Quarantine (23 page)

be fit enough to canter with the herd. A fatted camel, if it kept

out of the sun and stayed down on its haunches, could survive

a quarantine without water. It would, like Moses, have just

enough strength to carry a stone tablet from the mountain-top

to the water-hole, where it could be refreshed. Was not a man

a finer and a stronger creature than a camel? Could a man not

go as far and further without water and last the forty days,

unthinkingly, like a beast? Jesus nodded to himself He'd be a

resting camel, yes, and not go anywhere. He'd stay down on his

haunches. He'd not expose himself to heat or sun. He'd not

explore the precipice or even sit out on the rock to feast on

Moab and the sea. He'd stay inside the shaded halo of the cave

by day, seeking out the coolest air and asking nothing of the

thriving sunlit, moonlit world beyond, except that it should

rescue him from memory and hope.

That did not last. Jesus had another strategy. I'm like the

canker thorn, he told himself at other times. I have no need of

sap. I'll spread my skeleton across the rock and root myself into

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this marl. Sometimes he was a camel and a thorn at once.

Again, particularly at night when he was cold and desperate

for voices, Jesus turned back to his prayers. Old friends. He'd

force himself to be more disciplined with them. No matter that

his friends were fickle. He was not fickle, nor was god. He

prayed out loud without fear of offending any of his family with

his fervour. If he could not excel at prayers, then no one could.

But no one - not a priest, a saint, a prophet from the hills -

could pass the counties� moments of the day engaged by prayer

alone. There always came a time when the repetitions made his

chin drop on his chest, so that he woke with a falling shudder

after just a moment's sleep. At other times he simply could not

concentrate. His worshipping became more conscientious than

spontaneous. The prayers lost weight, like ashes in a fire, and

floated off. Sometimes he stopped the verses halt\.vay through

and caught himself paying more attention to the dirt beneath his

nails or an old woodworking scar across his hand than to the

holy words. Sometimes a prayer became a conversation that he

half recalled. He called on god to answer him, but all the voices

that he heard were from the Galilee, a cousin's voice, a neighbour

talking harshly to his wife, a peddler calling out his wares.

Most of all Jesus was disrupted by the silence of the cave, the

depth of night beyond the entry, the scrub's indifference. Perhaps

this silence was another test, he thought. Like hunger was a test.

And boredom, too, and fear. Instead of prayers, he tried to

concentrate on god in other ways, by listing all the prophets that

he knew, the holy books, the laws. He repeated all the alliterating

finger songs he'd learnt when he was small, each joint an attribute

of god, the wise, the merciful, the generous, the enemy of sin

. . . He took to marking patterns and holy signs on rocks and on

the ground and touring them each day to run his fingers round

their shapes, so that these dusty journeys of the fingertips became

his wordless prayers. And that was comforting. He took it on

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himself to pass the time by marking rocks with all the words he

knew.

He had taught himself at home to recognize a few words in

written Greek script, more words than anyone else in his family.

He could read and write his own name, and the name of god.

He could roughly translate the inscription on the local temple

stone which promised death to gentiles if they strayed into the

inner court. He knew the meaning of T I . CAE S . D I V I , the

truncated Latin on the tribute coins. It designated Tiberius to

be an Emperor and God. A blasphemy, the priest had said. The

priest had little sympathy for Rome, although when it came to

collecting tithes he much preferred their silver blasphemies to

the copper ones.

Jesus also knew the scripts for a dozen or so words in Aramaic.

He liked their timber squareness. They were shorter and less

angled than the Greek or Latin; no vowels. The marks were

simpler and more cheerful, doing all they could to bend in natural

shapes. They'd been designed by holy carpenters, not masons.

Their comers had a little curve to them, the work of planes.

After his boyhoo� years of study at the temple school, steadying

the scrolls and holding down the parchments beneath the pointing

finger of the priest, Jesus had learnt to match some of these

Aramaic shapes to sounds - the little candelabra of the letter sha,

the lightning strike of enn, the falling plough sign of the kaoh.

He liked the places on these parchments where scribes were

changed. The one who'd stitched his way across the page with

wary, threadlike marks passed on his verses to the playful and

untidy one who let his muddy sparrows leave their tracks in

undulating lines. Then came the scribe whose writing always

toppled backwards, as if the meanings of the words were riding

faster than the shapes which soon would fall on to their spines.

This was a happy ignorance for Jesus, only knowing a dozen

words amongst so many thousands. He would not want to read

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as easily as scholars, he told himself, for that would only help to

split the meaning from the sound, to divorce the music from the

shape. If he could read like his priest could, by simply dragging

his forefinger underneath the script and speaking every word he

touched as if these were not verses but an endless rote of errands

to be run, then the scriptures might become little more than

strings of tiny tasks, a list. There'd be no mystery. But in his

ignorance, he could both listen to the words of the reader and

marvel, too, at the unspoken narrative of shapes, or concentrate

not only on the script but also on the spaces in between. God

was in the spaces, he was sure. God went to the very edges of

the page.

Now, at the entrance of his cave with all the light of day

removed, only the voice of the priest was missing. There was

still a scroll for him to sit beneath. Jesus could look into the stars

and see such spaces and such shapes as he had followed in the

temple, spread out across the boundless parchment of the night

in silver verses; again, the little candelabra, the lightning strike,

the falling plough, the wary, undulating, toppling constellations

which were the work of just one scribe. The sky was like the

scriptures, written down in Aramaic too.

So Jesus took great care in marking down his list of words. It

was a sacred act, and one which brought the vastness of the

scriptures and the sky into his cave. He cut the three square

Aramaic letters which signified the name of god in the soft clay

walls and scratched them on the harder entrance stone. He made

a temple ofhis cave. He consecrated all the surfaces. He marked

his own name, too, but lower in the clay and smaller than the

name of god. He'd not scratch in the truncated titles of the caesar

- T I . C A E S . D I V I - but he attempted to reproduce the Greek

warning to all gentiles that they risked their lives by corning too

close. He wrote it where it would be seen if anyone came too

close, in the weathered earth at the entrance to the cave. He

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hoped that anyone could read. He faltered after seven of the

twenty words. The shapes were blurred. He used to know them

all by rote, but now his memory was failing him, like his bladder.

It was an empty bag. He finished off his warning to the gentiles

with the Aramaic enn and sha and kaoh. A word that made no

sense, but Jesus found the letters comforting. The lightning lit

the candles, struck the plough.

When he had finished writing out the word for god, laying

claim to every stone and any flat face of clay which had room

enough for lettering, he chose something simpler to occupy his

mind. He took up his pointed writing rock and scratched a basket

of three circles in the sun-dried floor, just inside his cave, and

cut the circles into quarters with a cross. It was a rough grid on

which to play the mill-game. This was how bad boys avoided

temple lessons, hiding in the medlar trees, and playing on the

mill-board for prizes of dried grapes, with sacrilegious forfeits

for the ones that lost: put grass snakes in the priest's side room;

steal walnuts from the temple tree; rap on his door and run . . .

And this was how old men killed time until the time killed them,

sitting with their backs arched in the shade, above a mill-game

board, waiting for their girls to serve a meal or for the moon to

send them home. Jesus searched for tiny stones to act as counters

- six blackish-brown, six white or grey - and spent the day as

best he could in opposition to himself, testing all the blocked

and ambushed routes around the grid. He'd never been much

good at the mill-game when he was young. He had not practised.

He'd prayed instead. He could not see the point of games.

Now he had all the practice that he wanted. He could enjoy

the dodging conflict of the little stones, the way they tussled for

the cross-roads of the board, and did their best to flee the outer

ring and hold the centre ground. There was another sermon

there, he thought. Outside the temple gates on market day, raised

on a cart. The mill-game as a symbol of the world, with god its

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inner circle and the stones as pilgrims hunting for the centre of

the cross. It was a holy game.

He could, therefore, persuade himself not to mind the guilty

times when he abandoned prayers, when he lost heart in the

repetition of the scriptures. Instead, he contested with himself

in the mill-game and played both parts, the winner and the loser.

Indeed, it seemed the game itself was a sort of prayer, with just

one supplicant and no one to respond except himself The

mill-game worshipper, alone in quarantine, could not presume

the company of god. Nor could the man at prayer. Both of them

had to play both roles, and be in opposition to themselves and

make all moves, and lose and win in equal part. God would not

show himself He would not sit cross-legged on the far side of the

board, replying to each move ofJesus's with his own stratagems,

drawing in his breath when he seemed bettered, crying out when

he had Jesus trapped, dispensing charity and hope and forfeits

when he had placed the final stone inside the cross. He would

not simply run up like a dog whenever Jesus prayed.

It was no comfort, knowing that the winner was the loser

too. Jesus could not sleep, even though he had relented in his

disciplines and allowed himself to lie naked and depleted on the

ground, out of the draught, his shoulder as a pillow. His skin

became as cold as clay. Where were the camel and the thorn?

He rolled into a ball, his knees pulled up towards his chin, his

thin arms clasped around his shins, his backbone bumpy like a

rabbit's gut. It was the fourth night of his quarantine, and he was

weak.

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Marta wanted female company. Aphas and Shim could look for

wood and maintain the fire at night. The badu could make traps

for birds - his only skill, it seemed. But there were female tasks

they would not do. They did not think it was their place to fetch

their food from Musa, or cook it, for example. Marta could do

that. Once her stomach had begun to settle, she was glad to have

their errands as an excuse to flee the caves. Of course she had to