by Stant Litore
“Selah,” Yakob whispered. Always. His face was still gaunt with shock, his motions stiff as the two of them carried another body in. This one was a beardless mercenary in Roman gear, one of the heathen polluting their land. He had paid for that, and Kfar Nahum had paid with him.
After they threw the body down among the corpses in the chamber, Zebadyah put his arm around his son and drew him close, held him as Yakob shook with silent cries. Just held him. The others bringing in bodies stepped around them without speaking.
At the sound of song, Zebadyah and his son stirred and stepped from the tomb into the chill air. The surviving women of the town—thirteen of them—had formed a line before the tombs and were singing the Words of Going that were as old as the People, words of lament for those who were lost and could not be recovered. That cold morning, their traditions and their memories were all they had left. No help had come from Threshing beyond the hill or from Rich Garden or Tower south along the shore, though a few from Kfar Nahum had fled to those towns during the night.
After the women fell silent, Zebadyah lifted his own voice. His eyes were dry, his back stiff and straight. In his deep baritone, joined after a few moments by the other men, he sang the cries of Iyobh whom God had tested, words of grief that in the long years of exile and then return had become the words of their People, the essential song of a tribe whose first duty was to endure:
Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble.
He comes forth like a flower, he is cut down.
Yet there is hope for a tree, if it be cut;
At the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs.
But man dies, and wastes away;
Yes, man gives up his breath.
The waters wear away the stones:
Washing away the things that grow out of the earth,
All the hopes of man.
Then they closed the tombs.
Even as the last of the great stones slammed into place, as some of the People knelt in their grief and others turned their faces again toward the town below, a strange and unexpected sound rang out, echoing against the slope of the hill and out over the sea. A horn call clear and deep as the voice of God himself.
The men and women glanced at each other’s faces in wonder.
The call of the shofar.
GOD WEEPING IN THE GRASSES
Shimon bar Nahemyah, the town’s other Shimon, held the horn to his lips, the ram’s horn he had taken from the synagogue. In his other hand, a heavy stone. His shoulders bore a fisher’s thick storm-coat, snatched up from his house during the screaming cold night. Other young men stood to his left and his right, their faces pale and shining with cold sweat. Bar Nahemyah put all his breath and all his fury into the cry of the horn. He blew the t’qiah, the challenge that meant: God is here! This place is his! On how many battlefields of his ancestors and at the start of how many holy feasts had that same call gathered the People in strength?
Letting the horn fall to hang about his neck on its tough bullhide cord, Bar Nahemyah lifted the stone, his hands shaking in his cold fury. He and the other youths were a short walk up the shoreline from the last houses of Beth Tsaida, and before them, in a great pit into which each day’s incoming tide poured cleansing water, was the town midden, the feasting place of gulls, where the poor left unwanted girl-babies before their eighth day and their naming, and where food that had been defiled and could not be eaten was left for the birds.
It was low tide, but there were no birds there now. Only the dead, both the quiet dead and the ravenous. The bodies of bruised, naked women lay across the heap, where the Roman revelers had tossed those who had collapsed during the repetitive rapes of the night. Three of the wakeful dead crouched over the women, tearing their flesh, their shoulders hunched, reminding Bar Nahemyah strangely of town elders gathered about the scroll of Torah, heads bent, peering into it for some sign of God’s purpose.
There was an old man in the pit also, and though his face had been chewed away by the dead, Bar Nahemyah thought it was Asa the tanner. He was clothed and there were no bruises on his body from being beaten, no visible wounds except where the dead had been at his face, their groping fingers digging out his eyes and their teeth tearing away the soft meat of his cheeks. He had not been thrown there by the Romans. Doubtless he had taken refuge beneath the refuse, witnessed the women hurled into the pit over him, lain shaking with his eyes clenched shut, hoping the Romans would not notice him there. Devoured from within by his terror.
But though the Romans must have hurried away quickly, shunning the midden after tossing in those they’d used and killed, there were no places shunned by the dead. The dead knew neither fear nor shame nor disgust at any stench. Only hunger. Perhaps Asa had screamed when he heard the corpses hissing at him from above the midden pit, dark silhouettes against the stars. Screams that were utterly lost amid the death-cries of the town. Or perhaps he had lain silent and still while they fed on the dead or dying women, until one of the corpses found him, too.
Bar Nahemyah and the others had kept silent in their approach; until the call of the shofar the dead hadn’t looked up as they lifted red flesh and entrails to their gaping mouths. Watching them, Bar Nahemyah had stood cold, as though he had swallowed the winter wind and given it a place to lie still and icy inside his chest. When he had left the synagogue with the shofar, he had not taken time to wash away the dried blood on his hands and arms from the two Romans he had killed during the night, nor the filth that had spattered across his coat as he drove a hammer into the heads of the groaning corpses that sought to surge through him into the synagogue.
He was fifteen and only recently a man. He had watched skulls burst apart beneath his hammer, had seen the meat and bone inside the human body. Had seen the girl who had given herself to him in an hour of gasping and heat on the night of their betrothal torn apart before his eyes, screaming for a few brief moments as the dead ripped out the insides of her belly, hollowing her until she lay still. He had seen all that. Now Bar Nahemyah was cold, everything in him cold. The shaking that had taken him after the violence had subsided before the rising of the sun, leaving behind only this heatless fury. No messenger or messiah of God had arrived during the night to halt the slaughter, no Makkaba riding from the cities of the south with vengeful, armed priests on dark horses behind. No miracle, no deliverance. There had been only the hammer held in his hand.
He had cast away the hammer in disgust and wrath once there were only bodies before the synagogue door, and he had not stopped to retrieve it as he strode out to check for other dead. Only after he came down to the shore had he realized his hands were empty; he’d stooped then to take up the stone he held now.
As the notes of the shofar faded, he lifted that stone and gazed down at the dead in the midden. “Heard that, did you?” he called to them.
The dead hissed and lurched to their feet, their jaws opening to reveal bloodied teeth.
“Don’t get too close,” Bar Nahemyah said to the others.
Then he hurled the stone.
For the briefest of moments it spun in the air like a ball in one of those games the pig-eating Greeks favored.
Then it smacked one of the corpses in the left shoulder. The corpse spun about and crumpled to its knee. The other two shambled past it. But even as Bar Nahemyah’s companions threw their own rocks down at the dead, the first corpse looked over its shoulder at them and growled like a beast as it staggered to its feet.
Then the men were hurling stones down at the midden, to the cracking of bones and the growling of the dead. One of the corpses toppled and lay still, its head crushed in. The others lurched on up the shallow sides of the pit, reeking of death and offal and salt water. A stone crushed one’s thigh—a corpse that, in life, must have been a girl nearly old enough to bear a child, her hair long and lank about her gray shoulders, one of her breasts chewed half away. Still she dragged herself across the shore with her hands, hissing and snarling.
Their bodies broke beneath the rocks, yet they kept coming.
And coming.
“Fall back,” Bar Nahemyah snapped. “More stones.”
The young men retreated at a stumbling run toward the grasses at the tideline, and along the way they lifted from the sand and shingle what they could: rocks smoothed and tossed landward by the sea, gnarled driftwood, shells of sea creatures blind and deep and strange as the world’s beginning, anything that could be thrown at the dead to do damage.
Another corpse fell, a large-bellied man, most of whose face had been eaten away before he rose. The sharp edge of a broken shell lodged between his eyes like Dawid’s slingstone, and he toppled backward and did not get up.
The last corpse still growled and lunged toward the living with uneven steps. It was the girl; she had risen up on one foot and was coming after them at a crouch, dragging her bad leg behind her. It was nearly on them now, and Bar Nahemyah’s companions fell back into the grasses. Bar Nahemyah himself stood his ground.
“Be still, you unclean tameh,” he cried, wrenching a long branch of driftwood free of the sand. Lifting it like a club, he waited for the corpse to stumble nearer. Its eyes were fixed on him, those gray, scratched eyes. Its jaw worked, opening and closing.
With a shout, Bar Nahemyah swung the branch, slamming it hard into the side of the corpse’s head, knocking it to the sand. He leapt over the fallen girl, spearing the end of the branch toward its head even as it hissed and tried to get up. The side of its head gave, yet it spat, and the thing’s hand clutched the end of Bar Nahemyah’s coat. Then he was slamming the branch down against its head, again and again.
Until it was still.
Bar Nahemyah stood over the body, panting. The other young men drew back in mute horror at both the dead and the man who had fought. The corpse’s fingers were still curled about the hem of Bar Nahemyah’s coat. Bar Nahemyah roared, shouting all of his rage and impotent grief at the thing’s dead face, and lifting one foot he drove the heel of his sandal against the clutching hand and broke its grip.
The hand fell back limp against the grit of the shore.
Bar Nahemyah gazed down at it for a long moment, breathing heavily. Then glanced up at the other, pale-faced youths. At the midden and the stinking dead lying on the offal. Heard the sigh of the waves and behind him, at the tideline, the rush of the wind in the grasses like the sound of God weeping. He cast the branch aside into the sand. Though his lips moved, no words came. He swayed on his feet. Then he tilted to the left and vomited.
STANDING AT THE SHORE
Before sunup, Shimon had walked to his father’s house in Beth Tsaida, that long line of fishers’ homes just above the tideline. He found the house empty and in disarray, its atrium open to the sky and silent but for a few of his mother’s chickens, the small, enclosed rooms around the outer wall dark. No one was there. The ewer his mother used for water had been shattered, and there were streaks of blood across the atrium’s dirt floor. For several long moments, Shimon stood staring at those dark stains, hardly breathing. All he could think of was the blood on his father’s hand. Was this more of his blood, or had others entered the house and struggled during the long night’s fight with the hungry dead?
But his father clearly was not here, whether this was his blood or not. And that meant this day was up to him.
Hastily, Shimon scooped up an armful of blankets and ran with them back up the hill to the tomb. He ignored the weeping he heard in the town and ignored the fear in his breast, knowing that if he stopped moving, that would be it. He would be too exhausted and too panicked to get up again.
When he reached the tomb, he wrapped Rahel and the maimed baby in blankets. He put his mother’s arm about his shoulders and, supporting her weight, he helped her slowly down the hill. Rahel looked about with bloodshot eyes, her face paling with horror as she smelled the smoke and witnessed the ruin of their town, the crumbled houses, the bodies in the streets.
A few survivors were already moving, shrouding the corpses or simply walking in listless circles, their faces bloodied or tear-streaked. No one called out to Rahel and her sons, no one challenged them, not one.
His heart beating fast, Shimon lay his mother down on her bedding in the small winter room she’d shared with his father, and handed her the baby, that small, crippled baby, that shattered hope. He covered them both with blankets. Rahel was shaking, but her son didn’t know if it was with cold or fear or grief or shock. He rubbed his hands together a moment, trying to think. Swallowed against his own fear. This was too big for him. They needed his father. Where was his father?
“Shimon,” Rahel whispered. “There.” She lifted a trembling hand, pointed.
He looked. It was his father’s white tallit, the four-cornered prayer shawl he wore to the synagogue, still folded over its peg in the wall, miraculously undisturbed by whatever chaos had struck their small house.
“Bring that here, please.”
When Shimon pressed the tallit into her hand, Rahel took the folded shawl and brought it to her lips, kissing the rough fabric. Glancing toward the roof, she whispered fiercely, “Adonai, find him, bring him home to us. Please. Let him be breathing. We need him. The boys and I. We need him. Bring him home.”
Her voice wavered. She kissed the tallit again, her eyes shining. She sang softly:
Though the fig tree does not flower,
And no grapes are on the vines …
She closed her eyes, fell silent. After a moment, she ended her prayer as prayers were always ended in Kfar Nahum: “Bless us and keep us, O God. Until the navi comes.”
At those words, Shimon straightened. He recalled the rough way his father had shoved him to the door, uncaring of his own safety. If God were watching, he would not bless him or his town for shaking in the dark. He heard the soft sounds of his crippled brother mouthing, reaching for a breast.
He went to the bin in the atrium beneath his mother’s olive tree, took up a clay bowl from the stack beside it, and scooped some of the last of their grain from its bin. He brought the bowl back to his mother and saw the relief in her eyes. He realized from the way her hands shook as she accepted it how fatigued and hungry she actually was. He glanced about, made sure the waterskin was within her reach. Then he met her gaze.
“You are safe,” he said. “I’ll go find father.”
Rahel nodded, her eyes closing. “The boats, my son. The boats. He would have gone to the boats. Gone out on the water, to get to some other shore where there were no dead. So he could circle into the hills and come back to us. See if his boat is here.”
Shimon took his mother’s hand quickly and kissed it, his eyes filling with tears that he blinked back. Then he turned and hurried to the door and flung it open, nearly ran across the packed dirt of the narrow street outside before stopping himself and turning to shut the door, putting his weight against it. Again he saw the blood on his father’s hand. Breathing raggedly, he leaned a moment against the door, gathering his courage. Then he hurried through the battered houses and out to the wild grass. He saw the sea, open and vast with its horizon of far hills, and he ran for the line of boats, the long row of wide-beamed fishers moored above the tideline.
It took him only a moment to be sure. Some of the boats were missing. His father’s boat, others. The tide had come and was now receding, and had washed away whatever track Yonah’s boat had left in the sand when his father dragged it out to the water, a task that normally took two men. It was not a small boat, and his father never brought in small catches.
Swallowing, Shimon straightened and looked out over the waves. A few cranes glided low over the water, but he could see no dark shape of a boat out there, nothing but the blindness of the sun’s fire on the sea.
A fear took him then, and he walked out onto the sand and planted his feet there among the shells and lake-weed the tide had left behind like memories the sea refused to carry. For no reason he could have given, Shimon was certain in his heart
that if he went back to his mother now, he would never see his father again. That he must wait, here, faithfully. Watching the sea. Awaiting the rock and pitch of the boat’s return on the waves. His mother had water and grain. He had found her and brought her and his brother safely home; he’d done his father’s command. Now his duty was here, at the edge of the sea.
Once, while he waited, he heard the call of a shofar and lifted his face. The call was very beautiful, and it carried over the water, and the hills across the Sea of Galilee gave it back. Shimon looked to the sea with fresh hope. Perhaps his father would hear the call and row toward it or run toward it along the shore if he was already on the land and not on the water. But there was still nothing on the sea, neither boat nor bird.
