Quarantine

19

Night arrived with its sullen wing to double-shade their tents and caves. Jesus slept; he was unconscious for a while, but when he dreamed he dreamed of Musa, no one else. Stroking Musa’s eyelids with his thumb. Musa’s face marked on the surface of the moon. Musa sitting in the kingdom of the lord, naked and uncircumcized, his great lap open to the angels’ gaze. Musa in a market-place, but selling fasts instead ofleather bags, withJesus his first customer.

Musa’s salesmanship was irresistible. Of course it was. Jesus could not make the man seem dull, even in his dreams. This devil was not ignorant, a huckster with no subtlety. He was a craftsman worthy of his task. He was a trader and a salesman, after all, and practised in making virtues out of sins. He could sell the mildew and the bruises on his blemished fruit. Their blackened peels are honey-sweet, he’d say. Taste them — pay first — and you will see.

No, forJesus, the merchant Musa andthe devil were the same, in dreams and out. Close cousins anyway, far-travelled, patient, shrewd, unshockable, refined. For every camel-load ofmerchan- dise that Musa had exchanged for goods abroad he would have packed a little knowledge in his panniers as well; the whereabouts of some blue, distant town, the predilections of some king, a new philosophy, a freshly coined word, telepathy, the aHocation of the stars. He’d have the trick of holding conversations with his customers on subjects as various as that year’s lemon crop, the uses of bern and balsam oils, and whether it was proper for a sadducee to eat an egg that had been laid on the sabbath. (‘Proper to eat it, wrong to cook it, I would say. Raw eggs are good enough for sadducees. ’) Al his conversations would be sharp. His knowledge was a gleaming weapon, a spear with wings, with which to prick and wound his quarry. Musa would not flee from arguments, or duck his head at words he could not understand. What he didn’t know he would invent, and his inventions would be more quenching than the truth. He was a strong adversary for god.

So here in dreams was Musa at his stall, seUing fasts to pious Jews, always intending that they should be trapped by their own vanity in some damp cave, on some sheer precipice, with not an ant to keep them company, and only devils’ water there to wet their eyes and tongues. Here was Musa calling on the holy wisdoms of Moses, Ezra and Mordecai whose fasts had been sustained divinely. Here was Musa with his hand onJesus’s, the merchant’s mouth a short breath from the client’s ear, his forked tongue hidden by his swollen cheeks, and whispering, ‘I challenge you. To battle me. For forty days.’

Again, more dreams. He came, this time toJesus in his cave. He held a carpet viper in one hand, and a desert mouse in the other. ‘These creatures are your cousins, Gaily. They’re like you. They go without their food and drink for forty days or more in this same scrub, three months, four months,’ he said. ‘If there’s no food or drink, they simply switch their bodies off and wait until the rains. That’s what you have to do. It’s easy. Of course, the pity is that one of them can always break its fast, to eat the other one. . Guess which. Let’s see.’ He put the viper with the mouse.

Another time the merchant was a priest, his great round head topped off with a linen hat. Bells and pomegranates hung from his blue robe. There were brooches made ofsardonyx, a golden purse, a purple cape. His se^on was that fasters who had earned his blessing could expect the greatest of rewards. He could not promise paradise to mice or snakes. But pious Jews? Their prizes were unlimited. With Musa at their side, they would be calm throughout their quarantine and comfortable, he promised them, leaning his weight against the temple door. They would have peace of mind. Al the distractions and appetites of public life would be driven off like scrub dogs, and clarity of spirit would come sniffing at their ankles, begging to be lifted up and stroked.

‘Towards the end — the last ten days, perhaps — your soul wiH fly out of your body like a lark,’ he said. ‘Believe me, you wiH pass into the fabric of the sky, until you sit amongst the angels at their table. Keep your elbows in. You’ll break your fast with rapture beans and golden goblets filled with nectar. And then they’H call you for your final prize — an audience with god. If you wil only place your trust in me.’

The final dream. They were in the Galilee. Musa in the market-place, with Jesus and his family, and all the villagers. ‘Let’s have a volunteer, to taste the black skin ofmy quarantine,’ he said. ‘You.’ He prodded Jesus on the chest, with his imperfect staff. ‘Try fasting now. Try forty days. You’ll find forgiveness if you’ve upset god. Your oddities. .’ he smiled conspiratorially at all the Galileans, ‘. . will be subdued, turned to a profit even. See how deep the nights become, how bright the stars, the longer that you keep away from food and drink. Come, Gaily. Bring your brothers, bring your friends. Broken hearts will be repaired. Bald men will grow fine heads ofhair. . Please have your coins ready when you come.’

This last nightmare was what Jesus woke up to a dozen times, in the darkness of the middle night. He had expected to dream of chicken and melon, mutton stew, lamb cooked above a vine-wood fire, not Musa preaching fasts. Jesus was at his weakest when he woke. His spirit was destroyed by sleep. He could not recall a single prayer to summon help, or shake away this final dream. His elbows and his knees cracked like seed pods; his bones were noisy ravens laughing at his flesh, tok-tok tok-tok. His body throbbed with cold. These were his moments ofdefeat. He’d been a fool to throw his clothes away. He’d been a fool to leave the Galilee. He’d been a fool to leap out ofhis bed to pray. He’d been a very stupid man to invest so much in fasting. His quarantine was little more than bogus goods, false gold, a leaking pot, sold to him by a man who had the devil’s tongue. He was not any closer to his god, for al his sacrifice, than he had been when he was six. Surely someone in the Galilee — his priest, a neighbour possibly, someone who knew the hermit scriptures better than himself — could have taken him aside before he left his home and offered some instruction on the torments that he faced ifhe came to the wilderness alone. Where was the rhapsody? What joy was there in all the suffering? Where was the dignity of death?

No one had said how painful it would be, how first, there would be headaches and bad breath, weakness, fainting; or how the coating on the upper surface of his tongue would thicken day by day; or how his tongue would soon become stuck to the upper part ofhis mouth, held in place by gluey strings ofhunger, so that he would mutter to himself or say his prayers as if his palate had been cleft at birth; or how his gums would bleed and his teeth become as loose as date stones.

No one had warned him how quickly he would lose his will to move about, how even lifting up his arms to wipe away the sweat — so much of that, at first, and then none at ali — would become a punishing task; how he’d postpone the effort and let the sweat drip off his brow without regard to cleanliness; how cruelly his body would begin to eat itself as his muscles and his liver and his kidneys fought for fuel like squalid, desert boys battling for a piece of wood; how his legs would swell with pus;

how his skin would tear and how the wounds would be too weak to dress themselves with scabs. No one had said, there wiil be stomach pains and cramps, demanding to be rubbed and soothed like dogs.

He hated dawn. At least at night, he could imagine he was whole. But in the cave’s dim light by day, he looked down at his arms and legs and saw how he was turning black in patches where his muscles and hisjoints were leaking blood. He’dbecome a leper, a hyena, one of those mottled slaves from the rivers beyond Egypt, flayed brown and pink by some hard master. They wouldn’t let him in the temple grounds like that.

Jesus rubbed his joints and warmed his fingers in his mouth. He could reduce these pains. But there were other, shocking pains that could not be rubbed away, the pains of sadness and despair. This was the greatest failing ofthem ail. Someone, surely, could have said, Stay with your parents in the Galilee. For if you go into the wilderness to fast, not just your body but your spirit will, against al faith, begin to bleed. Your spirit will shed its weight as well, its frame will ache, its eyes will dim. You’d be a fool to think your spirit is beyond the reach of thirst and hunger. Nothing is.

They had not even said, Go to the desert if you must, and fast. But do take care. For god is not alone up there, if god is there at al. But there are animals; and the devil is the fiercest of them ail.

Perhaps it was a blessing thatJesus’s spirit fell apart before his body did, because if it had remained intact as he grew thin and weak on fasting, he might have tried to escape the folly of his unbending quarantine. He might have decided that he ought to take the middle course, the one chosen by the other quarantiners that he’d followed up the scree a few days previously. They were wise and timid, and broke their fasts each day at dusk. He might have climbed the precipice each evening, walked up through the foot-marked pans of soft clay along the valley beds to the perching row of caves, and got in line amongst the poppies for his share of their food. He could have begged for clothes. Or he might at least have seen the sense in this one compromise — by all means to have gone without dry food, but to have kept his throat and body oiled during the forty days with a little water from their cistern, for water is the staff oflife and god’s great gift to the world.

What vanity to think a total fast can rid a man of sin, or put a man at god’s right hand, he might have told himselfif his spirit and good sense had not been so subdued. Go from this cave, go home, go now — be penitent, be purified, and sin no more.

It was too late. He had no strength to climb the precipice. Jesus had become a creature of the dark, a fugitive from pleasure, comfort, beauty, light. He sat inside the cave, his hands lapping round his genitals for coolness, or running round the three symbols for the name of god which he had scratched, it seemed a thousand years before, into the rock, or massaging his legs and arms. His face was bleached beneath the dust. His hair was knotted clay. His pupils had grown large and slow, in their attempts to catch and keep the light. He was confused and fumbling. The few sunbeams that came into his cave each morning made him sneeze and itch. My eyes can’t take the light, he told himself That is a sign that I am meant to stay right here.