Quarantine Read online

  When he was sitting down or standing up, Musa was an imposing man – but anything in between and, like a camel, he was vulnerable and comic. Miri had only got him halfway to his feet; his legs were doubled up, his knees were spread, his buttocks were just clear of his bed-mat. She’d had to hold him like that many times before, when he was drunk or, merely lazy, he demanded help with defecating beyond the tent. If she let go on those occasions, her husband would collapse on to his own waste. A mesmerizing thought. She always wanted to let go. She never did. She didn’t now, though it was tempting. She had so many grudges to express. She held him steady while he threw his head and shoulders forward so that his weight shifted from his buttocks to his knees, and then she pulled again. Musa was standing on his feet at last, and he was slow and dangerous.

  Shim was by now a hundred paces from the tent, and hurrying — only limping when he remembered to. His toe and ankle had survived. He had alarmed himself, and yet he was elated too. So this was why he’d travelled all these days into these numb and listless hills, he thought. Musa was sent to test his fortitude. Musa would be his quarantine. He’d kept his dignity so far, he thought, and he’d been admired for it, by the old man and the Jewish woman at least. But he would need to be alert and cautious from now on. Musa would be an unremitting enemy. He was the sort who’d come up to the caves at night and smoke his tenants out, or take away their water rights, or worse. There would be no escaping him. So when he heard the fat man’s oily voice calling to him across the scrub, he stopped and turned. He felt a little nauseous, to tell the truth, when he saw Musa standing up so solidly, with one arm hidden behind his back and all his pleats and folds of flesh made smooth and monumental by the falling, heavy cloth of his tunic. What magic was afoot? He’d not be the least surprised to see the fat man running in the scrub towards him, leaping boulders like a little deer, or somersaulting at him, as fast and weightless as a tumble bush. He’d grasp his ankles once again and pull his toes off, one by one.

  Shim’s hands were shaking. So were his toes. He could not move. He stood amongst the goats and cupped his ears to hear what Musa was saying.

  ‘What have you forgotten now?’ the big man called. There was, at least, no anger in his voice.

  Shim had no idea what best to say. Had he forgotten to ask permission to depart? He’d not apologize. Had he neglected some propriety? The question puzzled him. He could not speak. He was a fish caught on a line. He took a step or two back towards the tent. Then ten, then twenty more. He was prepared to talk at least.

  ‘You have left this,’ Musa said, when Shim was halfway back. ‘Look here. Come on.’ He showed his hidden hand. It held Shim’s spiralled walking stick, his talisman, his peace of mind, his one companion on the road. It was his sign of holiness. He had forgotten it.

  Shim would not be safe or comfortable without his staff. It was not Greek or logical, but he loved the twisting wood, each curl a cycle of his life. It was as much a part of him as curls cut from his hair. It could be used, like stolen hair or fingernails, to torment him with pains and nightmares if it fell — as now – into ill-meaning hands. He had to get it back. Should he retrace his steps more slowly, to show his unconcern? Or should he hurry with a careless stride to demonstrate his fearlessness? He hurried, almost ran back to the tent. He saw that Musa held his walking stick in his two fists, ready to hand it over or to strike. An image of the donkey came to mind. He understood her bruises now, the blood, the broken bones. The donkey was his little toe.

  ‘Go back and get the little Gally. For me,’ Musa said, as soon as Shim had returned and stood inside the tent, just out of reach. Musa’s tone was meek and pacifying. He was the merchant forced to drop his price. ‘Or at least let me keep this walking stick for just a while and lead me to the place where you could see him … You are not frightened of the precipice? You are not frightened of a fall, I hope.’ Musa reached forward and softly, oddly, touched the end of the staff on Shim’s leg. Shim neither shook his head nor spoke.

  ‘Miri,’ continued Musa, ‘bring honey water for my cousin. And some dates. Put cushions down.’ Miri frowned and shook her head at Shim. He’d be a fool if he came close. She could not tell if Musa meant to murder him or simply make him look a fool.

  ‘It is my quarantine,’ said Shim, staying put. Miri nodded at him, smiled. ‘I will not eat while there is light. I will not drink. I do not allow myself to recline on cushions. There is no compromise, no matter that the task of seeing to your donkey was exhausting.’ Here was his opportunity. He spat into the sand at last. ‘I cannot even swallow phlegm for fear that it might slake my thirst.’

  ‘Are you allowed to swallow words?’ asked Musa. ‘Then, perhaps, it would be well if you consume what you have said today, and start afresh. Begin again. Do what I ask. Accompany me. Show where he is. If it’s the man I think, then he’s as close as you will ever get to angels. You’re wrong, you see. He wasn’t only someone looking for his sheep or hunting eggs. Some nobody. He is a healer and his flock are men. His eggs are …’ No, he couldn’t think of anything for eggs. ‘There’s holiness in him. If it’s the man. He is the one who saved my life.’

  Musa liked that final touch, ’ … who saved my life.’ A useful lure, which he had used before. ‘This gemstone is blemished. That is true,’ he’d told a customer earlier that spring, and made the sale. ‘But it has healing properties as well. This is the stone that saved my life.’

  Musa didn’t need to talk to Shim now, or even look at him. He could forget him. This was another market trick. Address your comments to the crowd. Ignore the buyer. Let him battle with himself And there was a small crowd of eager listeners. His wife, of course, whose listening was dutiful; the woman Marta; the old man. Everybody lived in fear of death, and everybody was beset by age or sickness. So everybody liked to hear of healers. The badu – though he did not stop his rocking or let go of his tortured hair – turned his attentions towards Musa. Even if he didn’t understand a single word, he recognized the storyteller’s tone.

  Musa sat on his rugs again, with Miri’s help. He pulled his hands across his face, and let them drop into his lap. Where should he start? This one was hard. He only had to tell the truth. Just tell the truth and see the man again. He was hungry for the chance to see the man again. He’d even pay to see the man again. Musa did not recognize himself Was he in love with that frail voice, those hands? Had he gone mad? Or had he simply drunk more than he’d realized?

  ‘Two days ago,’ he said, ‘I had the fever. I was as good as dead. Hot, cold and wet. My tongue was black. Ask her. She sang for me all night. Her voice is like a goat’s. A voice like hers could drive the devil off, and clear the sky of birds. But even so she couldn’t lure the fever out. Miri, tell them it’s true.’ He waited while his wife obliged with a nod. ‘What could she do? Except pray? Already she was grieving for her husband. There wouldn’t be a man to take good care of her. I was a piece of meat, and soon to be as numb and silent as a stone. I don’t remember anything, except death’s door.’

  Where there were market-places, there were preachers. So Musa knew the words and mannerisms he should use to lend a touch of holiness to what he said: ‘She went to look for herbs to make a poultice for my head. And when she went a stranger came into my tent. He was my light and my salvation. He came from nowhere. And he was here, right by my bed, then not quite here, then gone, then come again. The air was flesh. But still I saw his face. I heard his voice. From the Galilee. He said his name. I can’t remember it. He put his holy water on my head. He pressed his holy fingers on my face. He held a conversation with the fever in my chest. He said, This man is loved by god. This man is loved by everybody’s god. This man is merchandise that can’t be touched. I will not let you take this man from us. He put his fingers on my chest. The hot and cold went out of me. He plucked the devil out as easily as you or I might take the stone out of an olive. He pinched death between his fingertips. He flicked it on to the ground, like that … as if it were an
olive stone …’

  Musa coughed to gain a little time. He could not think how olive stones and death were quite the same. He tried again, ‘ … I knew that I would live to be white-haired because … You must not take my word for this. Ask her. Come back in twenty years. This very place. And you will see me with white hairs. So now you understand?’ He looked at Shim finally. ‘That man you saw, that boy, he made me live again … The little Gally drove death away.’ Again he pointed at his wife. ‘Ask her. She left a dying man and then she came back to a miracle … You see?’ He slapped his chest. He pulled the flesh out on his cheek to show how soft and large he was. ‘I am restored.’

  It was exactly as Musa wished. He had his way; he had his company; he had the blond man’s staff.

  ‘Let’s see this holy man of yours,’ Shim said, glad for once that he was no longer the centre of attention. ‘Come, come.’ He called his fellow quarantiners to his side. The more they were, the safer he would be. They did not need persuading. Marta could not miss the possibility of further miracles. Aphas found the energy to stand and join the pilgrim group. A healer was his only hope. The badu followed them like a dog, always glad of expeditions. Would someone draw the demons out of him? They set off for the precipice in the middle of the day, when only mad men left their tents, to find the Galilean man, if it was him. He was the purpose of their quarantine, perhaps. He was the answer to their prayers. Like Musa, they would be restored.

  Miri and the goats were left behind. They had no need for miracles. Miri was unwidowed by a miracle already. She had no wish to meet the healer face to face. She’d want to slap his cheek. She’d want, at least, to have the devil’s eggy breath returned to her husband’s mouth. She’d want to have the days rolled back like parchment on a scroll to times when Musa lay across his bed with a blackened tongue, blurting fanfares of distress. But Miri did not believe in Musa’s healer, anyway. He was as real to her as cattle with two tails.

  She watched the five pilgrims disappear towards the crumbling decline of the scrub, their pace set by her husband’s flat, unsteady step. She could have wept. She could have taken Musa’s knife and scarred herself, as widows do. Instead she turned again towards the warring hanks of wool and the small world of her loom.

  13

  Miri normally preferred to weave in daylight outside the tent. The masters working in the towns would say that weavers who set their looms in open ground have first to find the landscape’s warp and weft, the shadow lines, the tracks, the spirit paths. The weaving and the landscape should concur or else the cloth would lose its shape. The wind, the water and the threads, the lines of scree, the strata of rock, the patterned strips of wool should run in unison and then the fabric would be true. The weaver and the ploughman should align. It’s not enough to know your yarn. You have to know the land as well, they’d say.

  But Miri simply liked the light of open ground. She liked the privacy. Most of all, she liked the moment, early in the morning with the sky still pale and unprepared, and no one else awake, when a piece of cloth was underway and she could step out, bare-footed, to inspect the new weave on the loom, its warp threads tightened by the cold and damp. She’d pick off any tiny snails that had climbed to feed on lardings in the wool. She’d twang the freshly wefted cloth to shed the dust or dew. If the weave was square and true and tense, the loom became a harp. The cloth would hum a single note to her. She could not wait to see what note the birth-mat would provide. First she had to find a place to peg the loom.

  Miri would have liked somewhere a little distance from the tent where she would be left in peace, out of Musa’s reach, and out of hearing. She’d already seen a flat place without too many rocks, on the leeward side of the tent. It would be safe and comfortable, once she had kicked away the stones and cleared the scrub weed. She would not bother with the landscape’s warp and weft. She’d travelled enough to know she’d find no patterned unison in this tumultuous scrub. No weave could match such stringy wind or cluttered light or rock, and only someone from a town would think it could. She would concern herself with duller matters and set the loom where the soil was firm enough to hold the pegs, and where the sunlight came in from the left, so that her working arm did not cast shadows on the cloth. The yarn, for her, was more important than the land. Yet, yes, she would allow the masters this — a weaving done in open air, informed by sunlight and then allowed to stretch and dampen overnight beneath the stars, was best. It would outlast a workshop weave which had not been toughened by the sun or tested by the wind and dew. A workshop weave was like a coddled child, pent up indoors all day. As soon as it encountered rain or heat or cold, it sagged and frayed.

  As Miri walked towards her chosen patch of ground, carrying the base beams of the loom, she realized she could not peg them out away from the tent as she had wished. The site she’d chosen was the perfect place, except in one respect. There were six goats. The five females were untethered. There was no goatherd to prevent them wandering. There were no dogs. Or other wives. Miri could not leave her birth-mat unattended. In the night the nannies would join the snails in feeding on the weave. Goats thrive on cloth. They love the taste of it, the colours too. They love to dine on cloaks and blankets. They’d strip a sleeping goatherd naked if they could. They’d eat the devil’s hat.

  At first she thought she’d try to stake the female goats alongside the billy. But she was pregnant. It was hot. The goats were spread out widely over the scrub, foraging for food. Chasing goats was work for boys. Besides, goats staked in dusty scrubland such as this would not feed well, and hungry goats did not produce good milk. She had no choice. She’d have to peg out her loom inside the tent and suffer Musa’s company.

  She was not used to constructing her loom inside. She did not know the rituals or the rules. A loom, assembled in a tent, should always face the entrance squarely, she’d heard it said; the awnings should never be allowed to fall closed while the weavers were at work. You might as well throw out the cloth, half done, if the awnings were closed by mistake. There were prayers to recite before the loom was warped, and other prayers for when the finished cloth was cut. Unfortunately Musa’s bed already faced the entrance to the tent. She would not want to weave within his reach.

  So Miri loosened the pinning on the side wall of the tent between the hand pole and the leg pole. She rolled the goatweave back on to the roof and fastened it with leather ties and stones. She’d opened up a gap three paces wide which she could close against the wind and goats at night quite easily. It gave her access to the dark part of the tent, beyond the woven curtain which she’d made herself some months before. This was where she slept when Musa did not want her, and where the stores were kept. It smelt of mildew, from the flour and the skins. She cleared a space, two paces wide, four paces long. A large birth-mat. She fetched the pieces of the loom which she and Marta had already stacked – too hopefully – at the entrance to the tent.

  Miri had her mother’s loom. She’d set it up so many times before, outside, and made so many lengths of cloth and in so many different camps – tent panels from goats’ hair, shrouds and cloaks, hair cloths and veils, mats and carpets, woollen camel bands, dividing curtains, travel bags – that weaving was her kith and kin. There, in the tent, was the little rug she’d made in grey and red, in carefree days before her mother died and she’d become her father’s burden. There were the goat-hair panniers, the cotton flour bags she’d made in undyed yarns. There was the blue-green curtain, in twined weft weave, that she had started when they’d camped in hills above the sea and her father had sent out word that she would go to any man that asked. Musa’s caravan had stopped and she’d been bartered for a decorated sword and a fleece-lined winter coat. ‘And you can take the loom,’ her father said. There was the black cotton dress she’d woven for the wedding day, with its cross-stitch embroidery in red and blue and its plaited woollen girdle and its cowrie shells. She’d spun the cotton and the wool herself. All her history was made of cloth. Now there would be a bi
rthing-mat in purple and orange.

  She set to work. She tied the broken orange threads of wool into one long piece and wound and stretched it round the two warping rods. She lashed the rods, pregnant with their orange thread, to the breast and warp beams. She pegged one beam into the ground, using a stone as a hammer. She pulled the other beam as far away as it would go, so that the tension on the wool was uniform, and pegged it to the ground. She carried stones into the tent and packed them round the pegs to stop them slipping. She put the leashes, the heddle rod and shed stick in place, opened up the warp threads, and checked the tightness of the wool. She tugged each thread, looking for the loosest ones which would meander through the weave if not fully stretched before the weft was started. The orange wool, unbunched, looked less garish than it had in sunlight. Perhaps her husband had been right to choose such cheerful wools.

  The gap she’d opened up in the side wall of the tent gave open views across the falling scrub, towards the precipice and the distant purple hills, a lesser purple than the wool. Somewhere below and out of sight, Musa and his tenants were hunting for their miracles. What kind of self-deception were they guilty of? Would the Galilean man or boy, this godly creature who’d crept so memorably into their tent, expel the old man’s cancer, fertilize the woman’s crabby womb, make Shim’s heart as handsome as his face, expel whatever madcap spirits had taken residence inside the badu’s head, bring god down to the precipice to transform Musa, shrink him to a proper size?

  Miri cupped her stomach in her hands. She knew that life did not improve through prayer or miracles. The opposite, in fact. So let them go and waste their time. She didn’t care. She only hoped their quest would take them far away and leave her there in peace all day, all year, to lose herself in woollen threads. She sat cross-legged before the loom. She rubbed the beams with her fingertips, exactly as her mother had, exactly as her daughter would. She plucked the warp. She played it like a harp. There were no orange notes as yet. It was too soon for her new mat to sing.