No Lasting Burial Read Online Free PDF

surprise in her voice.
    Gently,
his hands shaking from the fear that he would drop the boy or break him
further, Shimon handed his brother back. Their mother held the baby to her
breast, and Shimon looked away. A sense of crushing disappointment settled over
him, a fierce pressure on his heart. To have a new life, a new hope offered in
one moment and then torn away in the next, to find that his brother, like
everything else this night, was maimed and broken—
    “He
is your brother,” Rahel said quietly. The baby made no sound of suckling, just
soft breathing; perhaps he was falling asleep, pressed to the warmth of his
mother, his whole world her living flesh, unknowing of any dead outside or of
any hunger but his own. “Whether he is broken or not, he is your brother. Shimon,
never forget that.”
    Shimon
didn’t move; he just stared into the dark.
    “Shimon?”
    A
moment later: “Shimon?”
    He
glanced at his mother. She had suffered this night. Though his insides burned
with wrath, he leaned over her and pressed his lips to the baby’s head, felt
the softness of the infant’s skin. He did not even hear the distant cries in
the houses burning by the sea. Rahel turned the baby toward him, and after a
hesitation Shimon felt for his brother’s heartbeat. Found it, so much faster than his own, and in all the lethal night there was no other
sound.

ZEBADYAH
    Dawn
found the last men and women of Kfar Nahum laying the bodies of the dead
outside the town in long rows, both Hebrew and Roman, and shrouding them in
white linens. When the linens ran out they used blankets, or coats, or whatever
they could find. Most of the legionaries had perished, and those that hadn’t
had fled into the hills—that left many, many dead. The charred and broken
houses of the town reeked of them.
    A
few of the living women took ashes that were still warm from the ruins of the
houses and the Roman tents, and put the ashes in their hair. Then they knelt by
the corpses and keened, as other women had done before them on many
battlefields and in many burned cities throughout the long centuries of their
time in this land. Zebadyah the priest ignored them at first, searching the
dead for the face of his father. As he passed, men and woman lowered their
heads in weary reverence, but Zebadyah turned his gaze away from them. There
was sand in his graying hair and his white robe had been torn and soiled by his
flight when the Romans broke the door of his synagogue and by the long night
hours he had waited hidden beneath one of the boats out above the tideline.
There, with the boat’s keel for his roof, Zebadyah had covered his ears against
the screams of his people and the wailing of the dead in their hunger. He
recalled, as in a nightmare, a whisper in his ear out of the air, when the
Romans first began pulling people from their homes: Go. Go quick. Hide .
And the same whisper as he hid beneath the boat: Stay here. Now shame
smothered his heart.
    His
father Yesse had suffered during the night; one of the others among the
grieving had told him of it, his voice shaken, as soon as Zebadyah had walked
into town from the shore. In the hours of their drunkenness before the dead
came lurching out of the hills, and while Zebadyah trembled beneath the boat,
the mercenaries had stripped and beaten and mocked his father, for no better
reason than that he was old and weak and Hebrew. The legionaries had dragged
him from his house. This was a man with white hair and a long beard, who had
served in his youth as a priest and who stood ready still to serve as one, if
he should ever be called again to the lev ha-olam , the heart of the
world, the Temple in distant Yerushalayim. Yesse had outlived two wives and had
survived the deaths of three of his five sons, who had drowned in a storm at
sea. He was revered by the town, and Zebadyah, the oldest
of his two living heirs, brought fish for him and sat with him each evening as
he ate. The drunken legionaries pulled this