No Lasting Burial Read Online Free PDF Page A

pain, not knowing what to do.
    After
a while, Rahel whispered in the dark:
    Though the fig
tree does not flower,
    And no grapes
are on the vines,
    The olives give
no oil
    And the fields
no barley
    The flock does
not come home to the fold
    Nor the herd
home from the field,
    Yet I will cry
out in joy.
    Her
voice trembled, yet she did not allow the silence of the tomb to swallow her
song. The song of Habakkuk, a navi of their People in years past, one of
those blessed or cursed with the gift of seeing things that usually only God
saw. A song he’d made at a time of war.
    I will cry out
in joy,
    I will take joy
in my God.
    God is my
strength;
    He makes my feet
like the deer’s;
    He makes me walk
in high places.
    “How
can you sing that?” Shimon said suddenly. “How can you?” His hands were
shaking. “Everyone’s dying. I saw—They’re being torn apart .”
    Rahel
looked at him in the dark. “Oh, Shimon, Shimon. I am
alive, I am alive, I am alive, and my sons are alive.”
    And
she began whispering the words again. Shimon turned his back, overwhelmed with
the night’s horror. He glanced up, saw the round openings in the tomb wall into
which the ancestral dead had been slid feet first onto their shelves in the
dark and the silence. There were corpses there, many. His
father’s father and his wife, and their parents, and theirs. And many of
their brothers and sisters whose faces had been forgotten but whose names
remained, chipped into the stone beneath their places of rest. He reached up to
the lowest of these shelves, ran his fingers across the deep Hebrew letters,
worn by time yet still readable if there were only enough light. His hand still
shook a little at the memory of the corpse walking down the hill, at the memory
of its cry of hunger, yet the silent dead on their shelves above him and all
around him did not frighten him. Their silence and their presence was strangely comforting. Death had visited the People again
and again over the long weeping of the centuries, yet the People lived.
    “Would
you like to hold him, Shimon?”
    His
mother was lifting the small baby in her hands, holding him out.
    “It’s
all right,” Rahel said, seeing him hesitate.
    Swallowing,
Shimon took the boy in his arms as gently as he might a sacred scroll, terribly
aware of his brother’s fragility. Yet as Shimon felt the small weight of his
brother’s body, the warmth of him, something blossomed open inside his heart.
Settling the boy into the crook of his arm, he freed one hand and touched the
child’s face, first the tiny brow, then the soft cheeks, feeling his brother’s
warm vitality in the dark. His throat tightened and he wished to squeeze his
brother to his chest, but he didn’t for he feared hurting him. After the
horrors he had seen this night, this warm body in his arms was a miracle, as
though God had reached through the door of the cave and touched the world, in
this one place, at this one moment.
    He
ran two fingers over the boy’s hair, which was fine and sparse. Then he touched
the boy’s left arm, marveling at its smallness. He found the boy’s hand and
felt the small fingers close around his; he drew in his breath. That firm grip,
and the soft glint of the eyes in the dark. Shimon wished his father was here,
that he might hand him the baby and see the two of them together, but also he
was glad that it was he who held the child and who got to look into the little
boy’s eyes. Those eyes were as bright with life as though they were God’s eyes,
looking out of that tiny face at a darkened world.
    Solemnly,
Shimon touched the boy’s right arm, and gasped. That other arm was so thin, and
the boy didn’t move it at Shimon’s touch. The arm hung limp at the baby’s side.
    “Amma,”
Shimon whispered in the dark.
    She
looked at him. Shimon saw her eyes and the faint glow of distant fire on one
side of her face.
    “He’s
broken,” Shimon whispered.
    “Hand
him back to me, Shimon.” No urgency or