Quarantine Page 16

  20

  The devils on the precipice tempted Jesus three more times. They dropped down leather bags of food and water. But he was stubborn, and frightened enough to resist their gifts. He sent their bags bouncing down the cliff-face, bread for the ravens, water for the lizards, leather for the ants.

  Then his tempters must have run out of temptations or of bags, because they did not bother him to break his fast again. They only came on to the promontory each evening, to plague him with their vigil and their verses. He listened but he did not recognize the words they used although his hearing had become thunderous, and all their footfalls were distinct. He heard them sniff; he heard them cough; he heard them draw in breath.

  They still called to him, of course, not just the big man but the others too. ‘Gally, Gally. Gally, Gally,’ until they tired of it. He learned to recognize the whining miseries of old age, the bitterness of infertility, the swagger of the Greeks. They sometimes begged Jesus to come out of the cave, to talk to them, to prove himself with miracles. But Jesus did not have the strength to show himself, even if he’d wanted to. He’d used up any energy he had dealing with their bags of food.

  The little badu, though, did not call out, but in many ways he was the noisiest of them all. He couldn’t sit still for a moment. He had to run, or climb along the ledges as madly as a goat, or dislodge stones. He had to crumble earth and throw the pebbles that he found against the precipice. He seemed to be at war with everything. A truly troubled spirit, Jesus thought, on those three or four occasions when the badu came into view, clambering around the tip of the promontory. Here was a demon soul in torment, restless, tiny, dark, uncircumcized. A man entirely lost to god. This is what Jesus would end up like himself if he abandoned his devotions or was defeated for one single moment in his fast. He’d have to spend eternity with stones. He’d shrink and blacken. His foreskin would grow back. He’d have to clamber till the end of time.

  Just once his tempters almost trapped him. It was barely dawn on the twenty-second day of quarantine, and Jesus was sleeping. He mistook the scrambling feet which roused him from his dreams to be his own, in headlong flight down banks of scree and bones. ‘See how our little Gally runs!’ When he woke up, the dream persisted. There was shuffling. He thought that there was breathing in his ear. Fright made him strong. He sat up immediately and looked around into the shadows. He found what he was looking for. He didn’t care if there were animals. He would have welcomed death if it was death. But it was just the badu standing in the entrance to the cave, an outline, the cloak of Moab purple at his shoulders, and his gifts – some locusts he had trapped, a water-pouch – lying on his hands. His knee was cut from where he’d fallen on the climb, and so he stood unevenly, like a boy. He was less mad and restless than he’d seemed at a distance, less devilish. The locusts and the water-pouch were trembling. The badu was afraid, and so was Jesus. The shadow and the silhouette.

  The badu whispered a word, not quite an ookuroo, but something soft and boneless. Not a word that Jesus understood. The badu put the locusts on the entrance rock. He touched his heart and then his forehead, to mime that he was coming as a friend. Again a sign that Jesus did not recognize. He held the water-pouch out for Jesus to take, and when the offer was ignored, he tipped some water into his open palms, inviting Jesus to see it, smell it, put his tongue to it. Here was the odour of the Galilee, seeping through the badu’s shaking fingers and wasting on the ground.

  Jesus concentrated all his power in his voice. He’d practised this – the coming of the devil to his cave. He shouted in the badu’s face, ‘Leave me in peace …’ But, still, he took a half-step forward as he shouted, just to be a little closer to the badu’s hand, and the smell, and the glint of moisture that was left. The badu reached out through the dark, and put his damp fingers on Jesus’s face. He wiped the water on his cheeks. Jesus did not pull away. This was too much for him.

  ‘Rub just a little … on my lips,’ he said, although the words were weak and splintered. ‘Not swallow it.’ He would have wept at his own weakness, at all the days he’d wasted on his fast, if he had any tears. One drop of water and the devil would rejoice. One drop of water and he’d spend eternity with thorns and flames and rocks.

  The badu smiled – invisibly in this half-light – but did not move his hand or press his fingers on to Jesus’s lips. He shook his head. He said his word again, and took a half-step backwards out of the cave. His outline thickened with the light, but he seemed small and nervous. He’d not expected Jesus to be naked, or so wild. He offered the water-pouch again, but without looking at Jesus. He closed his eyes and waited, with one hand held out. With the other hand, he twisted his hair as tightly as he could into peaks and knots.

  ‘Who sent you here? To mock me,’ Jesus said, each word a self-inflicted wound. ‘I’ll not, not drink. But pour your water on my neck and head. I wash my face and eyes in it …’ Again the badu did not move. He only waited for Jesus to reach across and take the pouch himself But Jesus held his hands behind his back and muttered prayers. Finally, the badu reopened his eyes, and took another half-step back into the light.

  ‘You mock me, cousin,’ Jesus said. ‘You will not even wet my lips.’

  If the badu had done what he was asked, then Jesus’s quarantine might have ended just in time. But the badu was a nervous man, for all his patience. He’d risked his life to climb so far in the darkness. He took more backward steps into the first light of the day and stood outside the entrance to the cave where Jesus’s Greek letters promised death to any gentile who tried to come into the inner court. The badu held his hand up and nodded at the remaining dampness on his palm. Again he touched his heart and forehead. He did not speak. He did not smile again. He picked the locusts up and offered them. He held the water-pouch, but did not tip more water out. One leg was flexed. Prepared to run if Jesus tried to grab his arm.

  Now that Jesus saw the badu’s face, his weakness was replaced by anger, mostly with himself. This was a battle that he would not lose just for a drop of water on his head and neck. He clapped his hands. The bony impact echoed dryly in the cave. It hurt. He clapped his hands again, and shook his head. His neck and shoulders squeaked like a door. His skull had separated from the skin. His hair was weed. He took a step or two towards the badu. They almost touched again, before the badu backed away. ‘He cannot make me drink, the man,’ Jesus said. And then his final shout, a piece of yew log cracking in the fire, ‘Go out from me.’

  The badu was expressionless, a fish displayed behind the thick glass of a vase. He had not even blinked. His eyes and lashes had not moved, even though he had been shouted at, straight in the face. He simply nodded, turned away without a shrug and let the locusts go, though they were dead. A waste. He could have eaten them himself; a badu delicacy, the desert shrimp. Then he fled, back to the place where he had cut his knee, back to the summit of the precipice, back to his cave. He would not look at Jesus any more, though Jesus called to him while he climbed. He shouted out in Greek and Aramaic, ‘You have not tempted me. Praise god,’ and even with some words he knew in Sumar. But no reply. ‘Coward. Demon. Run to your master like a dog.’

  Jesus stood outside his cave, elated, naked and transfixed. He almost wept with happiness. So god was taking care of him after all. God was standing guard. Jesus praised the ingenuity of god. He knew another man who hardly blinked. The baker that lived five houses down from their family workshop was as unresponsive as the badu. Small boys would stand behind him at his stall and shout their jokes into his ears. They would insult his bread. But he would not respond.

  ‘O sweet, forgiving god, when I was weak,’ Jesus said aloud, with no one there to listen to his words. The devil’s go-between had come down to his cave to tempt him. But – praise the lord – the devil’s go-between was deaf. For everything that god had made was weak and blemished and imperfect by design.

  Jesus laughed. How dull and unprepared the devil was.

  21

  N
o one need be thirsty in the scrub, unless they choose, said Musa. He and Miri had exhausted all the water in their bags, and so had come up to their cistern at the caves to drink and to refill the empty skins.

  Without the open cistern to provide their drink, her husband would have dragged Miri from her loom, just when the purple-orange birth-mat was almost complete. She only had to loosen the warp, a little at a time, and then her mat could be cut off the loom and the four hundred ends tied. Tying these umbilicals was the guarantee that her pregnancy would be successful. But Musa only cared for mats that he could sell. He would not have put up with thirst rather than separate Miri from a mat which would produce no profit. He would have sent her out to hunt for water.

  There was, she’d already noticed, little sign of any water in the scrub, apart from the soft clay in the flood beds of the valley below the caves. She’d not persuade her husband to drink clay. There were no converging gazelle tracks, or stones piled up in columns to mark where someone else had found a well or spring, or any tell-tale, spongy pit of greenery. She would have had to uproot salt bushes for the meagre store of water in their roots, or dig out tamarisks which always had their little fingers planted in a patch of damp. But, thank heavens for the cistern at the caves. Digging into that had been a bit of luck, Miri thought, though she would rather it were filled with Musa than with water.

  She did not resent the brief break from the birth-mat to go up to the caves. She’d have a chance to talk to Marta, and she might succeed in walking the pain out of her thighs, and exercising her back and neck. She could not tell if it was the weaving or her pregnancy that made her ache so badly. But she was most aware of her growing bulk around the waist when she sat cross-legged at the loom. The baby neatly filled the space between her legs. Her clothes were tight and she was hot, even at night. Her breasts were hurting, and there was an amber discharge from her nipples to mark the coming of her milk. She had nosebleeds, and sudden cramps in her legs and feet which even crampbark could not relieve.

  Yet still she’d concentrated on her loom, and the retreating trellis of colours. She’d sat on the woven fabric, helping to maintain the loom in tension, and she’d found comfort in the intimacy of weaving, her pregnant body on the birth-mat wool. She’d lost herself in it. She’d shut out Musa and the discomforts of her life. She felt somehow that finishing the mat would free her of the man. Perhaps she’d fly away on it, her baby sitting neatly in her lap.

  Miri was content, when they had clambered up the slope below the caves, to sit and rest for a while before she filled the water-bags. It was mid-afternoon, but there’d been very little sun to keep her and her husband in the tent. It was not hot enough to sleep. The salt sea valley was still sharp with light, but in the hills solid clouds were stacked like unworked slate, as sturdy as the land itself.

  Despite the heavy coolness of the afternoon, Musa was too short of breath to go back to the tent straight away, although he had appropriated Shim’s walking staff to help him get about and he had Miri to carry all the water for him. Besides, he had an unperfected plan which required that he should stay exactly where he was as long as possible, at least until he saw a way of getting what he wanted and deserved. It was a question, not of wickedness but pride, he told himself. He had to turn a profit at the end of this forced stay in the scrub. He couldn’t go down to Jericho with no successes to boast about. No merchant would. A merchant always wants a victory. Musa had had no luck down on the precipice. Perhaps he’d have a little luck up here. Bad luck for someone else.

  He felt that he’d been split in two by his short stay in the scrub. Those twins again. It was the weeping, lesser twin who went in search of luck down at the promontory. The twin who prayed. The twin who hoped to feel the healer’s touch again. It was the trading potentate, the fist, the appetite, who came up to the caves. Each step that Musa took towards the cistern, put Jesus at a greater, safer distance. The landlord left his superstitions in the tent. He took his irreligion to the perching valley in the hills. He was ambitious. He would make his mark. He would surprise them all.

  So, he sat down in the shade of rocks, next to the lower cave where Marta slept, and demanded hospitality. He did not care that his tenants were fasting, concentrating on their prayers, and – by this thirtieth day of quarantine – short-tempered and depressed. He had Miri clap her hands and call out, ‘Gather, gather,’ as she’d done on that earlier occasion when Musa had first come up to the caves.

  The badu did not answer Musa’s call and show himself, but Aphas and Marta were more obedient; Aphas because he always hoped that Musa would seduce the healer to come up to their caves, and Marta because the sound of Miri’s voice was irresistible. Finally, even Shim responded and came down to his landlord as slowly as he could to find a spot, a little distance from the rest, and safely out of Musa’s reach, where he could show how calm he was, and unperturbed.

  ‘What do you have? I’m tired,’ said Musa. They brought their landlord dry dates to eat – the same dates that he’d sold to them a day or two before – and the stripped-meat remains of a slipper deer which the badu had brought back the previous evening. Musa was not satisfied with that. He had a nose for something sweeter than a deer. ‘What else?’ He noticed Aphas would not look him in the eye.

  ‘What have you got you shouldn’t have?’ he asked the old man. Just a hunch. But, if the hunch paid off, he knew it would seem frightening and magical that he could read their minds. Aphas blushed. He stammered even. ‘We’ve got a little honey, if you want.’ And so, reluctantly, they offered him some of the dripping honeycomb which they were keeping for themselves, wrapped in some damp cloth. It gave them what little energy they had and should have lasted till the end of quarantine.

  Musa ate his honeyed meat and dates. He held his hand out while Marta poured a little water from a bag on to his greasy, sticky fingers.

  ‘Where did you find the meat and honeycomb?’ he asked. He was feeling dangerous and mischievous, and excited, too – because the nearness of the woman’s lap, the slightly rancid taste of meat, had given him the idea which would perfect his plan. He belched. He rubbed his stomach. Just practising.

  ‘The little badu got them,’ Aphas said. ‘Somewhere around.’ He waved a hand about.

  ‘Somewhere around? Not on my land, I hope. I told you once. This isn’t common land. Anything you see is mine. What should I do? Put wooden gates on those …’ he pointed at their rows of caves, ‘ … if I can’t trust my guests. Give me the comb, what’s left of it. Miri, bring it here! I am not pleased. You’re dining on my honey, now. And stealing meat.’

  ‘It was the badu,’ Aphas said again. ‘Not one of us.’

  ‘Might have found it anywhere,’ suggested Marta, speaking to herself a shade too loudly. She half-suspected from what she’d heard from Miri that Musa’s claims to any of this land were bogus.

  ‘What, is the woman speaking now? Let’s hear. What have you said?’

  ‘They might be bees from anywhere …’

  ‘What anywhere?’ asked Musa. He turned to Marta, cocked his head, narrowed his eyes. What kind of woman argued with a man? This kind; square-faced and large; broad-backed. ‘Beyond my land there is my cousin’s land. And then my uncles’ land is after that, and then my land begins again. That’s further than a bee can fly. That’s further than any one of you can run before you’re caught. Let’s not fall out.’ He spoke the last line with his sweetest voice. He turned to Aphas again. He had to hide his smiles. ‘Where did your neighbour find the nest? Near here?’

  ‘We didn’t see. We saw, but …’

  ‘What did you see?’ He had the afternoon to waste. He’d bully them.

  ‘We saw him, well, he got a length of stick …’

  ‘You say he went to fish for bees?’

  ‘ … and he took a bit of bone he found and hollowed out the stick …’

  Musa allowed the man to chatter, only interrupting now and then, a herdboy idly tweaking an old goat’s rope. This
billy posed no threat to him. Musa could afford to let him talk. The talking was an opportunity for Musa to perfect his plans, to come up with some way of sending these men on errands in the night while he could stay behind to occupy their caves. So it was only with half an ear that Musa listened to Aphas while he described with the wonder of a townsman how the badu had plugged one end of the hollowed stick with a piece of rotting apricot …

  ‘What apricot? Where have you stolen apricots?’

  ‘We bought the fruit from you.’

  ‘Well, then. They were good apricots, and cheap. Too good to put in sticks. Go on, then. Speak. I didn’t say that you should stop.’

  The badu, Aphas continued, had pushed the plugged end of his hollowed stick into the ground outside his cave and then backed into the shadows, on his haunches, to wait for bees. It wasn’t long before a bee had landed on the stem, and crawled into the hollowed stick in search of fruit. It flew away. It came back with companions from its nest, and soon there were a hundred bees transporting dabs of apricot.

  ‘The badu put his thumb down on the open end. Like that,’ said Aphas. He slapped his own thumb on a rock, though not as dramatically as he had hoped. ‘He’d trapped ten bees inside the stick. What did he do?’

  ‘He got ten stings?’

  ‘ … he let one out to fly away. He followed it, down there. Until he couldn’t see it any more, or hear its buzz. What did he do? The same again. He let another one get out, and followed that. We saw them go. That’s all we saw. They went behind the rocks into the thorns. It’s clever though. A third bee, and a fourth, and then a fifth, and getting closer all the time. He’d got ten bees to run behind, you see? When they go free they always fly back to the queen inside her honeycomb.’