Quarantine (19 page)

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Jesus had not expected anyone to come. There would be god

at hand, of course. Invisible, unprovable, perhaps, and shy to

intervene. But ready to provide. If needs be, god would show

Jesus how to tum the stones to bread and take his water from

the clouds. All things are possible to him that believes. And at

the end of quarantine he'd give him faith enough, ifhe so chose,

to jump off the precipice instead of climbing to the top. He'd

have no fear of death. The angels there would fly out of their

eyries in the sky and take him by the arms back home to the

Galilee. In their good care he'd not so much as strike his foot

against a stone.

Jesus knew exactly what he believed where angels were concerned. He put his faith in them. They were as real to him as birds. He was no rigid sadducee. But he was not so clear on any

of the other, weightier and wingless issues of the day. He'd sat

cross-legged and done his best to follow the arguments held in

the temple court by older men, but he could find no pleasure

in debate. It was too easy to agree with every idea put to him

with any feeling.

Of course a Jew should take the laws of Moses literally. He

saw the sense in that. He nodded, rapped his knuckles on the

ground, a young man wise beyond his years. But should a

righteous Jew reject everything not found within his laws - the

immortality of souls, for instance, or the cheering prospect of

messiahs - for fear of being reckoned false and being cast aside

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by god? He could not nod or rap at that with much sincerity

because, like every fresh-faced follower of god, he harboured

hopes of immortality himself, and prayed to see messiahs too.

He prayed they'd come to earth to make god tangible, to mediate

for god in all the conflicts of the world. But would messiahs

drive the Romans out or let them stay, unharmed? Again, Jesus

would not claim to have a single view. He did not like the taxes,

tithes and tributes that the Romans levied in the Galilee to pay

for their great marble works, their aqueducts and unremitting

roads, but still he could not bring himself to hate the frightened,

pink-skinned boys from far away who were the local legionnaires.

He pitied them. They were not circumcized. They were not

Jews. They had no covenant with god. They had no place in

paradise.

Jesus had a simple view, a village view of god, that was not

scholarly. He believed he was the nephew ofhis god, a god who

many years before had chosen from all of the families of the

world the family of Jews - not Romans, note - to be his kin.

He'd rescued them from captivity and led them to a promised

land, the Galilee. If god required the Romans to depart and

retreat with their taxes down their roads back to the city of their

birth, then he would do it all himself. He had the strength, for

he was hard and muscular. His nature was not womanly. An

engineer like god who kept the great machine of stars and planets

voyaging through air could have no trouble with the Romans

if he chose to drive them out. The fact he did not choose to

drive them out was evidence that god was not concerned with

matters of the body. His empire was the mind and soul, the spirit

not the flesh, the age to come and not the world of days. There'd

be a battle, then, bitter and divine, not with the Romans but

against the legions of evil. All the demons would be killed and

every sin defeated. Then God would call his family to his clearing

in the fields. God would separate them, one from another, as a

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shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. Then waters would

break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert; the

burning sand would become a pool and the thirsty grounds a

spring of water; the haunts of jackal would become a swamp and

the scrub would flourish with its reeds and rushes. That's what

the scriptures promised.

Jesus had sat inside his cave and looked out on to the poisonous

mists rising from the sea and expected to witness in his loneliness

a vision of god's mossy paradise. He'd not expected to be disturbed

by visitors. But first - with hardly one day of his quarantine

endured - there'd been the tumbling donkey, then the faces

on the ridge, and now this gathering of five. He sat entirely

still, too scared to hide himself in prayers, and watched

the timid delegation taking risks to reach a crumbling promontory a little way along the precipice. He watched the blond man - not an angel now - pointing out to his four strange

companions the stony perch and the entrance to his cave. He

sank back further into the darkness and looked out like a cat.

They must have seen a shadow move or heard the rattle of

a displaced stone, because they stayed, standing or sitting on

the sloping earth and looking across at the key-shaped darkness

where he hid as if they had no business in the world except to

wait for him. He could not hear the words, but he could hear

their voices. They were thin and querulous, like lambs. That

was a slightly cheering thought. He was a cat. And they were

lambs.

If they had been five shepherd boys, five camel drivers, five

legionnaires, five matching anything, he might not have found

their presence quite so sinister - but these five were like animals

in Noah's ark, unlikely and disturbing friends.

There was a second face already briefly familiar to Jesus from

the falling of the donkey, an impish, restless figure, as brownskinned as a honeycomb, with red-black hair. There was an old 1 1 0

man, bent and hesitant, his legs like twigs. And a woman, sitting

at a distance from the men.

There was another man he recognized as well. The large man

from the tent, the one whose dates and water he had taken, the

almost dead man he'd abandoned only yesterday. He'd offered

no more care and charity than to rub a little, borrowed water

on his lips. The merest drop. He'd left the man to die without

companions. But Jesus was not troubled by any guilt. He was

afraid. He could remember the man's blackened tongue, and the

heat of fever. And he could still recall the eggy odours of the

devil on his breath. Yet here he was, recovered, big, beyond

the grave, against all probabilities. He was holding a stick or

walking staff in one hand, and that - to a timid man like Jesus,

lonely, inexperienced, far from home - seemed ominous. It was

the twisted wood that should be thrown out or burned. It was

so fractured by the distance and the heat that it seemed to curve

in spirals like the

baton he'd heard about from stories

older than the scriptures. The sort of stick that could strike flames

into a bush, split rocks, become a snake, turn wine to water with

a single touch, tum holy bread back into stone again, make

brothers fight and mothers chase their sons from home. It could

fly through the air into a cave and beat its cowering occupant.

It was the sort of playful stick the devil used to drive good Jews

away from god.

The man put down his curling stick and cupped his hands

around his mouth. 'Come out. And talk to us,' he called in

breathless bursts. His voice was like the echo of a voice, an

almost-dead man's voice, reduced and watery and pale. 'Come

out, Gaily. Let's see. Your face. ' Gaily? The big man knew him,

knew the nickname that his Galilean neighbours used. He knew

where he was from. 'Gaily. Gaily. I'm the one. From yesterday. '

A chilling phrase. 'You drove the fever out. A miracle. Come

out and. Show yourself . . . '

I I I

Jesus knew that angels and devils could not be told apart just

by their looks. Handsome was not virtuous. It was not sinful to

be fat. But he could tell the difference. Angels left you calm of

spirit when they stepped into your life. Devils left you troubled.

Here was a devil then, sent to the wilderness, with death and

fever as his friends, attended by four mad, unbelonging souls, to

be adversaries to god. Jesus would not come out of the cave, no

matter what they said, no matter what their slander was, no

matter what they offered him. They'd come to tempt him from

the precipice with their thin cries.

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Slugs came in the night and marked their silver maps on Marta's

legs; and when she woke she had to shake the cave lice out of

her clothes. She felt as if a kittle bug had crawled across her face

while she was sleeping and laid its gritty eggs along her eyelashes.

Her head was full of flies. It seemed she'd swallowed something

in her sleep. It left its scales and bitter mucus on her lips. It

bruised her throat. It wrapped itself inside her abdomen and

jabbed her stomach every time she moved. A sand-fish or a

heavy snake, perhaps? The galling spirit of the scrub fowl whose

vertebrae she'd snapped? The cave had made her grubby, panicky

and ill.

She had to walk off several times a day, and in the night, to

the plug ofboulders where the valley ended, to retch and defecate.

There wasn't any privacy amongst the rocks. She always had an

audience of lizards, birds and flies, and there were snakes and

leopards observing her in her mind's eye. Her husband, Thaniel,

and all the elders ofSawiya gathered round, disguised as shadows.

'She's giving birth to dung,' he said. 'That's the best she can do.'

Once, beyond midnight, her clothes bunched up around her

waist, her bowels hot and mutinous, she'd been discovered by

the badu. He'd leapt between two boulders, above her crouching

body. His naked foot had ahnost struck her head, and both of

them had cried out their alarm in unison. This was only the

second time she'd screamed in ahnost ten years, since her marriage

night with Thaniel, in fact. The first time had been a day or two

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before when she'd been struck in the face and chest by the birds

hurtling from the grave. If anybody in Sawiya had cried out so

loudly there'd be a crowd before the echo died. But this was

scrubland, out of hearing of the caves. No one came.

At first she feared that she'd caught Musa's fever or that

something venomous had bitten her. Anything was possible, in

that haggard and incautious land. That's why she'd persevere

with her quarantine, despite her sickness, and the filth. She would

not flee back to Sawiya as her good sense and her stomach told

her to. If anything could happen, then it would. The good, not

just the bad. She was a practised optimist, and her optimism was

enhanced by fasting. The desert mystics that she'd heard about

from scriptures, prepared a path for god by emptying their