The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  And certainly not when Omar had come, and Tamar had looked at him and her fourteen-year-old heart and shattered at once, for he was the best of men, the handsomest of men, and so very kind and generous. He had brought her presents from the beginning, well primed by her father’s friends, but he had talked of his brother Jehohanan. He had sat beside her in her father’s house, holding her hand secretly so that her father might not see in boldness, but he had spoken of Jehohanan.

  And when they had come to Jerusalem, she an exited, frightened bride, the first person she had met had been Jehohanan. Serious, straight faced, handsome too, but not as Omar was. He had looked at her and nodded and said sharply to Omar, ‘You have been gone too long. There is work to be done. In the warehouse and at the meetings.’ And he had taken Omar away, and left the frightened girl to her sister-in-law, only one year senior in years, but so much older in her knowledge of the world.

  Not that Susannah had ever been unkind to Tamar. But hard, that she had been. She had not allowed her to weep when she missed her mother. She had chided her for being so sick as her pregnancy took hold of her. She had made her work in the big house the brothers shared when she yearned to go out into the busy streets to wander in the crowds and stare at the booths in the bazaars the way she had always done at home. But Susannah had also been good. When Tamar’s time had come and labour pains had frightened her so, it had been Susannah who made them bearable by the presence. When the baby Simeon had been so ill, so frail it seemed he might die, it had been Susannah who had taught his silly childish mother how to care for him, and rear him to sturdy toddlerhood. And when Omar had become more and more involved with Jehohanan’s politics, it had been Susannah who had helped Tamar, sulky and pouting at being neglected, to see how foolish it was to chide a man for doing what he had to do.

  And if she herself had ever yearned for her own people, far away in Gaza by the sea, if she had suffered the same homesickness in the bustle and danger of Jerusalem that Tamar had suffered, no one, least of all Tamar, knew of it.

  Dawn came with its usual suddenness, bearing with it the smell of old smoke and the sweet sickly scent of dead bodies, already rotting in the wreckage, and the children turned into the last sleep of the night as Susannah stood up and stretched.

  ‘We must count what we have, share it and then part.’ She said, as calmly as if they were still at some and she was instructing Tamar on how to arrange to dead with the day’s laundry. ‘We cannot go together, for there is no reason why my people should care for you, or yours for me.’

  ‘Go where?’ Tamar stared up at her, suddenly more frightened than she had been all night. To have lost Omar was agony. Lovely happy Omar. She would not think of him. But to part with Susannah? That was unthinkable.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere without you!’ she said shrilly. ‘Susannah, you cannot… ’

  ‘You must go home to your own people. Home to Babylon,’ Susannah said. ‘They are yours and they will care for you. If you go north, you should pick up a caravan. They will see you safe on your way. You are a handsome woman, and the children are tender. They will help you. If you’re clever and sensible.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to Pumpeditha,’ Tamar began, and then stopped. ‘I mean, I do, but not without you. I want you to come too. My Abba will love you and look after you-‘

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ Susannah said sharply. ‘I have my own people, and they have a right. A right to the children I have borne.’

  She stopped, sharply, staring at Tamar and then looking down at the four children, curled up together in the sandy hollow, sleeping like a litter of puppies in a basket; and then turned her head away.

  ‘It must be so, my dear,’ she said more gently. ‘You must go to your people, and I to mine. It has always been so for widows. Who else can we ask to care for us? Come, let me see what shekels you have brought.’

  Tamar felt the tears running down her cheeks and made no effort to hide them. Usually Susannah was infuriated by her easy weeping, but today, Tamar felt, she would not scold her for it. Not when they were to part so soon. For Tamar knew she could not argue with Susannah. Dreadful, fearful, miserable as it would be to part from strong Susannah, to her own people each of them must go. It had always been so.

  Together they untied their fortunes from about their waists and necks and fingers. Omar and Jehohanan had been successful merchants, for all they gave so much energy to their politics, and their wives had gone as decently bedecked as the wives of such men should; tinkling with the gold pieces threaded on gold thread, their clothes glittering in secret places with carefully sewn on golden coins. They should have a goodly store.

  And they did. When they counted it and shared it, they had more than enough to get back to their homes, even if they had to pay travellers they met on the way to accompany them. They even had enough to feed themselves on their arrival, for a little while at least.

  And so it was that as the sun at last lifted the complete roundness of its disc above the wreck of Jerusalem on the tenth day of Ab that Tamar and Susannah stood in the Valley of Hinnom and looked at each other, saying goodbye. Tamar stood with Micah in her arms and Simeon clutching at her skirts, and Susannah with Leah and Mehitabel flanking her.

  And then Susannah began to speak, her voice low and almost dreamy, and Tamar felt the chill of what she said rising from the pit of her belly into her throat. And could do nothing about it.

  For what Susannah said was irrefutable. Had there been any argument that could have been marshalled against her, strong as she was, would not Tamar, as weak as she was, have done so? Would she have let such a thing happen had it not been the ineluctable will of God? In year to come she was to tell the bitter angry Leah the same thing, over and over again. Not that it made any difference.

  Jehohanan, said Susannah, staring back at what she was left of Jerusalem, had died with his city. ‘Never again shall he walk or breathe or eat or sleep beside me. Never again shall he make me a child.’

  She had turned then and looked at Tamar. ‘Is it not a cruel thing that there is no child to follow such a man, Tamar? Is it not? God could not have meant it so.’

  ‘No child? But there are your lovely daughters,’ Tamar said, looking anxiously at her small nieces, feeling the cut in Susannah’s words, not wanting the children to feel hurt. ‘You have your sweet daughters.’

  ‘Ah yes, but no son. No boy to be called Bar Jehohanan. No son to bear the name of such a great man on into the world he fought for. It is a cruel thing, that. God could not have meant it so. Could he?’

  ‘I do not know the ways of God,’ Tamar said, frightened and not knowing quite why. ‘How can I know the ways of God? I never understand men’s doings… ’ For indeed, in Tamar’s eyes God was really just another man. Large, powerful, totally

  incomprehensible. Just another man. ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘If your Omar had lived, the good Lord in his wisdom would have decreed that he give me a son for his dead brother. Is it not so, Tamar? Isn’t that the law?’

  ‘I told you, I know nothing of such things,’ Tamar said, almost pettishly. ‘I’m just a woman.’

  ‘Ah, but I know, Tamar. I tell you it would be so. But Omar is dead, like Jehohanan.’

  There was a silence then, and Tamar did not look at her. She was still frightened, still did not know why.

  ‘But you have two sons to call Bar Omar. Haven’t you, Tamar? Haven’t you?’

  And now Tamar understood. She pulled the boys closer to her, her soft-skinned brown eyed boys, and shook her head, furiously, violently, as though by doing so she could shake off Susannah and her soft implacable voice for ever.

  ‘But it must be so, my dear,’ Susannah said, with a voice full of infinite reasonableness, infinite patience. ‘You know it, and so do I. It has to be so – you cannot take away two boys called Bar Omar, but leave me with no Bar Jehohanan. It would not be right. It would be an abomination in the face of the Lord.’

  And so
it was on the tenth day of Ab, in the year 70 of the Common Era, Susannah, widow of Jehohanan, turned her back on Jerusalem and walked southward, her daughter Mehitabel scurrying along on her left, and her right child who tried to pull away, and kept looking back piteously at Tamar. In Tamar’s arms as she stared with stricken eyes at the receding figures of her sister-in-law and the two children lay the baby Micah, burbling a little and reaching for the loose hair on her forehead to play with it. And at her side stood her niece, Leah, a stolid dark eyed girl with a face and eyes as opaque as the pebbles that lay about them in the rough valley scrub.

  Tamar never saw her son Simeon again, and Susannah never saw her daughter Leah. But the Will of God had been done, according to Susannah, and a son bearing Jehohanan’s name was carried away from Jerusalem to the new world beyond. And Tamar, doing as she always did, which was the best she could, turned and walked blindly northward, bearing her baby Micah in her aching arms, barely noticing how cruelly the stones of the valley floor bit at her feet. She had lost her home and her husband and her son. There wasn’t much else that could happen to her and her children. Was there?

  2

  And so it was that the wandering began. In truth, of course, it had begun long before, hundreds of years ago in the time of Nebuchadnezzer and Jehohaichin, where many thousands of the people of Judea had been deported to Babylon. Some of them had come back to Jerusalem in the time of Joshua, but later others had sickened of the hard labour of reconstructing the ruins of the first temple, and had returned to the lush life of the great eastern nation, sending money back to help the struggling builders in Jerusalem, just as some had gone to settle in the old land of bondage, Egypt, where life was good and easy.

  But it was not good and easy for Tamar, walking doggedly northward from the Valley of Hinnom below burning Jerusalem, with the silent ice-cold Leah at her side, and Micah soft and heavy in her arms. Battered with loss, she could feel nothing but the pain in her feet and legs. The misery of Omar’s death, the agony of parting from Simeon, and also from Susannah, strong and comforting Susannah, was so overwhelming that the only way she could comprehend any of it was by thinking of the sharp stones beneath her soles, the dragging in her ankles and the spasms that seized her shrieking calf muscles.

  It was not good and easy, but for all that it was not impossible. As the evening shadows lengthened over the rising ground on the first day after the burning of the travellers making their way eastward, from Damascus. Judeans, by great fortune, they were kind to her and did not kill her for the sake of her small store of gold, and the possession of her children who would have made useful slaves in time, but welcomed her, and gave her a bundle of goat skins in which the children could be put to sleep, and above all, fed them. They gave her goats’ milk and coarse meal bread and dried figs, and asked in return only that she tell them in all the detail she could, of what had happened in Jerusalem.

  They sat there in the thick black velvet night around a sulky cooking fire and listened attentively, their heads covered with the woollen cloths that showed the heavy wear of their travelling life. These five men were merchants in a small way of business who could only live by moving their goods from one town to another about the rich green half-moon through which the Euphrates and Tigris made their mighty ways to the Persian Gulf. What happened in Jerusalem mattered profoundly to them, for where Romans were, trade was not.

  So they questioned and listened and sighed and looked upon Tamar with sad respect for her suffering and let her sleep secure that night, rolled in one of their own carpets for warmth, and did not molest her even though not one of them had laid with a woman these many weeks.

  The next day they laughed at her, indulgently, for travelling north when she had wanted to go east, and took her up on their pack ass with Micah wrapped around her robe on her lap and Leah walking alongside and set off towards the rising sun, while she pondered on Susannah’s wisdom; for had Tamar turned east she would have found no travellers to aid her, but would have had to walk the many miles alone, finding what food she could along the way.

  Dear Susannah, she thought, and let tears prick her eyelids. Dear Susannah, I miss you so. And somehow she managed not to think of how much she missed Simeon, too, he of the noisy and shouting and sweet insolence that used to make her laugh with such delight. She thought only of her sister-in-law as the travellers made their way to Ava and then Pumpeditha. It was the only way she could keep her head clear, thinking of Susannah.

  And what did Susannah think of, so many miles west and south of her? As Tamar and Leah and Micah were being carried safe into the main market square of the dusty city of Ava, she was lying on her back on the hard stones of an alley off the Anthedon wharf of Gaza, her knees spread apart and her eyes wide open, staring up at the sky over the rise and fall of the heavy shoulders of the man who was pushing his body into hers. She was grimly not thinking of anything, just watching the sky appear and disappear as he grunted his way to his satisfaction, and cutting her mind off completely at the waist. She knew that somewhere behind her Simeon and Mehitabel were watching, alert and a little puzzled, but she did not think about them either. And certainly she did not think about dead Jehohanan.

  The man rolled off at last, fumbling at her even though he had reached his peak and clearly found it good. This time she slapped at his hand, feeling safe now to do so, and he laughed and stood up and rearranged his robes, leaving her to scrub herself as dry and clean as she could, her back turned to him and children in an attempt to maintain some dignity.

  ‘No more till we are safe at sea,’ she said then, turning around and staring at him, her head up and her dark eyes narrow in her white face. ‘That was the bargain.’

  ‘A bargain it is – though it won’t be much of a one for me if you don’t show a bit of enthusiasm.’ He grinned, his yellow teeth against his dark lips. ‘Got a lot to learn, you have.’

  ‘I’m not a whore,’ she said contemptuously, bending to pick up her bundle and jerking her head at the children to bring them to her side. ‘Just a widow and orphan, trying to keep my soul inside my body, and my children’s too. When do you sail?’

  ‘Sunrise.’ His eyes slid away from her direct gaze. He should be despising her, damn it, a woman he had just taken in such a way, but there was something in her face that made him feel uneasy. Not ashamed, precisely, for when did a man ever need to feel shame about his manhood? But something. ‘Sunrise,’ he repeated, then said abruptly, ‘Did you hear what happened in Jaffa last night?’

  ‘Last night? Last night I was sitting in my dead father’s house, hearing that all my kin that live have fled. Gone to Egypt. I can’t follow them there, for where will they be? They didn’t know I was in need of them so they left no messages for me. And with my father dead, why should any of my brothers care for me? They have anguish enough with their own women and children-‘ She was talking almost to herself now, staring out at the wharfside at the end of the alley, at the tangle of masts and rigging swaying against the greyness of the dawn sky. ‘Anguish enough… ’

  ‘They took their heels there,’ he went on, ‘heard the Romans were coming, piled into the ships, went out even though the wind was rising. Storm took ‘em. Turned every last damned vessel on its side, and those that got themselves ashore we stuck on Roman swords along the beaches. Never put to the sea at night – there’s not a mariner anywhere as doesn’t know that. Drowned for their pains – ‘

  ‘Better than being spitted on a sword,’ she said sharply, and pulled Mehitabel towards her, for the child had broken into a sudden wail. ‘But there’ll be no storms or drowning for us. God wouldn’t bring me so far, not take such sacrifices from me just to tip me into the sea.’

  And she led the way to the ship, with its owner trailing behind her, a little bewildered by the subservience she was able to create in him.

  It was to be so for the next many weeks as they traversed the great sea, hugging the shores whenever they could, on their way to Cyprus where he had a c
argo of dried fruit to exchange for one of olive oil which was to be taken on to Sicily, there to be exchanged for a load of cracked marble to be taken at last to Valencia in Spain. All through the journey it was she who in some subtle way seemed to control him, deciding when they should sail and what they should eat, when they should copulate (for she was scrupulous in paying her fare for herself and the children) what rates they should get for cargoes and what they should carry.

  She left him in Valencia, taking her share of the cargo money – for, she told him firmly, it was her shrewd bargaining that had got him his prices and she was entitled. Turning her back on him, contemptuous still, she took the children, taller now and even fair skinned Simeon baked nut brown by the sun and sea winds, and made her way to the city of Cordoba.

  She could have stayed in Valencia, for there were Jews there, but deep within her she was still afraid of the Romans. If she herself had come by the sea from Gaza, could not they? Inland, it would be sage. So, inland she went, and with her cargo money bought a small house at the top of a long winding street and set herself up as modestly as a merchant. The Jewish citizens of Cordoba, comfortable and settled people who traced their ancestors back to the days two hundred years before when a handful of Jewish slaves had been peninsula, accepted her, and allowed her a widow’s privileges. Even at this great distance news of the happenings in far away Jerusalem had penetrated. They felt she had a right to their tolerance.

  And there, at last, she stayed. Sometimes she remembered her Jehohanan, in the dark wastes of the summer nights when her body stirred and reminded her she was a woman, had once had hungers and had been sweetened by the satisfaction of them, but that was not often. More of her thoughts she gave to Simeon.