Quarantine Read online

  14

  Jesus had not expected anyone to come. There would be god at hand, of course. Invisible, unprovable, perhaps, and shy to intervene. But ready to provide. If needs be, god would show Jesus how to turn the stones to bread and take his water from the clouds. All things are possible to him that believes. And at the end of quarantine he’d give him faith enough, if he so chose, to jump off the precipice instead of climbing to the top. He’d have no fear of death. The angels there would fly out of their eyries in the sky and take him by the arms back home to the Galilee. In their good care he’d not so much as strike his foot against a stone.

  Jesus knew exactly what he believed where angels were concerned. He put his faith in them. They were as real to him as birds. He was no rigid sadducee. But he was not so clear on any of the other, weightier and wingless issues of the day. He’d sat cross-legged and done his best to follow the arguments held in the temple court by older men, but he could find no pleasure in debate. It was too easy to agree with every idea put to him with any feeling.

  Of course a Jew should take the laws of Moses literally. He saw the sense in that. He nodded, rapped his knuckles on the ground, a young man wise beyond his years. But should a righteous Jew reject everything not found within his laws – the immortality of souls, for instance, or the cheering prospect of messiahs – for fear of being reckoned false and being cast aside by god? He could not nod or rap at that with much sincerity because, like every fresh-faced follower of god, he harboured hopes of immortality himself, and prayed to see messiahs too. He prayed they’d come to earth to make god tangible, to mediate for god in all the conflicts of the world. But would messiahs drive the Romans out or let them stay, unharmed? Again, Jesus would not claim to have a single view. He did not like the taxes, tithes and tributes that the Romans levied in the Galilee to pay for their great marble works, their aqueducts and unremitting roads, but still he could not bring himself to hate the frightened, pink-skinned boys from far away who were the local legionnaires. He pitied them. They were not circumcized. They were not Jews. They had no covenant with god. They had no place in paradise.

  Jesus had a simple view, a village view of god, that was not scholarly. He believed he was the nephew of his god, a god who many years before had chosen from all of the families of the world the family of Jews – not Romans, note – to be his kin. He’d rescued them from captivity and led them to a promised land, the Galilee. If god required the Romans to depart and retreat with their taxes down their roads back to the city of their birth, then he would do it all himself. He had the strength, for he was hard and muscular. His nature was not womanly. An engineer like god who kept the great machine of stars and planets voyaging through air could have no trouble with the Romans if he chose to drive them out. The fact he did not choose to drive them out was evidence that god was not concerned with matters of the body. His empire was the mind and soul, the spirit not the flesh, the age to come and not the world of days. There’d be a battle, then, bitter and divine, not with the Romans but against the legions of evil. All the demons would be killed and every sin defeated. Then God would call his family to his clearing in the fields. God would separate them, one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. Then waters would break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert; the burning sand would become a pool and the thirsty grounds a spring of water; the haunts of jackal would become a swamp and the scrub would flourish with its reeds and rushes. That’s what the scriptures promised.

  Jesus had sat inside his cave and looked out on to the poisonous mists rising from the sea and expected to witness in his loneliness a vision of god’s mossy paradise. He’d not expected to be disturbed by visitors. But first — with hardly one day of his quarantine endured — there’d been the tumbling donkey, then the faces on the ridge, and now this gathering of five. He sat entirely still, too scared to hide himself in prayers, and watched the timid delegation taking risks to reach a crumbling promontory a little way along the precipice. He watched the blond man – not an angel now – pointing out to his four strange companions the stony perch and the entrance to his cave. He sank back further into the darkness and looked out like a cat. They must have seen a shadow move or heard the rattle of a displaced stone, because they stayed, standing or sitting on the sloping earth and looking across at the key-shaped darkness where he hid as if they had no business in the world except to wait for him. He could not hear the words, but he could hear their voices. They were thin and querulous, like lambs. That was a slightly cheering thought. He was a cat. And they were lambs.

  If they had been five shepherd boys, five camel drivers, five legionnaires, five matching anything, he might not have found their presence quite so sinister — but these five were like animals in Noah’s ark, unlikely and disturbing friends.

  There was a second face already briefly familiar to Jesus from the falling of the donkey, an impish, restless figure, as brown-skinned as a honeycomb, with red-black hair. There was an old man, bent and hesitant, his legs like twigs. And a woman, sitting at a distance from the men.

  There was another man he recognized as well. The large man from the tent, the one whose dates and water he had taken, the almost dead man he’d abandoned only yesterday. He’d offered no more care and charity than to rub a little, borrowed water on his lips. The merest drop. He’d left the man to die without companions. But Jesus was not troubled by any guilt. He was afraid. He could remember the man’s blackened tongue, and the heat of fever. And he could still recall the eggy odours of the devil on his breath. Yet here he was, recovered, big, beyond the grave, against all probabilities. He was holding a stick or walking staff in one hand, and that – to a timid man like Jesus, lonely, inexperienced, far from home – seemed ominous. It was the twisted wood that should be thrown out or burned. It was so fractured by the distance and the heat that it seemed to curve in spirals like the demon’s baton he’d heard about from stories older than the scriptures. The sort of stick that could strike flames into a bush, split rocks, become a snake, turn wine to water with a single touch, turn holy bread back into stone again, make brothers fight and mothers chase their sons from home. It could fly through the air into a cave and beat its cowering occupant. It was the sort of playful stick the devil used to drive good Jews away from god.

  The man put down his curling stick and cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Come out. And talk to us,’ he called in breathless bursts. His voice was like the echo of a voice, an almost-dead man’s voice, reduced and watery and pale. ‘Come out, Gally. Let’s see. Your face.’ Gally? The big man knew him, knew the nickname that his Galilean neighbours used. He knew where he was from. ‘Gally. Gally. I’m the one. From yesterday.’ A chilling phrase. ‘You drove the fever out. A miracle. Come out and. Show yourself …’

  Jesus knew that angels and devils could not be told apart just by their looks. Handsome was not virtuous. It was not sinful to be fat. But he could tell the difference. Angels left you calm of spirit when they stepped into your life. Devils left you troubled. Here was a devil then, sent to the wilderness, with death and fever as his friends, attended by four mad, unbelonging souls, to be adversaries to god. Jesus would not come out of the cave, no matter what they said, no matter what their slander was, no matter what they offered him. They’d come to tempt him from the precipice with their thin cries.

  15

  Slugs came in the night and marked their silver maps on Marta’s legs; and when she woke she had to shake the cave lice out of her clothes. She felt as if a kittle bug had crawled across her face while she was sleeping and laid its gritty eggs along her eyelashes. Her head was full of flies. It seemed she’d swallowed something in her sleep. It left its scales and bitter mucus on her lips. It bruised her throat. It wrapped itself inside her abdomen and jabbed her stomach every time she moved. A sand-fish or a heavy snake, perhaps? The galling spirit of the scrub fowl whose vertebrae she’d snapped? The cave had made her grubby, panicky and ill.

  She had
to walk off several times a day, and in the night, to the plug of boulders where the valley ended, to retch and defecate. There wasn’t any privacy amongst the rocks. She always had an audience of lizards, birds and flies, and there were snakes and leopards observing her in her mind’s eye. Her husband, Thaniel, and all the elders of Sawiya gathered round, disguised as shadows. ‘She’s giving birth to dung,’ he said. ‘That’s the best she can do.’ Once, beyond midnight, her clothes bunched up around her waist, her bowels hot and mutinous, she’d been discovered by the badu. He’d leapt between two boulders, above her crouching body. His naked foot had almost struck her head, and both of them had cried out their alarm in unison. This was only the second time she’d screamed in almost ten years, since her marriage night with Thaniel, in fact. The first time had been a day or two 113 before when she’d been struck in the face and chest by the birds hurtling from the grave. If anybody in Sawiya had cried out so loudly there’d be a crowd before the echo died. But this was scrubland, out of hearing of the caves. No one came.

  At first she feared that she’d caught Musa’s fever or that something venomous had bitten her. Anything was possible, in that haggard and incautious land. That’s why she’d persevere with her quarantine, despite her sickness, and the filth. She would not flee back to Sawiya as her good sense and her stomach told her to. If anything could happen, then it would. The good, not just the bad. She was a practised optimist, and her optimism was enhanced by fasting. The desert mystics that she’d heard about from scriptures, prepared a path for god by emptying their stomachs and their heads until they went into a trance. Moses too. So if she felt giddy-headed all the time, a touch delirious, in a raptured panic, then that was good. Even ill-health could be taken as a portent of her improving fortune. Ill-health had brought the Galilean man to Musa’s bedside, after all. Might ill-health bring him to her cave as well? Would he kneel by her side as Musa had described, and place his hand above her womb and say, ‘Be whole again’? Might he declare her pregnant, by some miracle?

  She’d heard of women — unmarried, some of them, or widows and grandmothers, or wives whose husbands were away – who had conceived a baby without the maculate involvement of a man. Angel children, they were called. A thin and comic telling of the truth, she thought. But it was comforting to imagine that, in stories anyway, a woman might conceive without enduring a husband between her knees, that life could be created chastely.

  With the Galilean healer so close, it all seemed possible. The almost-sight of him, the shy and nearly-shadow on the precipice, had made her pregnant with hope at least. When Musa had stopped calling out — ‘Come on, Gally. Show yourself’ — the templed silence of the afternoon had seemed trapped and amplified by the valley’s vaulted walls. She’d listened to the conversation of the gnats, the dry remarks of crumbling soil. It had seemed that she could hear the living rocks around the healer’s cave, breathing, humming to themselves, praying even. She’d stared so long into the bashful blackness of the key-hole cave that amongst the visions she had seen were spectres of herself with angel babies at her breast and on her knee. All girls. No heirs for Thaniel, and no divorce! She’d been like the seed pod of a scatter bush. A little sun or wind or time and she would burst.

  So Marta let herself enjoy the fantasy of being sick with child. Her symptoms were the same: stomach cramps, diarrhoea and nausea. Her head was steam. Her back and thighs were bruised. Her face was flushed. She even fancied that her nipples hurt, that they had broadened and were darker. Even if not pregnant by some miracle – or if not pregnant yet — then, perhaps, these pains were smaller miracles and brought about by those changes in her womb which she had come into the hills to pray and fast for. Perhaps her stomach was disturbed by all the sterile acids being driven out by juices of fertility. The diarrhoea and the vomiting would empty her of all the poisons of her past. The bad luck in her life was passing out of her like brackish water leaking thickly from a bag. She’d be sweetened and renewed. If anything could happen, then it would.

  Of course, there was a nagging part of her which recognized and feared that other godless, uninspiring possibility, the dismal scripture that everybody said was kept sealed in cupboard vaults by priests who’d stolen it from devils. There’d be no answers to her prayers, not in forty days, not in forty years. There were no miracles, nor angel children, nor even any rewards for a blameless life. There was only time and talk and making do, and then the rough-weave shrouding of the everlasting earth. Her face was flushed because she had been touched not by the floating hand of some glimpsed healer but by the scrubland’s harsh and unforgiving wind. The hurting back was due to sleeping on the ground in damp and draughts. The water from the cistern was to blame for her bad stomach. Or, perhaps, the culprit was nothing more angelic than the scrub fowl that she’d caught and eaten, barely cooked, at their first meal together.

  But Marta was in no mood to think of life as godless and intractable. That cupboard vault would stay sealed, for forty days at least. She was not calm, sedated by prayers, the fasting and her loneliness as she had expected. Instead, her mood was turbulent. One moment, a fear of animals and darkness. The next, a tumbling faith in god. Dismay at being ill, unclean and living in a cave, then sudden rapture at the prospects of her life transformed. She’d lost control of her stomach, heart and brain, perhaps. She trembled and she wept, she laughed out loud, she mumbled to herself, she hardly slept, but she was possessed by hope, as madly and absurdly, as sweetly and as helplessly, as a melon taken over as a nest by bees. You’ll be alone, she had been warned by her sister and the neighbours’ wives, who feared for her safety and her sanity as she set off from Sawiya. You’ll live on rain and leaves, if there are leaves. You’ll lose yourself up there. You’ll fry. But no one had foretold how she would find a godly pattern to her journey to the hills. No one had mentioned wayside marks carved into rock which would lead her and the men so safely and so simply to the caves. No one had promised there would be a water cistern, ready dug. Or that an evening meal would flap into her hands. Or that the landlord, Musa, despite his charges and his rents, would be heaven-sent to provide some decent food for her, and keep her safe from thieves and wolves. No one had prophesied, You’ll make a friend, the pregnant woman with her loom, whose hand she’d held, whose stomach she had touched, whose child she could imagine as her own.

  There was one prophecy, of course, which Marta had heard at least twice a day in Sawiya, whenever she’d recited the introit to prayers. She’d always spoken it as if the words referred to worlds ten thousand days away. But here, so close to heaven in the hills, so close to no-such-thing, the more she ran the verses through her mind, the more it seemed the prophecy was meant for her alone. Its garments fitted her. Those were her tears described, her barrenness, her quarantine, her desert places. The scrubby hills beyond Jerusalem, the scriptures said, would send down to the world through David’s seed a holy king. He’d heal the sick. He’d bring comfort to the broken-hearted. He’d build up the empty spaces. He’d spread fertility on earth.

  Once Marta had decided that there was a holy pattern to her quarantine, she was softened to the possibility that what was prophesied through god’s own word would come true. If anything could happen, then it would. That was her latest article of faith. What was destined for ten thousand days would come about at once. So she had listened to Musa’s tale — how he was healed by the man that he called Gally — and she had recognized immediately what it must mean. That fifth figure, dogging them from Jericho, that shadow on the precipice, that man who, if Musa spoke a quarter of the truth, could drive out fevers, devils, death, was sent by god to put the world to rights. He would not have travelled to the scrub and clambered to his cave only to minister to rocks and ants. He would have come, her daydream promised, to minister to her. Their meeting was ordained. There’d come a time, during the forty days, when he would swell into the holy king. He’d reach out from his cave into hers and hold her, cupped inside his giant palm: ‘Be well …’
He would build his kingdom in her empty spaces.

  These were her waking dreams. But there were others, more troubling, in which less godly prophecies came true. Her neighbours worried her. Not just the leaping badu or the dying Aphas. 117 They were beyond her help and understanding. She was glad of that. But Shim too. She dreamed about him almost every night, perhaps because she was uncomfortable and cold, and hardly ever slept deeply. Sometimes she dreamed he was amongst the men who watched her in Sawiya when she went down to the well, the only handsome one. Sometimes he was confused with Musa and the Galilean man; the tent was caves, the fat was thin, their quarantine became a feast of uncooked meats, and all three men leaped over her while she was squatting in the rocks. They were a trinity as silent and as elegant as deer.

  But on the second night of their quarantine, after they’d gone down to meet the healer and then had come back to their perching valley in the dark to break and celebrate their fast on Marta’s strangled fowl, she’d had a dream of Shim that would not fade when she woke up. He came into her cave on draughts of air. His body was as hard as wood. His arms were snakes. It was he who swelled and cupped her in his palms and said, Be well. His seeds were insects running up her leg. Even in her sleep she knew they were as mad a match as the orange and the purple wools on Miri’s mat. But Marta did not shake herself awake or let him go. She let her hair and his, the black and blond, entwine and spin a yarn across the cave’s damp floor – one-ply, two-ply, a braid, a knot that no one could undo or cut. She’d have to go back to Sawiya with Shim tied into her hair as evidence of what she’d dreamed.

  Marta knew that dreams like this were little more than moths. They flew by night. They showed their colours in the dark, and then, once there was any light, they shut their wings and disappeared. But she was waiting to be blessed by god and fearful that her sins would show. She wondered if such shaming dreams as hers might still be visible by day. See how she walks, see how her face is flushed, see how her nipples have grown broad, they’d say. Was there a blond hair clinging to her clothes? Could 118 anybody tell by looking in her eyes that she had spent her dreams with Shim; how silent and how beautiful he’d been for her, how fertile she had been for him? On other nights she dreamed that Gally came to work his miracle, but he found Shim inside her cave and went away.