by Stant Litore
“Amma, what is it?”
She just shook her head.
“Amma—”
“All our people,” she whispered.
His face hardened. “I will get them out of the house, amma. And that—that man from Natzeret. I’ll throw him to the dirt.”
“No.” She smiled up at him and took his hand in hers. They looked frail, but her grip was strong. “It’s not that, my Shimon. It’s only that I didn’t know. I didn’t know our town was so broken, so many of us ruined. How bad it had become. Your father—” Her voice caught. “He would have wept to see this, Shimon. He believed in Kfar Nahum. He believed not even the Romans, not even the dead out of the hills, could do this to us. Could ever do this to us.”
“What happened, amma?” Shimon took a breath. “There are people out there who were ill, a few who were maimed. Now they … What happened?”
Her gaze strayed to her arm. Shimon followed that glance, but saw nothing there. Just her olive skin.
“The dead are coming back up,” she said.
“Yes.” His own voice caught.
“They’re coming for him. Have you seen his eyes, my son? He burns with life. So much that it spills out of him and touches the rest of us. It’s like fire, and the shedim are moths, Shimon. He’s drawing them out of the sea, just by being here.”
“Then we have to get rid of him.” Shimon’s voice was cold, colder than he would have thought possible. He thought of the stones he could lift from the street outside. Thought of the bruises that purpled the man’s face and arms. Perhaps this was why he had been driven out into the desert, so that the dead might follow him where he went and leave the living alone.
“No,” Rahel said. “I have no fever.”
“Amma?”
“I have no fever, Shimon. I thought—at first I thought it might come back. But it didn’t.”
He sat back on his heels. “What happened?”
Fever? Something had happened. And Rahel was—different. Lost in thought. Lying here in her bedding as though utterly exhausted. That wasn’t like her. And Koach—he was different, too. His insides went cold with dread.
“It’s not important,” Rahel whispered. “He’s what’s important. He’s anointed, Shimon. Our navi, our messiah, our anointed one. I have to tell Zebadyah bar Yesse tomorrow; he has been so afraid. I have to tell him. This stranger—he is the one we’ve waited for.” She closed her eyes. “Fifteen years. I’ve waited fifteen years.”
Shimon kept silent. He sensed that she needed to speak, needed badly to speak.
“I prayed, Shimon. That night your father died. As I held little Koach in my arms. I begged God, in the silence of my heart, I begged him to send the anointed one, that I would see him with my own eyes. I told God, My boys need me. And everything out there is burning and dying. I can hear it. I can smell it. Let me see Kfar Nahum healed before I die. Let me see my two sons together and strong.” Her eyes glistened. “When I opened my eyes this day and saw him there, I knew. I knew. I had suffered enough, enough even for El-Shaddai Our God. He had chosen to answer my prayer, little Shimon. He would not let me die until I saw that man. With my own eyes.”
“Amma,” he murmured, but said nothing else.
She squeezed his hand. “You can break a family or a People even as you can break an arm or a clay bowl. Everything had broken, that winter. When the Romans came. They broke the doors of the synagogue. They took—whatever they wanted, Shimon, whatever they wanted. To fill the tax debt. They broke us.” A hiss in her voice. “They took some of the boats, all the food, all the fine clothes. They hurt our girls. Yonah your father … he hid me.” Her eyes softened. “He was so brave, your father. He hid me out in the kokhim, among the dead. The one place the Romans didn’t think to look for anything of value, and the one place no one else in Kfar Nahum thought to hide anything. I was so scared, Shimon. It was dark, and all about me the bodies and bones of our dead. Yonah brought food and water when he could, but I had to ration it so carefully. He couldn’t always come, and he didn’t trust anyone else to. We were all afraid, everyone.
“Most of the time I sat huddled against the wall of the bone chamber, just praying. My belly was so full with your brother. I didn’t want to move or do anything but sleep. And I was hungry, so hungry.” Her voice trembled. “I was terrified that something would go wrong. That I would lose the baby. I did rise once, and I explored the tomb with my hands, because I couldn’t bear not knowing what was there. There was the great chamber, and the tunnels leading out from it, and the shelves where our dead are slid into the living rock.. I touched a few of them, Shimon. I … I had to. I had to know they were still.”
He touched her hair gently. “It’s all right, amma. It is long past.”
“Long past.” She smiled weakly. “Nothing stays buried, my little one. Maybe nothing stays broken, either. I hope that’s so.”
Her little one. It had been years since she had called him that.
She hadn’t called him that since Koach was born.
Since before his father died.
Shimon blinked and swallowed against a tightness in his throat.
“I heard them carousing. The shouts, the screams. I could hear it all, all the pain of the women I knew, the men. And I couldn’t do anything.” Her hands shook. “I couldn’t even cry for them, Shimon, because my labor took me, and all I could do was breathe, just breathe, between the pangs. Breathe and hear. Such horrible screams.” She closed her eyes. “Even the moaning of the dead wasn’t worse than that.” She drew in a breath. “For all I knew, Yonah was dying while I fought to push Koach out of my body. Oh, Shimon, I wanted to die. And I wanted to live. I cursed your father, biting my lip to hold in the screams. He wasn’t there with me. I hated him, for a few brief moments.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know if he lived, or if you did, or if I would live, only that I had to push that baby out into the world. Even if there was nothing left out there, nothing but the dead. They moaned all around the tomb, and my heart—I have never felt fear like that. Or rage. Or—”
Her hands trembled.
“And then I had two sons,” she whispered, and fell silent.
All his adult life, Shimon had stood with his back to the memory of that winter. That memory had stalked him at every waking hour, until its cold fingers touched his very shoulder, and when he lay down to sleep it sprang on him like a lion on a gazelle. Now, in his mind, he turned and looked into the cold eyes of his pursuer.
He remembered waiting on the shore, unable either to shout or to flee as the boat came in. With its scrape against the sand, his father’s body had staggered into the gunwale and toppled over to lie half in the water, half on the moist land. Shimon had stared in fascinated terror at this human shape that looked so much like Yonah, the fisher, who in the last year had taught him to carve an oar, to gut a fish, to tack a boat against the wind.
He remembered his father’s face turning to him, the eyes lifeless, the low hiss in the dark. Remembered scrambling away over the sand and loose shingle, stumbling, getting back up, falling again. Remembered kicking up sand, frantic to regain his feet, the corpse bending over him, dried blood on its hand. His father’s blood.
And he remembered his mother’s scream, a cry raw with fury and pain and grief, as she leapt between Shimon and his father.
Then Rahel had stood painfully straight, her tunic dark at her thighs with the blood of the day after childbirth, her hair sweaty across her face. Both hands whitened about the haft of a fishing spear. The iron point had gone through his dead father’s eye and into his skull and there it was sheathed. His father’s limbs hung limp. He no longer moved or moaned, but the spear held him up, so that he appeared to be standing there beside his wife, gazing at her with those eyes that had looked out, unseeing, on the water and that had looked across the sand, unseeing, at his child.
With a low wail, Rahel wrenched the hook free; it left his father’s body with a quiet squelching sound not unlike the spilling
of innards from a fish’s belly. Yonah’s body toppled to the sand and he lay still. The wound was dark in his brow, a wound that didn’t bleed. Rahel stood over him, breathing hard, the fishing spear held at her side. The hand that gripped it shook violently.
A wind came in off the sea, and her hair blew across her face, hiding her anguish from her son. Shimon felt the chill of the wind on his brow, which was damp with sweat.
“Abba,” he gasped, “abba.”
“No,” Rahel whispered. She swayed on her feet.
Leaping up, Shimon caught her as she fell, a woman weak from horror and loss of blood from her labor; even as Shimon threw his arms about her and held her tightly, the spear slipped from her limp hand and sheathed its point in the sand.
That moment, and others, flashed through Shimon’s heart like a school of fish. Rahel between him and the corpse of his father. Or leaping before Barabba’s horse. Even Koach his brother, standing over the body of his beloved, that blunt rock in his hand. For so long Shimon had thought his entire life but the last rattle in a corpse’s throat—a last fight for air that was without meaning or hope of victory. His failure to bring in fish enough to feed his kin had always shamed him; now his days of despair shamed him more. While he’d sat in his grief and his gloom, his mother, who’d once given birth in a tomb even as the shedim moaned on every side, had stood constant, had never stopped hoping and believing in her sons. The waters may wear away the stones, but no matter how the waves crash against the shore, some hearts can never be worn away, can never be crumbled, can never be pounded into sand.
“How did you do it?” he asked suddenly. “When father came back. How did you do it, amma? How did you find the courage?”
Her face showed her pain. “I did it,” she said slowly, “because I loved him. I loved him, Shimon. Most wives do not love their husbands, because most husbands do not love their wives. But I loved your father. I loved him from the moment he appeared at my father’s door with a net of fish and a plea in his eyes, asking for me.” She smiled faintly, her eyes wet. “I loved him, so I had to.”
“Amma,” Shimon whispered.
She reached up and grasped his hand again, tightly. Her eyes sought his. “Your father would be proud of you, Shimon. Never doubt it.”
He choked. “I love you, amma.”
“And I you, Shimon.” Her face was tight with weariness. “Will you sing to me the way you did when you were a boy? After your father had kissed me, while he was gathering up his things for the boat, you would come sit by me and sing me to sleep. Do you remember?”
“I remember,” Shimon said hoarsely.
“I am going to try to sleep.” A faint smile. “I don’t care how many people are here. You and Koach can care for them a while. Sing me to sleep, my Shimon.”
Shimon drew up her wool blanket and tucked it around her chin. Long ago it had been dyed blue, but its color had faded away with time, like so many other things. Behind him, Shimon could no longer hear the navi and others speaking; it was quiet out in the atrium. Outside the house, his brother and the priest’s sons might be watching for the dead, but he could not hear their footsteps or their fear. For the moment, there was nothing in the world but mother and son. Rahel squeezed his hand and he returned her grip, and sang in a low murmur, for her. A song he’d heard her sing once in a tomb, far away, on the other side of time.
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.
God is my strength;
He makes my feet like the deer’s;
He makes me walk in high places.
THE LIGHT SHINES IN THE DARK
Leaving his mother sleeping, Shimon stepped out into the atrium. The house was nearly empty again. The people who had gathered there were gone, and Koach hadn’t returned. Yeshua sat alone by the cold firepit, holding a small lamp in his hands; there was a little flame—he must’ve lit it before dark fell, before the Sabbath Bride settled down for her night’s rest—and the scent of rancid oil mixed with the lingering smell of roasted fish in a way that did uncomfortable things to Shimon’s stomach, though it also made him aware that he hadn’t eaten since the morning. The town had feasted, yet he had not.
He crouched across the firepit from Yeshua, giving him a wary look. Two fish still lay on the coals. Shimon snatched one up in his bare hands; it had cooled long before, but when he lifted it to his teeth and bit, the oil and flavor of the fish ran into his mouth and his hunger roared in his belly. He tore at it in urgent bites. A small sound made him glance up, and he noticed the beggar woman—the one Koach had helped—leaning against the olive tree, in its shadow.
Shimon cast the bones of the fish down over the coals; he would clean out the pit in the morning. He considered Yeshua. Madman or navi, was this man a blessing or a threat to the town? His mother trusted the stranger and thought him a holy one—the holy one, the navi. The bruises on the man’s face were dark in the lamplight, his face thin. Shimon wondered whether this stranger in his house had eaten much, either.
“There were …” Shimon glanced around. “People.”
“Gone home for the Sabbath,” Yeshua said quietly. “All of them. Or to what shelters they could find or that those who feasted here would … would offer. All gone. I am alone.” Anguish in his face, he didn’t look up from the light. “Still alone. I’ll always be alone, won’t I, even if I feed a house, even if I feed a town, even if the lame walk and the mute sing. I am still alone. I am still standing in the desert, listening to the screams.”
Shimon grunted. Earlier in the day, the stranger had been almost furious with energy. He had moved with a hastiness and an urgency that was entirely alien to the slow, exhausted men and women of Kfar Nahum. But now a hush had fallen over him; he looked faint. Worn. Shimon realized, startled, that there were wrinkles about Yeshua’s eyes that had not been there in the morning. Now he looked more like the men Shimon knew. Even his voice, the way he talked, had changed. He no longer sounded frantic, desperate, dangerous.
Only sorrowful.
“You have the hospitality of this house.” Shimon’s voice was gruff. He would honor his mother’s wishes and her hope.
“I would … I would like that,” Yeshua said, a flicker of gratitude in his eyes. He stared at the small flame.
“Well,” Shimon muttered. “I will bring some bedding out here.”
“My mother lights a lamp,” Yeshua said, as though he hadn’t heard. “A small lamp, much like this one, a lot like this one, every night. Every night. Though oil is costly in Natzeret.” He glanced at the fish bones on the cold coals, such grief in his face that Shimon had to look away. “I suppose it is here, too.”
The flame wavered; the stranger glanced at it and then stilled the shaking of his hands. He took a breath, then set the lamp carefully to the side. “They are so loud. I hear them, Cephas. I hear them whether I rise or whether I lie down. I hear them always. Every hour, every day.”
“Hear who?” Shimon peered cautiously at the man’s face, but his eyes held a cold, clear intelligence. There was no madness there. Only thought and pain.
“The cries,” Yeshua answered. “Their moans of hunger.”
Shimon’s breath caught. “The dead?”
“The living,” Yeshua said sharply. Then he pressed a hand to his eyes. “The dead. Both.” His voice was calm, though thick with fatigue—as though his raving had been a thicket he’d broken through and now he was in the open again, but sweaty and weary from his work. “All of you eating alone, and not together. So many closed doors, so many windows shut. So many of you dying alone in your lonely houses.” He sighed. “Kana is wrong. Zebadyah is wrong, too. We can’t avoid our past, its violence. Can’t deny it, not ever. The screams in our desert. Nor even atone for them.�
�� His eyes were distant. “Only forgive.”
Suddenly, a scream pierced the air. Shimon gasped. Yeshua’s face hardened. Outside, a few doors slammed; wooden slats rattled shut over one window.
The murmur of the sea, the sigh of water on the sand.
Then they heard it.
Low, wavering moans. Distant yet loud in the stillness.
“You did this,” Shimon said, his insides numb and cold. “You brought the dead back up.”
“Yes.” Yeshua’s voice was quiet and sad. “And the fish also. But by this time tomorrow it will be over, I think.”
Shimon stood. “We have to bar the door,” he breathed.
“No.” Yeshua’s face hardened, and he stood, too. “Let others hide. You and I, we will do the father’s work.”
Shimon turned on him in horror. “Don’t you hear?” Hardly daring to speak above a whisper. “The dead are coming.”
Those strange eyes of Yeshua’s were bright and fierce in the light of the lamp. “No matter how the door burns, Cephas, I have to step through it in the end. I can’t flinch back from it any more. Whatever the father wishes me to do, the weeping father, it’s time I did it.” He gripped Shimon’s arm. A hard, tight grip. A workman’s grip. A nagar’s grip.
His voice was clear and calm.
“Don’t be afraid, Cephas.”
When Yeshua stepped past him to the door, Shimon followed, still meaning to bar it. But instead, Yeshua took hold of the door and threw it wide. Shimon could see the shadow-shape of the house that leaned just across the narrow street from this one.
Then he sucked in his breath, for in a stab of cold dread, he remembered.
Yakob and Yohanna. And Koach.
His brother was out there.
A PESTLE, A MENORAH, A SHOFAR, A SICA, AND THE HEAT OF A SUN
Bar Cheleph saw them first, and when the others—Koach, Yakob, Yohanna—turned their heads, it was as though Bar Cheleph’s shriek had split the night open and let the shedim tumble out of nightmares into the real world, the world of time and suffering. The corpses stumbled up the shoreline toward them, lurching, their arms lifted, their moans muted by the surge and song of the sea, but no less terrible. There were perhaps ten or twelve of them, their eyes glinting in the faint light off the water. A few boat people, having lost their shelters, had erected hasty windbreaks of driftwood draped with lake-weed and had huddled behind them against the cold of night. Now they leapt to their feet and sprang, shouting, across the sands, fleeing the oncoming ghouls. The same wind that had brought the Sabbath Bride to Beth Tsaida with the dusk swept up, bringing to Koach’s face this time the reek of the dead.
