Quarantine (3 page)

hers. It would be the one, mistaken for a thorn bush or a breeze,

that rustled at her side. It would be her shoulder-blades, and

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then the one that brushed the sand-flies from her lips and eyes.

It was bewitched by her already, if that is possible, if the land

can be allowed a heart. The stone had stubbed itself upon the

toe. The earth was showing kindness to the flesh. It let her pull

its stones quite readily out of the ground, so that her husband's

grave grew waist-deep without exhausting her and causing any

strains. She only broke her nails, though there were some cuts

and bruises on her knees. The torment of her buttocks and her

thighs was even eased a little by the exercise.

So this is happiness, she thought. Or this, at least, is what adds

up to happiness. Here was the mix that she'd been praying for.

There's hardship and bad luck in happiness, for sure. There's

broken nails. There's blood. There's solitude. But there was the

prospect, too, with Musa dead, of sleeping peacefully without

his bruising fingers in her flesh, of never running after men and

camels any more, ofbeing Miri without shame or hesitation, of

letting drop her headscarf for a change and loosening her hair

from its tight knots so that nothing intervened between her and

the sky.

Indeed, her headscarf was pulled off Her coils of hair were

left to drop and unravel on their own. She then lay back beside

her husband's grave, put her uncovered head on stones and,

open-eyed, the sky her comfort sheet, she almost slept. She was

exhausted and invincible. Her pregnancy had made her so;

exhausted by the digging and the dying; invincible because that

pulsing in her womb was doughty, irresistible. What greater

triumph could there be than that - to cultivate a second, tiny

heart?

She had been told, when she was small, that the sky was a

hard dish. She might bruise her fists on it if only she could fly.

It was a gently rounded dish, blue when not obscured by clouds

or night or shuddered into pinks and greys and whites by the

caprices of the sun. But now she raised her hands into the

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unresisting air above the open grave and wondered if the dish

were soft. And she could fly right through it, only slowed and

coddled by its softness, like passing through the heavy, goaty

curtains of her tent, like squeezing through the tough and

cushioned alleys of the flesh, to take a place in heaven if she

wanted, or to find that place on earth where she'd be undisturbed.

She'd not be undisturbed for long. It was the first new moon of

spring that night, and there were travellers - already heading

from the towns and villages, already passing through Muntar,

Qumran, and Marsaba - who had some weeks ofbusiness in the

wilderness. They came to live like hermit bats, the proverbs said,

for forty days, a quarantine of daylight fasting, solitude and prayer,

in caves. Could hermit bats be said to pray? Certainly they were

so pious that rather than avert their eyes from heaven they passed

their hours looking upwards, hanging by their toes. Their ceiling

was the floor. Their fingered wings were folded like the vestments

of a priest. Discomfort was their article of faith. And hermit bats

- perhaps this is what the proverbs had in mind - possessed no

vanity. No need for colours or display. There was no vanity in

caves.

The caves near Musa's grave, for all their remoteness, were

known to be hospitable, much prized by those who sought the

comfort of dry, soft floors while they were suffering, much prized

by desert leopards, too. Inside were the black remains of fires

and, on the walls, the charcoal marks where visitors had counted

off their quarantines in blocks of ten.

There were other caves in Miri's wilderness as well, less prized,

in the sheer and crumbling precipice below the tent, which only

goats and lunatics could reach and in which only goats and

lunatics - and bats - would choose to pass a night - though at

this time of year it might seem that lunatics were just as numerous

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as goats. This was the season of the lunatics: the first new moon

of spring was summoning those men - for lunatics are mostly

men. They have the time and opportunity - to exorcize that

part of them which sent them mad. Mad with grief, that is. Or

shame. Or love. Or illnesses and visions. Mad enough to think

that everything they did, no matter how vain or trivial, was of

interest to their god. Mad enough to think that forty days of

discomfort could put their world in order.

Not all the cavers were insane. That spring there had been

fever in Jerusalem and many deaths. Musa wasn't the only one

to leave his mouth unguarded. Most of the travellers heading

eastwards for the solace of the hills were the newly bereaved

who wished to contemplate the memory of a mother or a son

in privacy, and for whom the forty days were not remedies but

requiems. There was a group of nine or ten of these - all Jews

- who, for a modest rent paid to the shepherd, had taken up

their grieving residence in natural caves above a stream on the

trading route just south of Almog, where their deprivations

would be slight. There were produce markets at the waterhead,

an undemanding walk away, where they could eat once the

daylight fast had ended and take their ritual baths, and the caves

were relatively warm. Bereavement's punishment enough, they

thought. Why starve? Why freeze at night? Why hide away?

How would that help the dead, or bring them back?

There was another group of twenty-four - all men, and

zealots, pursuing the instructions of Isaiah, 'Prepare straight to

the wilderness a highway for our god' - who were keeping to

the Dead Sea valley, looking for the Essene settlements. They'd

spend their forty days in artificial, dug-out caves, waiting for the

world to end (Please God the world won't end in forty days and

one . . .

) and sharing their possessions and their prayers, with only

the palm trees their companions.

But those who made it to the perching valley where Miri -

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half open-eyed - was sleeping, and where Musa and the fever

devil were bargaining the final hours ofhis life, sought something

more remote and testing than requiems and communal prayers.

There were five of them - not in a group, but strung out along

the road where earlier that morning the caravan of uncles had

passed by. Three men, a woman and, too far behind for anyone

to guess its gender, a fifth. And this fifth one was bare-footed,

and without a staff No water-skin, or bag of clothes. No food.

A slow, painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising,

mirage heat, as if someone had thrown a stone into the pool of

air through which it walked and ripples had diluted it.

The first four - their problems? Madness, madness, cancer,

infertility - had started their journeys that morning from the

same settlement in the valley. Though they had observed the

proprieties of pilgrimage by keeping some distance apart, they

had at least endeavoured to keep each other within sight and

hearing. There were robbers in the hills, army deserters, lepers,

devils, animals, avalanches of dry scree, and a threatening conspiracy of rocks, wind and heat which made the landscape treacherous and unpredictable. It was a comfort to have some

help close by. By the time they'd clambered up the shifting

landfall to the plateau at the top of the precipice and were walking

through the flatter scrub towards the tent, they had become

separated by only a few hundred paces. They were more hesitant

and slow. Exhausted, obviously; but also uncertain of the way,

uncertain even if this quarantine were wise. They were searching

for the wayside marks, carved in the largest rocks by some holy

traveller years before and now much eroded, which indicated

where the caves were found. The marks directed them towards

the higher ground. They had to leave the camel tracks and the

cliff-top path before they reached or even saw the tent, with its

abandoned invalid. They walked along the flood-beds of the

little valley, and none of them could miss the opportunity to

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make their own marks by stamping on the soft clay before they

headed for the scarp and for the dry and warmer caves behind

the poppies and the grave. So Miri woke, startled by sudden

noises. The first of the temporary hermits was scrambling through

the loose stones of the scarp to choose his place to sleep. Miri

could not see who had disturbed her, but she recognized the

sound of human feet, slipping in the scree. She could hear others

approaching from below.

Miri curled into a ball, a porcupine without the quills. She

was no longer undisturbed. Whose unsteady feet were these?

She wished that she could disappear into the ground. That was

possible. There was an open and inviting grave for her, within

arm's reach. She only had to roll the once. A few stones clattered

into the grave with her, but they were not noticed. Four pairs

of climbing feet were making greater noises of their own and,

anyway, no wild land is ever entirely still and silent. It has its

discords and its detonations. Earth collapses with the engineering

of the ants; lizards smack the pebbles with their tails; the sun

fires seeds in salvos from their pods; pigeons misconnect with

dry branches; and stones, left loosely to their own devices, can

find the muscle to descend the hill. So Miri settled in to Musa's

grave and, for the moment, was not seen or heard.

She had been dreaming about her child, of course. The usual

mix: anxiety and joy. Her sleep had shut her husband out. But,

in those alarming moments when she woke, became a porcupine,