No Lasting Burial Read Online Free PDF Page B

old man from his house and made him
dance in the open ground before the synagogue, and then at swordpoint they
forced him to strip away his garments and stand naked. He wept as they made
crude jokes about his circumcision, as they asked him if he found he could
still give pleasure to women, or whether he had lost some piece of his manhood
and grown so white-haired searching to find it again. Perhaps they would have
humiliated him further, but at that moment the moans had broken out, and the
famished dead from the hills had fallen on them with their lethal hunger.
    When
Zebadyah found old Yesse at last, groaning in pain and grief where he sat
against the side of a stone house near the edge of the town, the elder rebuked
his son. “Tend to the People first,” he rasped, “and let God tend to me,
Zebadyah.”
    Zebadyah
carried his father to the synagogue, feeling by instinct rather than conscious
thought that it was the town’s safest place, though he grieved to see the door
broken from its hinges, blood smeared across the letters from the Law that his
father’s father had carved, with great labor, into the lintel and doorposts. He
could hear the other survivors groaning within. The usually dim, cool interior
was now lit with candles and stuffy from the smoke and the heat of the bodies
smothered together beneath the low roof. The tiny flames shone strangely on the
polished cedar of the cupboard against the east wall where the Torah was kept.
The menorah had been knocked over and lay flat on its table and the shofar that
used to be beside it was missing, but at the time Zebadyah hardly noticed.
    Yakob
and Yohanna were already there, with Leah bat Natan and several other women,
carrying waterskins among the suffering and the feverish, or pressing wet
cloths to hot faces. When Zebadyah’s sons saw him, they hurried to lay out
bedding for Yesse.
    “There
are many here who are unclean, father,” Yakob whispered as Zebadyah laid his
father down. His eyes showed their whites. By unclean he meant touched
by the dead . Bitten .
    Zebadyah
nodded wearily, whispering words of praise in his heart that his sons were both
alive, however haggard they might look.
    “Was
grandfather bitten?”
    “I
am fine, boy.” Yesse opened his eyes.
    “He
is fine,” Zebadyah repeated numbly. He sat for a moment, just to catch his
breath. Gray-eyed Yohanna, his face become overnight that of a man and not a boy, crouched beside Yesse and lowered the waterskin to his
grandfather’s parched lips.
    Zebadyah
heard a raised voice behind him and glanced over his shoulder. He saw Benayahu,
the town’s nagar , the wood-worker, repairer of houses and boats, with
his back to the synagogue wall. His face twisted in rage and horror. “Snatched
her,” he was crying. “Snatched her from my hands. My wife. They took her from my hands, they ate her!”
Beside him stood a boy whose dirt-darkened face was streaked with pale rivers
left by his tears, and the boy—who was not Benayahu’s—held the nagar ’s
yearling daughter in his arms, asleep.
    But
Benayahu did not glance up at either the boy or his child. He had torn away the
right sleeve of his tunic and he held the ragged, rolled-up cloth tightly to
his upper arm. Zebadyah didn’t know if the bandage covered a bite or a wound
from a Roman blade, but at this moment he did not have the strength either to
care or to fear.
    The
priest worked his mouth a moment, to get enough spit to speak clearly. He
looked to his sons’ gaunt faces. “Where are Yonah and Rahel? And
their boy?”
    “We
haven’t seen them, father,” Yakob said.
    Zebadyah
squeezed his eyes shut. If they were not here …
    He
forced his head up, looked around at the refugees of their town. More than
forty lay on the clothes and blankets that had been tossed across the
synagogue’s stone floor for bedding, some of them shaking, some of them still.
Some with horrible wounds, and their kin huddled over them, praying or giving
them water or