Quarantine (25 page)

cancer out of Aphas as easily as he could pluck the stone out of

an olive and toss it to the ground. Those were the very words,

more powerful than scripture. 'I did see someone move,' he said

at last. 'Forgive my tears.'

'Someone, perhaps. A shepherd . . . ' said Shim.

'Why not a holy man?'

Shim would not allow that possibility. He spoke from personal

experience. He'd seen holy monks several times before, he

explained. He'd sat with them, in temples to the north, in Greece,

in other caves. He'd seen a prophet once. He'd been with men

who knew their scriptures off by heart, and others who could

discern the future of the world from studying the stars. All of

them looked wise and old, as dry and silvery as weathered timber.

Enlightenment took time. Their beards were long and grey;

their skins were lined like parchment scrolls. There was a light

around them, not like light from a fire, but cold and pious,

corning off their skin like phosphorescence on a fish. Such a

light was the mark ofholiness and such a light, people said, could

heal. It was a light he hoped to earn himself It wasn't easy to

acquire without long years of seeking it, far from the comforts

and distractions of the world. It wasn't given after forty days. It

wasn't squandered (on the likes of Musa) . It wasn't found in

shepherd boys. 'It does not climb down cliffs to hunt for eggs,'

he said. 'You mentioned shapes and shadows when you saw

something in that cave, but you did not notice any light, I think.'

He closed his eyes. He concentrated on the light to come. 'Don't

give up hope.' He meant that Aphas ought to hope that Shim

would soon begin to glow.

'I do hope,' Aphas said. 'What else is there for me but hope,

and prayer? We ought to pray. As loudly as we can. Then he'll

come. He'll come to join the prayers, if he's a holy man.'

It was not easy to kneel in prayer on that rough, sloping

ground. Marta felt she ought to help the old man, but once she

had, Musa demanded help as well. She had to hold him by his

wrists, and take his weight while he sat down, and then she had

to pull him forwards on his knees. He held on to her hands too

long. His nostrils flared when she got close to him, as if she were

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a meal. They rocked in prayer until there was hardly any light

remaining in the sky. They asked for cures, fortunes, changes in

their lives. But still there was no sign of Gaily.

'He's gone for good,' said Shim. 'I told you so. ' But Musa,

Marta and Aphas would not hear of it. Musa pushed his borrowed

staff into Shim's back. A warning to stay quiet. It left a puckered

indent in his clothes. They watched for tremors in the darkness

of the cave. They heard odd sounds, thin evidence of hope. It

seemed, as well, that there were marks of movement that looked

like lettering on the sloping rock in front of the key-hole entrance.

Some stones had been displaced since their last visit. Perhaps by

birds. Perhaps by someone sitting on the rock.

'He's there,' said Musa, almost the first words that he'd spoken

since they'd left the tent. 'I'm sure of it. And we must tempt

him out. A hundred prayers won't do the job. He isn't short of

prayers. He has his own supply. But he needs food and drink or

else he'll die. ' The next time that they came, he said, they'd

bring some dates and bread, and water in a bag. 'We can tie

them to some yarn and lower them on to the rock. He'll show

his face for that. If he's a man.'

The pilgrims pulled each other to their feet and stood on the

promontory for one last view of the cave, like mourners, their

shadows dropping out of sight. No movement on the precipice.

There was no one to look at but themselves. Then not even

themselves, because the light betrayed them. They had to

scramble back to safer ground up slopes which had no shape or

colour, through scrub which still was waiting for its moon.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, in candlelight, the purple and the orange

wools embraced.

J s

Jesus wanted to believe that a flapping pigeon had landed in the

canker thorn above his cave. Some proper company at last, out

of the ark. Grey feathers and red earth, black wood. He was

familiar with pigeons. They roosted underneath the beams of

his father's workshop, and lived off garden scraps and chicken

feed. He knew their sounds, especially the alarm of their wings

if they got trapped by cats or caught in the twig nets put down

to protect the beans and peppers in the family patch. Then he'd

be the first to run outside and set them free. God's work.

From the noises that he heard, he judged his visitor to be a

single bird, caged by the thorn. He recognized the sharp and

frightened chirps it made, the heedless way it shook and banged

its wings. Come down, he whispered to himself He hardly had

the voice or faith to call out loud. He longed to press its feathers

to his face. That's what the fast had done to him. He no longer

prayed for god to come. He'd settle for the bird.

His pigeon dislodged a cloud of dry marl, which floated at

the cave entrance, making speckled columns of the sloping

sunlight, making temples of the air. His pigeon knocked off

some of the thorn's few silver leaves. The tree was shedding sins

at Jesus's feet. He could have put his arms out into the sun and

caught a leafifhe'd had the strength and could have stopped the

trembling in his hands. As it was, he did not move at all. He let

the leaves make their pattern on the ground, uninterrupted. He

only watched and counted them, telling fortunes from the way

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they fell. It would be bad luck if any leaf was touched or covered

by another. And then - when bad luck was heaped up on the

ground - he would outlive the fast, escape the scrub, only if the

falling leaves exceeded forty. Or, every leaf was one more year

of life. In that hard light, with his poor eyes, the piles of leaves

looked like a hoard of silver jewellery.

Soon there were leaves enough for Jesus to escape the scrub

and live another sixty years. All he wanted now was for the

pigeon to come. It was bound to be a bird from home, he told

himself, a grateful pigeon sent from the Galilee to be his witness.

He sat in darkness, his ankles crossed, just his toes amputated by

the hard edge of the sun, and listened to the frantic beating of

its wings. He waited for the pigeon to liberate itself, and fly

down with its narcotic ookuroos to hunt for chaff at his. feet.

There was no chaff.

Jesus rubbed his knuckles in his eyes, he pinched the bridge

of his nose, hoping to clear his sight. The entrance to the cave

appeared hard and sharp, a jagged pyramid oflight, but anything

beyond was out of focus. His eyes had weakened in the gloom,

and one was watery and blurred from an infection. The tears

drained from his sinuses into his throat; that was the moisture

he had drunk for thirteen days. His tongue was dry and stiff and

silvery, a thorn leaf in his mouth, a mouth stuffed full of sin.

The only sounds that he could make himself were little more

than ookuroos. He and his pigeon were cousins, then, tongue-tied,

inconsequential in the scrub, and insubstantial to themselves.

They were soft creatures, naked, dislocated and afraid, and tired

beyond the boundaries of sleep.

Jesus did sleep, though, or fainted. When he woke, the pigeon

had grown larger and more threatening. There were no chirps

or beating wings. What he'd mistaken as a bird now struggled

with the thorn too heavily to be so small and feathery. It tugged

and tore too madly at the branches. The sheer cliff-face above

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his head, where surely nothing larger than a single bird or bush

could find any purchase, seemed to be making noises fit for a

rock cat or a wolf. Bigger pieces of the marl began to fall, and

cover the jewellery. The leaves seemed curses now. Sixty years

in hell.

Jesus was not too tired or ill-nourished to be afraid. He closed

his eyes, squeezed the bridge ofhis nose again, and concentrated.

His hearing was still as sharp as reeds. He heard the bush grieving

for its last few leaves, the crumbling marl, the tetchy bluster of

the valley wind, his own uncushioned heart-beats. At last and

in the distance, high and thin, coming from the naked air above

the precipice, there was the turbulence of agitated men. Another

flying donkey then?

A branch snapped loose and fell on to the sloping rock in

front of the cave. Then a small leather bag, much reddened by

the marl and snagged by the canker thorn in which it had become

entangled, dropped into view. It hung on a plaited wool rope

in front of the key-hole opening at knee-height from the ground,

and swung from side to side, its weathered leather chirping

sharply - a cowering pigeon, indeed - until it lost momentum

and only swayed when it was tugged from above.

Jesus did not even sway. He put a finger in each ear and

pressed his palms into his eyes. He would be deaf and blind. But

he could not shut out the world for long. He had no doubt what

sound would be the next, a voice too high and reedy to be a

normal man's. No soothing ookuroos. He'd heard and feared that

voice a dozen times before, because each evening of the fast the

fever-giant he'd left for dead in his black tent with its bat wings

had come on to the rocky promontory a little to his right to

tempt him from his quarantine. He shouted out his messages in

short and breathless bursts, like some trinket salesman, as if long

phrases would not have the wings to fly between the promontory

and Jesus's cave. 'Come out, Gally. Let's see your face . . . My

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name is Musa. I'm your cousin. And your friend.' No answer?

Then, 'I'll make you rich . . .' At other times, 'At least put up.

Your hands. To pray for us. You can't refuse. This woman's

barren, see? This uncle's dying. From a canker. A canker in his

ribs. These other two. Have been possessed. The one. Won't

speak. The other one. Can't shut up. Come. Up to the tent.

You are. You are the healer. Come up. And heal.'

Jesus concentrated on the leather bag, and waited for the voice

to start again. He could imagine Musa and his retinue - the

blond, the tall woman and the limping man, the cat-like madcap

with the hennaed hair - now inventing their beguilements

in the company of serpents and hyenas on the summit of the

precipice. He could imagine them with wings like vultures, and

with yellow eyes. When they had lured him into their tent,

amongst the fingered cushions and the seeing lamps, they'd rub

their sins against him, flesh on flesh, and defile him with their

food - their mildew and their carrion, their sabbath fish, their

cups of blood, their geckos and their pigs.

It might have been wise, ifJesus wanted any peace of mind,

to impose upon himself the cheerful, undemanding view of

radicals and city Greeks, that the devil was simply an excuse;

someone to justify a person's own shortcomings, someone to

take the blame. It was their creed that devils had no place on

earth, that evil was not a living creature in the world. There was

no one to blame other than oneself There was just good luck

and bad, god's rules observed and broken, the clumsy juggling

of happiness and guilt. And death of course, but death without

a reckoning, and death without eternity. IfJesus could persuade

himself of that, then how much more comfortable his quarantine

would be. The leather bag would be nothing more than an