Quarantine

2

It was midday, and Miri opened up the outer awnings of the tent so that she could both clear the air of death’s bad breath and inspect the landscape for signs oflife. Did she expect the caravan, already troubled by its conscience, to tum around for her? Or was she simply fearful of the leopards, wolves and snakes which were at home amongst these hills? She sat cross-legged in bands ofsunlight, next to her husband’s wrapped body, her hand resting almost tenderly on his ankles. He had a fading pulse. And he was all but silent now. A whistling throat, that’s all. He’d lost the strength to shout. And he was cold. So was the inside of the tent.

Miri stared into the distant tans and greys ofJudea, trying to remember what she was required to do for him, what prayers, what body herbs, what disposition of the limbs. She’d done her duty in the night and tried to lure the devil out. But that had failed. Her husband’s body was a labyrinthine hiding place, so full of caves and chambers that many devils could make homes inside. What was her duty to him now? To call on all the gods by name and ask for mercy for this man? To combat his illness, like the perfect, patient wife, with oils and salves and kisses? To find a stone and drop it on his skull? No, nothing that she did would make a difference. That was the truth, bleak and comforting. Her husband was unconscious and about to die, and she should leave him to it. Let the devil do its work behind her back.

Anyway, this vigil was exhausting her. She could not sit a single moment more. Her child was strong and vigorous; it had pressed its arms and legs against her hips so unremittingly that within the past few months her pelvic bones had widened and the nerves were trapped. Her buttocks and her thighs were torments. She felt she had to move out of the tent or tum to stone. This was the remedy. She would simply walk away — if, first, she could defy the pain and stand up — and return that afternoon to a corpse. It might be cowardly to leave a man to die alone, but there was no one there to block her path. No one conscious anyway. Musa couldn’t use his knuckles or his fingers or his heels against her now. He couldn’t pull her hair to make her stay. She laid the dampened cloth across his mouth — to keep the devils in, perhaps? — loosely tethered the ailing donkey, and staked the one biUy amongst the female goats. Then, turning her back against the flaking crown of the cliffs, she went off across the level scrub towards the vaHeys and low hiUs in search of well-drained ground and her husband’s undug grave.

It would be hard, she knew, to bury Musa. Hard on the heart, but harder on the fingers. For he was large. She would have to take great care when lifting heavy rocks or tearing at the ground. There were pans of soft clay along the vaHey beds where anyone — a child even; a child would not resist the opportunity to make its mark in clay — could crack a hole in the earth simply by stamping. But the higher ground where Musa’s body would be safe from floods was biscuity like ash-fired pot. Underneath the biscuit there were stones.

Miri hunted for a burial place with views across the salty valley. It was not long before she’d found the perfect spot, an open scarp, backed by low, coppery cliffs, pock-marked by many caves and — it was spring — discoloured by the opposing red of scrub poppies. The world from there would seem large and borderless, she thought, and that would be appropriate for a traveller like Musa whose excursions had been ceaseless while he lived and who would soon find that death was large and borderless as well.

It was a tender day for widowhood, warm and clear and breathless. There in the sinking distance, two days’ walk away at most, was the heavy sea below Jericho, and then the cliffs of sodium and brine, the careworn hills, the bluing heights ofMoab, and finaly (because she could not think that there was any heaven in this place) the rifting, hard-faced sky. It was clouded only by the arrowed streamers ofthe spring birds, heading for the Danube from the Nile.

What better place to pass eternity?

But for the living Miri it was hard. She felt large and borderless herself So far her marriage — a few months old, and to a younger, tougher man — was inflexible and empty, a fired pot, a biscuit underlain with stones. At least, she thought, she could be more eager and more dutiful with her husband’s dead body than she had been with his living one. She’d bury him with care, as deep as possible. She wouldn’t let him face into the view, throughout eternity, across to Moab and beyond. She’d bury him face down, as was the custom for a man who had no heirs (not yet; at least), so that he’d copulate for ever with the earth and all his sons and daughters would be soil.

She put her fingers on the ground, pulled loose the first of many hundred stones, and tried to open up a grave.