by Stant Litore
“Cast it away,” Zebadyah called. “Or throw it into the fire.” The priest had turned where he sat, his back to the other guests, legs crossed, hands on his knees. His beard tumbled down his chest. He had begun to recover from his shock, but his eyes were anxious. Yesse beside him chewed gingerly on a bite of fish, watchful.
Koach bit back the words he wanted to say. “It’s a gift to her.”
Yeshua set down the clay bowl. “May I see it?” he asked.
The silent woman took a quick step back. For the second time, it occurred to Koach that this might be the first day since she was a small girl that she had been given a gift. In the past few hours she had been given a coat, fish to eat, and a wood-carving, a small thing of large beauty for one whose life held none—with nothing expected in return. It might break her to give it back. He wished he could understand the emotions, wild and dark, that he saw in her eyes. He wished that she could speak.
“It’s all right,” he whispered.
Yeshua held out his hand, with that quiet intensity in his eyes.
The woman’s eyes were wet, and she hesitated. Then she placed the carving in the stranger’s hand and jerked her fingers back quickly, fear in her eyes. Perhaps she’d been beaten in the past for an unwanted touch.
Yeshua lifted the wooden horse, looked at it closely. Then he walked away along the wall of the atrium, as though he’d forgotten them. Koach watched him, bewildered. He was so strange.
Zebadyah rose to his feet, but Rahel murmured without looking up, “He, too, is my guest, Bar Yesse.”
“We are open to the sky,” Zebadyah said, his tone urgent. “What we do here, God can see. You, stranger. You have given me back my father, and I don’t know what you are, if you are a navi or a witch, if it is prophecy and vision that make you shake like a twig, or shedim from the lord of flies. But that is an idol you hold in your hand, one touched by a heathen slut—”
“She is no heathen,” Koach said sharply. “And—”
“She has spoken no word of Aramaic, no word of Hebrew.”
“She doesn’t speak. At all.” The fury from before came back up, scorching. “Can’t you see she is suffering and alone?”
Zebadyah reddened. “How dare you speak. You who made that thing of wood. You who insult my brother’s memory—”
“Bar Yesse!” Rahel cried.
“Son,” Yesse said.
“I will not see our town distracted by small gods!” Zebadyah’s voice rose, thick with contempt. “Gods you can hold in your hand, rather than a God who can’t be held, who will not come at our call, for we come at his. That!”—he threw his hand out toward the stranger and the wooden horse he held—“That is an evil, a distraction you shape with your hand. A crack in the wall, while the dead press against the stones. That is not safe, it is not useful!”
Yeshua turned on the priest, his eyes hot, the wooden horse clutched in his hand, his voice loud and quick. “The father who made you may not find you useful—or you—or you—” He took them all in with a sweep of his hand. “Of what use are any of you to the Holy One who shaped the earth and filled the seas? But I have been in the desert and I … I believe this: there has never been a day when the father has not found you beautiful.”
There was silence. Even Koach was taken aback at the hardness in the stranger’s voice.
Yeshua turned the horse over a few times in his hand, peering down at it. His face was troubled.
“I think it is possible,” he murmured, “to keep every letter of the written Law yet fail to live a lawful life. And maybe it is possible to yearn, even to yearn for the father’s heart and yet … yet miss him entirely.”
“Bar Yosef …” Zebadyah began.
“Sit, my son,” Yesse said behind him. “Eat. Our town has been unclean a long time, and the cleansing of it can wait until after we eat. Tonight we are guests in Bar Yonah’s house. I’ll hear no shouting in my son’s house.”
Zebadyah kept silent, his face drawn with old pain. But he did not sit.
Yeshua walked back to the young woman and pressed the wooden horse into her hands; she took it and backed away.
“Bury it in the sand, if you will,” he said. “You do not need it. You do not need it, talitha.”
As Yeshua stepped away from the woman, his face went white. For a terrible moment he stood completely still. Then, with a hoarse cry, he clutched at his ears, at his head.
“Bar Yosef?” Koach cried.
Others leapt to their feet, staring in horror or confusion. Rahel stood, too, her face lined with worry. Their shadows appeared long before their feet, with the approaching Sabbath.
It was a long moment before Yeshua spoke. When he did his voice was thick. “Just stop … just stop screaming … stop …”
“Witch,” Zebadyah whispered. Yesse took his son’s hand, squeezing his fingers.
Rahel was at the stranger’s side in a moment, her fingers all but touching his shoulder, though he was neither husband nor kin to her.
“Water! Get him water, amma!” Koach said to her.
Yeshua stretched out one hand as though to push them all away. “No,” he gasped. “I am all right … It is just sometimes … sometimes too much …”
His gaze fixed on the young woman who still held that wood-carving.
“You are the loudest,” he said. “The screaming in your heart … without pause. What … what hurt you so?” He drew in air, his chest heaving. Then he staggered toward the silent woman. The whites of her eyes showed, as though in a moment she might turn and run from the house.
There was a desperate look in Yeshua’s eyes.
“Don’t hurt her!” Koach cried.
“It might hurt, talitha,” Yeshua said. “It might. You lost this, and it may hurt, coming back.”
Talitha, he’d called her again.
Little girl, little daughter.
He reached for her, and she stood, trembling, as he touched her hair. Koach stood tensed, unsure what to do. Rahel’s eyes were watchful. All their eyes were watchful.
Stepping near to the young woman, Yeshua bent his head and did a shocking thing. He pressed his lips to the woman’s throat, gently.
The touch was intimate and familiar and unsettling. Not because he appeared to want her, but because he was treating her as the very closest of his kin, as though anyone who looked up into his face with such naked need might be his kin. No one spoke. All of them—those seated at their meal, those standing—all of them just watched the stranger, this man who stepped over their People’s traditions and their boundaries as simply and without regret as though these were only lines drawn in the sand.
Yeshua straightened and looked at the woman’s eyes a moment; she gazed up at him in shock. Her lips parted; she released a sound like a sigh, like something leaving the body. She began to tremble.
Koach saw her take a breath. He went still, seized with sudden, fierce premonition.
She was shaking.
She sang a high, wavering note.
Her eyes shone with tears.
“It’s all right,” Yeshua said softly. His own eyes shone. “It’s all right. The Sabbath Bride, she is here, even just outside the door. Will you welcome her in for us, talitha?”
She lifted her voice higher, and her eyes filled with tears. Other eyes moistened around her. She began to weep as she sang, and she laughed helplessly.
“Come!” Yeshua cried, spinning to face the others, his arms out, his hair wild about his face. “Have the waters worn away your hearts and your lives like Iyobh’s stones? Does she need to sing alone?” He took the girl’s hand and lifted it high, and he held out his right hand to Rahel, who stood nearest. “Take my hand,” he said softly, and with wondering eyes, she did. “Everyone, please. Sing.”
He lifted his voice in Hebrew, strong Hebrew words out of a desert so deep in their past. Then Rahel began to sing, too, her voice thin at first, then stronger. Old Yesse stepped near, staring at the young woman; Rahel reached for his hand, and without even
seeming to notice, he took her small fingers in a firm grip that belied his age. And as if that one touch poured water from a cistern, they all began to sing, some taking hands, some not. The song was an ancient psalm and one they had heard recited in the synagogue, though without music. Dawid himself might once have stood at the entrance to the Cave of Adullam and sang that psalm to the morning air in that voice of his that had charmed the land’s women and its men and even the six-winged angels of heaven.
The house sang. In ten, twelve, fifteen voices, they sang their love of the Shabbat Bride who brought with her a covenant of rest and peace between God and all living things for whom even the drawing of breath is a labor.
Then something happened that had never happened before in Kfar Nahum or in any village of Israel. Those who were seated because their bodies gave them pain rose shakily to their feet. Sinews reknit themselves. Limbs straightened and strengthened. One beggar’s murky eyes cleared and gazed for the first time on a world of color and shape. The healing passed by touch from one person to the next, swift as a whisper, and the room filled with heat. Each face lit with a glow like that of flames on a winter night. The hair of the men and women crowded into the house rose as in a lightning storm, and wind swept against their faces. They heard the timbers of the walls creak with the pressure of God’s presence, the shekinah that had fallen on their fathers’ tents in the desert, now filling this small house until the stone out of which it was made groaned. Then the heat rolled through the door and out into the street, and dust billowed in the sudden wind.
The townspeople and the boat people looked on each other in wonder, hearing each other’s voices. Most of them hadn’t sung in years.
Not in this silent town where even the synagogue knew neither music nor laughter.
Not in this place of grief.
Not in the house-shaped tombs of Beth Tsaida by the sea.
One of them didn’t sing.
Koach took up a clay pestle, small and heavy, that his mother had dropped by the firepit, and then retreated to the doorstep. There he stood and gazed out at the dust blowing in the street. He was shaken. Singing and joy and that heat in the house were as alien as the fish flopping in their hundreds on the sand. He clutched his weak arm. The dust gusted up from the street as though stirred by the footsteps of the Sabbath Bride.
Whatever had killed Tamar was out there still, prowling the shore or the wild slopes like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Likely the sound of song and feast loud over the shore would bring it back, summoning that lurching corpse like a guest arriving late.
Koach glanced down at his right hand, the hand that was thin and dead. He tried to make it into a fist. His fingers didn’t even twitch.
His eyes stung.
What if that arm were to be healed? That would not make him a man, not make him whole. He had been denied his bar ‘onshin. He had been barred from the synagogue. He had been struck, spat upon, thrown to the dirt.
You have a worse injury, Yeshua had told him.
The other young men—Yakob, Bar Cheleph, Bar Nahemyah, Yohanna—they were not in his mother’s house feasting with the old and the women and the beggars. They were probably all on the shore, watching for the dead or searching for signs of Benayahu.
Even while he sat idle here.
He had only one arm, but he had two eyes; he could watch. He could shout. He could do his part. He drew in a breath. It was for boys to mope and men to act, he told himself. He’d had no bar ‘onshin, but at least he could do his best to be like a man. Anything less would shame the woman he’d loved, who was dead. He thought of Shimon entombing Tamar, doing her the honor he could not, and his face burned.
The surge of heat and power within the house behind him faded, but he still heard many voices singing, his mother’s among them, pure and beautiful as he’d rarely heard it before. He didn’t know what was happening, what was changing within this town. He didn’t know what was changing in him. But he knew what he had to do.
He might step inside again, find his carving knife. But no, no, he would not go to watch for the dead with that in his hand. He was a youth who carved things of beauty and fittings for boats; his blade would remain a craftsman’s tool, not a zealot’s knife. His grip tightened instead about the pestle his mother had used for grinding meal.
Koach took a breath. This was a thing he had to do. But he would wait for his brother’s return; he wouldn’t leave his mother alone in a house crowded with others.
So he watched the dust move with the wind’s breath, and listened for the approach of his brother’s feet.
EPISODE 8
RAHEL’S STORY
It was almost dusk before Shimon staggered back into the town. Even as he reached the outskirts, he heard the singing of women. He stopped, astonished. Listened. Strained his ears as though his ears were cups to fill with all that music. He drew in a ragged breath. How long—how long since he had heard music like that? The Sabbath Bride was walking across the water into the town, following the last footsteps of the setting sun, and for the first time since Shimon was a boy, the town was welcoming her.
The singing stopped about the time that Shimon reached his mother’s house. The door was open, but Koach stood at it like a door-keeper, with a pestle clutched in one hand, and their gazes met. There was a question in Koach’s eyes.
Shimon found he couldn’t speak, so he only nodded.
He saw the relief and sorrow in his brother’s eyes and was startled, for it was not the sorrow of a boy he saw, but a man’s grief. Whoever this youth was, he was not hebel. Suddenly Shimon wondered if his brother had grown to manhood while he slept between the nights’ battles with the sea. The thought shamed him. But there was also a warm flicker of pride for his brother, something he hadn’t felt before.
“I have to go,” Koach said quietly.
“Go?”
He lifted the pestle, and his eyes glinted with a hardness that Shimon had seen before only in the eyes of the fishers.
“Something’s still out there. Zebadyah’s sons have gone already to watch. They’ll need help.”
Shimon stood very still. He could hear voices within the house, but not their words.
“Be careful,” he said at last. There was nothing paternal in his tone. It was just one brother’s advice to another.
Koach gave him a grateful look, and then inclined his head respectfully. “You also,” he said. He stepped past Shimon and began walking quickly around toward the back of the house and the stretch of shore behind it.
Shimon watched his brother go. He gripped his shoulder a moment; it burned where the rock had cut him. Maybe that corpse up on the hill had been the only one they had to worry about. But he didn’t think so. From Koach’s tone, he knew Benayahu had not been found. And there might be others. Sometimes, it was not just one corpse you dragged up in your nets. There might be three or four. Since his thirteenth year he’d known that any winter might be the town’s last. Nothing was certain, nothing was safe.
He stepped inside his house, turned and shut and barred the door by long habit. And stopped. Startled. There were new scents in the air. Fish roasted for food, and the sharper scent of spices. His mother must have placed a fish over the spirit fire to keep the shedim from the house. He hadn’t smelled that in—so long. For the first time, it really sank in that there were fish. There was food. There were hearts to lay on the coals to keep the shedim away. And maybe, just maybe, everything was going to be all right.
He blinked, his throat tight, and stepped through to the atrium.
The beggar-stranger from Natzeret stood with his back to the olive tree. Perhaps twenty men and women of the town—and perhaps ten boat people—sat around him, their faces upturned, listening. Some of them, Shimon knew, had been broken in body. One had been blind. And that young woman had been mute, the one who appeared to be wearing his father’s coat—his father’s coat, but Shimon was too overwhelmed, too bewildered, for the coals of anger in his chest t
o flicker into fresh heat. He just stared. Those who had been broken now sat hale and whole, and he knew the singing he’d heard had come from this house.
Facing the others, Yeshua was drawn and pale as after great labor. He was talking in a low murmur; Shimon couldn’t make out the words. The stranger looked completely intent on those sitting near him, and didn’t glance up as Shimon looked on, bewildered.
This man stood in his house, in his house, with more than two dozen unexpected guests. He looked about for Rahel, but couldn’t see her; she was not among the seated guests. She was not at the firepit, though there was evidence of a meal. A vast meal.
His belly growled so fiercely that some of the guests glanced up at him.
There had been a feast here, a feast of strangers. He stood outside their circle, unsure how to act, everything in him a wash of confusion and fatigue. He glanced about, saw that the rug was drawn across the door to Rahel’s small room along the outer wall of the house. Had she gone to bed, with so many strangers in her house? Nothing here made any sense.
Too weary and his emotions in too great a turmoil to deal with the strange navi or the people pressed all about him, or even to throw them from his house, Shimon went to find his mother. Stepping into her room, he let the rug over the door fall back behind him to block out the sight and some of the noise from their atrium. There was a little light, very faint, from between the slats of the boarded-up window, and by it Shimon saw that Rahel lay in her bedding with her small hands clasped at her breast, her fingers curled around a tattered shawl. His father’s tallit. Shimon’s throat tightened. In this dim light, though he had seen them many times before, his mother’s hands looked suddenly wrinkled and aged.
“Amma,” he whispered.
She glanced up, and he saw that she had been crying. A day ago, when he had been numb, it might have wearied him rather than distressed him. Now he ached for her, and hurried to sit beside her, setting his hand on her shoulder.
