The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  Simeon Bar Jehohanan, for she always addressed him by his full name, was the most precious possession she had, in spite of her growing store of gold from her dealings in the Cordoban markets. But he – he hated her. He spent the rest of his life filled with a huge fury at the way he had been robbed of his infancy of warm soft red headed mother, and given instead this implacable black eyes creature who brooded over him and watched him and stirred his deepest feelings into anger. His hate spilled over into hatred of her daughter Mehitabel too, but it was a different sort of hate, a mixture of contempt and disgust. Only when he realized, as he did eventually, how it would hurt Susannah to show any care for Mehitabel, did he so.

  Despite Susannah’s rage, he married Mehatibel, timid cowed Mehitabel, and bred many children upon her, of whom nine survived. And one of them, just one, was a girl with red hair and round blue eyes, and he called her Tamar for the mother for whom he still yearned, and at last to love again, as well as hate.

  But Susannah stopped loving, and became harder and harder and more shrivelled and more angry as the years dropped away, and died at last in the year of 120 of the Common Era, with her full complement of seventy years, long after her daughter Mehitabel had succumbed to the exhaustion of her repeated childbirths and had closed her eyes in peace. And no one, not one of her grandchildren, and certainly not the nephew she had tried to make into her son, mourned her.

  But Tamar mourned far away in Babylonia though she was never to know what had happened to her beloved Susannah; such messages as she sent Gaza from time to time went unanswered, and she never did hear again of her son, or her niece. But all her life she remembered Susannah and spoke of her often in love and longing however much Leah stared at her with opaque black eyes and disgust in her face.

  That was something that Tamar found it difficult to come to terms with, Leah’s loathing. Micah grew up to be a gentle easy going boy, much like his dead father. Had there been any kinsmen of her dead husband to whom Tamar could have wed, her family would have arranged it, but there were none. The Romans had killed them all. So Tamar lived comfortably enough as a widow watching Micah grow up, and marry, loving his quiet little wife Sarah as if she had been her own, and exclaiming joyously over the fat babies who had arrived with almost monotonous regularity, and trying hard to love Leah too.

  But with each year Leah became colder and more bitter and more adamantine. She would sit in the kitchen of Tamar’s house, consumed with hate, only her eyes gleaming in her white face to betray the heat of the fires within. Tamar would sit and watch her uneasily, and try and talk brightly to her about finding a husband, but the look that always tuned on her from those black eyes would make the words falter in her throat.

  And then the time came when the festering hurt in Lead at last spilled over for all to see. Micah, now a prosperous weaver of fine silk, happy with his silent Sarah and vociferous brood of children, was accused by his neighbours of having robbed a fellow weaver. He protested, of course, for in truth Micah was too easy going a soul, too simple a man, to have the wit to plan a robbery. He demanded as was his right under the law to know his accuser. And his sister – as he had always considered her to be – stepped forward from the press of people standing about his doorway, and stared at him bleakly over the shawl that covered her head and which she kept close to her mouth and said, ‘It is I.’

  Tamar, pushing through the crowd to which she had been summoned, wept aloud at that, and ran to Leah’s side, and begged her not to be so evil, not to turn against her brother with such wicked lies, but Leah only said softly,‘Brother?’ He is no brother of mine nor ever was. He stole the silk. I saw him.’

  The whole town of Pumpeditha rang with the scandal of it. Day after day, Micah, standing his trial before the priests and the elders, brought his friends to explain that he had been with them that evening, but failed to convince them, for if the man’s own sister had informed on him did they not have to believe her? Blood of his blood, the sin she would be committing if she lied was so awesome they could not believe she could contemplate it. So they believed her, and stripped him of his loom and his tools, everything but the clothes on his and Sarah’s and the children’s backs, and left him, despised by his neighbours, grieved over by his kin, and totally bewildered by it all that it had happened to him.

  And Leah? She returned to Tamar’s house and sat in her kitchen and stared at her aunt with those bleak black eyes, but this time Tamar did not only see hate in them, but a sick triumph, and for the first and only time in her life let anger fill her. From the earliest days, Tamar had been the gentle one. She had cried easily, yearned easily, smiled and laughed easily, but had never raged easily. Until now, when she turned with her hands raised to strike the silent girl.

  It was as though, at last, Leah had been given permission to let loose the bitterness that filled her. She stood up, suddenly tall in Tamar’s eyes, and jerked her neck back so that her shawl slipped from her smooth black head. And moving so easily it was as though she had rehearsed every movement, took from the stone beside the fire a bone handled knife with a wicked long narrow blade and held it before her in such a way that Tamar, rushing headlong towards her in her pain and distress, ran straight upon it.

  They stood there for a long moment, the two women, in the dimly lit kitchen on the south side of the courtyard of Tamar’s mother’s house, Tamar with her round blue eyes even more rounded in a sort of silly surprise, holding her belly with both hands and feeling the blood slide from beneath her fingers in bulging spurts, and Leah, the knife in her hand, still watching her with, for the first time that Tamar could ever remember, a smile curving her mouth. That was the last thing Tamar saw in this world, the smile on Leah’s face. But the last word she ever said, breathily and in a childlike little voice was, ‘Susannah… ’

  Of course Leah had to go. Bearing false witness was one thing; easy to get away with that. But to kill – that was a Law of Moses much harder to flout. Go she must, and go she did.

  To Babylon, a two and a half day’s journey to the north, if she walked fast, and did not rest too long at night. There in the great bustling city where men from every corner of the modern world came to trade and cheat and womanize and sometimes to learn and worship, there where a woman with energy and limited scruples could build a personal fortune, there she would lose herself. Using the silver dishes she had taken from Tamar’s house and gold ornaments she had taken from Tamar’s cooling body she set herself up in the spice trade.

  Not that it was easy for a woman to be a dealer in her own right. Women were for bed and children, nothing more; faced with any encroaching female trying to live a man’s life the merchants of Babylon would have jeered and asked who she thought she was – Deborah come again? Leah knew that, and wasted no energy or time flouting established practice. It was simpler to circumvent it. A man named Issachar, a handsome indolent Moabite, was content to marry her, at her behest, and do as he was bid.

  By the time she was forty, she was rich. Issachar had given her five children as well as cover for her spice dealing, and they were, by and large, satisfactory. The older two boys were twins, dour black eyed fifteen-year-olds with a sharp eye for dealing and a harsh reputation in the Babylonian markets. Then there were the girls, highly unregarded by their mother though useful about the house, both at thirteen and fourteen safely betrothed to men of substance in the community. And last of all ten-year-old David, the child of watchfulness that was so like her own that in his company she could relax, as she could with no one else. They were close, those two, so close that the older boys had long since learned to hate their brother.

  Which should in a sense have helped them too to be close to their mother, for despite the prosperous years in the Babylonian spice markets, Leah had never lost her consuming hate for the two people who had destroyed so much of her life when she had been five years old. Micah and his mother. So faded was the memory and so warped had her imaginings become that Micah had become the focus of all her resentm
ent, and even though she had destroyed his repute in Pumpeditha and killed his mother, she was not yet content. She wanted to do more, to drive him and all his kin away from their home as she had been driven out of hers.

  One day, she would tell herself, sitting in her counting house with David by her side, one day I will destroy him. One day before I die.

  3

  When David was eighteen years old, Leah told him once again as she had told him many times before the story of her childhood sufferings, painting in vivid colours the agonies of unhappiness she had known, making graphic comparisons with his own easy love-lapped childhood. And David (who had indeed frown up in comfort, for by the time of his birth his mother had made the family tolerably well off, and by the time he was called to be a Son of the Commandment at thirteen, very rich) caught fire as she meant him to. Filled with the eagerness of his youth and the passion of his love for his mother and not a little by a desire for adventure to enrich his too secure life, David was ripe for instruction. Which Leah duly gave him.

  Which was why in the year 118 of the Common Era he travelled from Babylon to Pumpedithia, retracing his mother’s steps of a quarter of a century earlier, though he rode in a handsome leather saddle on the back of a large, well fed ass where she had gone barefoot on calloused soles. He was accompanied by two slaves and pack asses piled with bales of rich spices, notably the very precious pepper from India that had reached Babylon overland in one of Leah’s caravan’s, from that far and mystic country. David knew exactly what he was to do.

  He set up his auction of spices in the Pumpeditha market place, as Leah had said he should, announcing himself by his full name, David Bar Issachar. None, she said, would think he could be her son, so it would be safe. People came, as she knew they would. Though Pumpeditha was a city of importance, with many scholars from the neighbouring academies at Nehardia and Sura thronging its street on market days, and comfortable new merchants and vintners of farmers jostling there too, something new was a matter of excitement; and David Bar Issachar was new.

  He auctioned part of his store for gold, then announced to the listening throng that he wanted no more gold; he wished to sell his spices for good – especially silk and woollen cloth. Were there, he asked innocently, weavers of such cloth in the town?

  And so David came face to face with his uncle Micah – and Micah’s daughter, Keziah. The youngest of his great brood, she was the joy of his life. After her grandmother’s dreadful death, her mother, poor Sarah, had gone quite made, and spent all her days huddled in a back room, listening to strange voices that no one but she could hear. It was Keziah who ran the house and stretched its poor resources to feed them all, and who comforted her father as he struggled to make ends meet.

  And struggle it was, for since the scandal of his sister’s accusation and his mother’s murder, Micah had been regarded with deep suspicion by his fellow citizens; far too few of them sold good yarn to weave his cloth, and even few bought the cloth. But they managed well enough – but not so well that the news that a rich merchant was in town and willing to trade cloth for valuable pepper could be ignored.

  Looking upon Keziah had a strange effect on David Bar Issachar. Because she was an unmarried girl, she went with her head uncovered, and as she stood in the sunlit market place her hair shone in an aureole of wildly curling tendrils and her round blue eyes seemed to shine. Such colouration was not unheard of among the Jews of Babylonia, but it was not common, and to David’s bedazzled eyes Keziah seemed the most exotic creature he had ever seen. Gazing at her, he did not think of his mother at all.

  Afterwards, he was to smile wryly at how matters had transpired. His instructions had been clear – he was to discover which of the weavers was Micah and exchange spices for cloth and then switch the cloth his uncle gave him for some trumpery stuff Leah had provided and accuse him loudly of cheating. ‘After all that has gone before,’ Lead had declared, ‘He will be as an outcast. It will destroy him totally.’

  But David did nothing of the sort. He traded Micah’s cloth for the best of his pepper, making the older man’s eyes open with delight, and asked himself to their house to deliver the sacks, and perhaps engage in further trading. By the time he had eaten Keziah’s good cooking, served by Keziah herself, and had watched her moving about the small and mean living room of the family house, the discovery that he had manage to find the Wicked Uncle of whom his mother had spoken to him came too late.

  Too late for Leah that is, for when David told Micah, with disarming honesty of a young man fallen helplessly in love and desperately needing to please the man he sought to make into his father-in-law, who he was, Micah told him the truth about the past. Of Leah’s false witness, and later, murder. Of the way Tamar had suffered in Jerusalem so long ago, which saved the children’s lives.

  ‘Why,’ said Micah, ‘if the exchange of my brother for your mother had not been effected, my boy, you would not exist. For it is clear that your mother’s mother, Susannah, perished under the Roman sword in Gaza. You have a sorry heritage, my poor nephew, a sorry heritage, for Leah is a bitter twisted woman. Though I wish her no evil,’ he added hastily. ‘I just pray she will never come near nor by me or mine.’ He made an ancient gesture, learned from the street boys of his youth, a sign that would keep evil from him.

  What could David do but believe him, besotted as he was? He smiled at Keziah, and then totted up the value of his mother’s spices and gold he had already gained, and his riding ass and his pack asses and his slaves, and decided he was ready to live his own life. He would renounce his father and his mother and cleave unto a wife.

  They went to live many days’ journey away eastward, far beyond the great Euphrates, on a tributary of which Pumpeditha lay, and the mighty Tigris, in a small village which was of so little importance it had no name though it was near the very ancient place where the patriarch Abraham had once lived, the city of Ur. David Bar Issachar laboured well and mightily there, planting olives and vines and rearing fat sheep, as did his children and his children’s children, and their children after them. For David, the wandering ceased. Twenty-four generations later, in the year 762 of the Common Era when Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur came and founded his great city of Baghdad there, the rich Jewish family that David had begun became great Princes of the Great City. They were to wander again, eventually, but for a while, a long while, it was all peace and comfort and increasing riches for the grandchildren of Leah, the great grandchildren of Susannah.

  But not for Micah, son of Tamar and Omar. When David Bar Issachar bore away his beloved Keziah he let her go, for he knew it was inevitable. But he suffered dreadfully from loneliness and fear after she had gone – fear that Leah might try again to harm him, specially now she had lost her son to Micah’s child.

  So, Micah left poor demented Sarah to the care of her brother who agreed to take on the burden in exchange for Micah’s precious loom and tools, and with his two surviving sons left Pumpeditha on foot, bearing his meagre store of gold tied to his waist on a leather thong.

  They went west and north, making their painful way through scattered groves of olives and patches of grain fields, going – anywhere, as far as they could get from Leah’s baleful influence. Micah by now was almost as mad as his poor Sarah, seeing Leah or her agents behind every tree, smelling her on every change of wind, hearing her whisper to him from every dawn breeze. But he was not completely mad – he could still work, and did, with his sons, Daniel and Akkub hiring themselves out wherever they could. In Damascus they halted for a time, and longing for his lost red haired Keziah.

  Daniel, an energetic young man with great personal ambitions, decided he would be most likely to realise ambitions if he went on. Almost a year after his father’s death he reached the mighty city of Byzantium, and there he stayed. He married the daughter of a rich merchant, and seemed well set upon his plan for riches of his own to start with. But much was to happen to the children of Daniel before they were to be comfortable as the children of his
sister Keziah. Very much.

  As for Akkub, he didn’t quite get as far as Byzantium. He reached Tarsus, beyond Antioch, and there married a poor man’s daughter (having no wealth of his own, he was lucky to get a bride at all) and laboured away his life in other men’s vineyards. His children, the family of Akkub Bar Micah, became part of the grey background of Tarsus, poor, unremarkable, happy enough to full their bellies, make children on their wives, and in their time, due quietly enough. Their time, too, would come, one day, for many generations they simply existed. Nothing more.

  And Leah? What of Leah? When David failed to return, and she could hear nothing of what had happened to him, her fury, her resentment, all the pain of her childhood, the protracted grief she still felt for the dead child she had once been, at last overwhelmed her. With no one else nearby upon whom she could vent her pain, she turned it all against herself so violently that even his indolent husband Issachar was alarmed, and had her put in chains to retrain her from self injury. For the rest of her life – and she lived to be seventy – she was lost in the world of her own madness.

  She was put in her chains in the same year that her mother Susannah died far away in Cordoba. The Romans who had destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem almost fifty years before had destroyed them both.

  It was strange how the patterns repeated themselves, as the generations of the children of Susannah and Tamar pleased down the years. As son followed father, as daughters kissed their weeping mothers goodbye and went away to enrich another family’s nursery with the husbands chosen for the, the characteristics that had marked the two of them overwhelmed, time and again, those of the fresh blood that each marriage of each child brought to the tribes.

  In the place that would become Baghdad, first; there, long after Keziah had died in her eighty-second year and been laid to rest in a tomb that was a good deal more sumptuous than was proper for a Jewess, but upon which her grieving sons insisted, red haired and blue eyed babies were born in almost every generation. Cousin married cousin with almost monotonous regularity as the years moved on, and so strengthened and refreshed the red hair and the blue eyes.