And the same whisper as he hid beneath the boat: Stay here. Now shame smothered his heart.
His father Yesse had suffered during the night; one of the others among the grieving had told him of it, his voice shaken, as soon as Zebadyah had walked into town from the shore. In the hours of their drunkenness before the dead came lurching out of the hills, and while Zebadyah trembled beneath the boat, the mercenaries had stripped and beaten and mocked his father, for no better reason than that he was old and weak and Hebrew. The legionaries had dragged him from his house. This was a man with white hair and a long beard, who had served in his youth as a priest and who stood ready still to serve as one, if he should ever be called again to the lev ha-olam, the heart of the world, the Temple in distant Yerushalayim. Yesse had outlived two wives and had survived the deaths of three of his five sons, who had drowned in a storm at sea. He was revered by the town, and Zebadyah, the oldest of his two living heirs, brought fish for him and sat with him each evening as he ate. The drunken legionaries pulled this old man from his house and made him dance in the open ground before the synagogue, and then at swordpoint they forced him to strip away his garments and stand naked. He wept as they made crude jokes about his circumcision, as they asked him if he found he could still give pleasure to women, or whether he had lost some piece of his manhood and grown so white-haired searching to find it again. Perhaps they would have humiliated him further, but at that moment the moans had broken out, and the famished dead from the hills had fallen on them with their lethal hunger.
When Zebadyah found old Yesse at last, groaning in pain and grief where he sat against the side of a stone house near the edge of the town, the elder rebuked his son. “Tend to the People first,” he rasped, “and let God tend to me, Zebadyah.”
Zebadyah carried his father to the synagogue, feeling by instinct rather than conscious thought that it was the town’s safest place, though he grieved to see the door broken from its hinges, blood smeared across the letters from the Law that his father’s father had carved, with great labor, into the lintel and doorposts. He could hear the other survivors groaning within. The usually dim, cool interior was now lit with candles and stuffy from the smoke and the heat of the bodies smothered together beneath the low roof. The tiny flames shone strangely on the polished cedar of the cupboard against the east wall where the Torah was kept. The menorah had been knocked over and lay flat on its table and the shofar that used to be beside it was missing, but at the time Zeba
dyah hardly noticed.
Yakob and Yohanna were already there, with Leah bat Natan and several other women, carrying waterskins among the suffering and the feverish, or pressing wet cloths to hot faces. When Zebadyah’s sons saw him, they hurried to lay out bedding for Yesse.
“There are many here who are unclean, father,” Yakob whispered as Zebadyah laid his father down. His eyes showed their whites. By unclean he meant touched by the dead. Bitten.
Zebadyah nodded wearily, whispering words of praise in his heart that his sons were both alive, however haggard they might look.
“Was grandfather bitten?”
“I am fine, boy.” Yesse opened his eyes.
“He is fine,” Zebadyah repeated numbly. He sat for a moment, just to catch his breath. Gray-eyed Yohanna, his face become overnight that of a man and not a boy, crouched beside Yesse and lowered the waterskin to his grandfather’s parched lips.
Zebadyah heard a raised voice behind him and glanced over his shoulder. He saw Benayahu, the town’s nagar, the wood-worker, repairer of houses and boats, with his back to the synagogue wall. His face twisted in rage and horror. “Snatched her,” he was crying. “Snatched her from my hands. My wife. They took her from my hands, they ate her!” Beside him stood a boy whose dirt-darkened face was streaked with pale rivers left by his tears, and the boy—who was not Benayahu’s—held the nagar’s yearling daughter in his arms, asleep.
But Benayahu did not glance up at either the boy or his child. He had torn away the right sleeve of his tunic and he held the ragged, rolled-up cloth tightly to his upper arm. Zebadyah didn’t know if the bandage covered a bite or a wound from a Roman blade, but at this moment he did not have the strength either to care or to fear.
