Quarantine (20 page)

stomachs and their heads until they went into a trance. Moses

too. So if she felt giddy-headed all the time, a touch delirious,

in a raptured panic, then that was good. Even ill-health could

be taken as a portent of her improving fortune. Ill-health had

brought the Galilean man to Musa's bedside, after all. Might

ill-health bring him to her cave as well? Would he kneel by her

side as Musa had described, and place his hand above her womb

and say, 'Be whole again'? Might he declare her pregnant, by

some miracle?

She'd heard of women - unmarried, some of them, or widows

and grandmothers, or wives whose husbands were away - who

had conceived a baby without the maculate involvement of a

man. Angel children, they were called. A thin and comic telling

of the truth, she thought. But it was comforting to imagine that,

in stories anyway, a woman might conceive without enduring

a husband between her knees, that life could be created chastely.

With the Galilean healer so close, it all seemed possible. The

almost-sight ofhim, the shy and nearly-shadow on the precipice,

had made her pregnant with hope at least. When Musa had

stopped calling out - 'Come on, Gaily. Show yourself' - the

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templed silence of the afternoon had seemed trapped and amplified by the valley's vaulted walls. She'd listened to the conversation of the gnats, the dry remarks of crumbling soil. It had seemed that she could hear the living rocks around the healer's

cave, breathing, humming to themselves, praying even. She'd

stared so long into the bashful blackness of the key-hole cave

that amongst the visions she had seen were spectres of herself

with angel babies at her breast and on her knee. All girls. No

heirs for Thaniel, and no divorce! She'd been like the seed pod

of a scatter bush. A little sun or wind or time and she would

burst.

So Marta let herself enjoy the fantasy ofbeing sick with child.

Her symptoms were the same: stomach cramps, diarrhoea and

nausea. Her head was steam. Her back and thighs were bruised.

Her face was flushed. She even fancied that her nipples hurt,

that they had broadened and were darker. Even if not pregnant

by some miracle - or if not pregnant yet then, perhaps, these

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pains were smaller miracles and brought about by those changes

in her womb which she had come into the hills to pray and fast

for. Perhaps her stomach was disturbed by all the sterile acids

being driven out by juices of fertility. The diarrhoea and the

vomiting would empty her of all the poisons of her past. The

bad luck in her life was passing out of her like brackish water

leaking thickly from a bag. She'd be sweetened and renewed. If

anything could happen, then it would.

Of course, there was a nagging part ofher which recognized

and feared that other godless, uninspiring possibility, the dismal

scripture that everybody said was kept sealed in cupboard vaults

by priests who'd stolen it from devils. There'd be no answers to

her prayers, not in forty days, not in forty years. There were no

miracles, nor angel children, nor even any rewards for a blameless

life. There was only time and talk and making do, and then the

rough-weave shrouding of the everlasting earth. Her face was

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flushed because she had been touched not by the floating hand

of some glimpsed healer but by the scrubland's harsh and unforgiving wind. The hurting back was due to sleeping on the ground in damp and draughts. The water from the cistern was to blame

for her bad stomach. Or, perhaps, the culprit was nothing more

angelic than the scrub fowl that she'd caught and eaten, barely

cooked, at their first meal together.

But Marta was in no mood to think of life as godless and

intractable. That cupboard vault would stay sealed, for forty days

at least. She was not calm, sedated by prayers, the fasting and her

loneliness as she had expected. Instead, her mood was turbulent.

One moment, a fear of animals and darkness. The next, a tumbling

faith in god. Dismay at being ill, unclean and living in a cave,

then sudden rapture at the prospects of her life transformed.

She'd lost control of her stomach, heart and brain, perhaps. She

trembled and she wept, she laughed out loud, she mumbled to

herself, she hardly slept, but she was possessed by hope, as madly

and absurdly, as sweetly and as helplessly, as a melon taken over

as a nest by bees. You'll be alone, she had been warned by her

sister and the neighbours' wives, who feared for her safety and

her sanity as she set off from Sawiya. You'll live on rain and

leaves, if there are leaves. Y ou'll lose yourself up there. You'll

fry. But no one had foretold how she would find a godly pattern

to her journey to the hills. No one had mentioned wayside marks

carved into rock which would lead her and the men so safely

and so simply to the caves. No one had promised there would

be a water cistern, ready dug. Or that an evening meal would

flap into her hands. Or that the landlord, Musa, despite his

charges and his rents, would be heaven-sent to provide some

decent food for her, and keep her safe from thieves and wolves.

No one had prophesied, You'll make a friend, the pregnant

woman with her loom, whose hand she'd held, whose stomach

she had touched, whose child she could imagine as her own.

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There was one prophecy, of course, which Marta had heard

at least twice a day in Sawiya, whenever she'd recited the introit

to prayers. She'd always spoken it as if the words referred to

worlds ten thousand days away. But here, so close to heaven in

the hills, so close to no-such-thing, the more she ran the verses

through her mind, the more it seemed the prophecy was meant

for her alone. Its garments fitted her. Those were her tears

described, her barrenness, her quarantine, her desert places. The

scrubby hills beyond Jerusalem, the scriptures said, would send

down to the world through David's seed a holy king. He'd heal

the sick. He'd bring comfort to the broken-hearted. He'd build

up the empty spaces. He'd spread fertility on earth.

Once Marta had decided that there was a holy pattern to her

quarantine, she was softened to the possibility that what was

prophesied through god's own word would come true. If anything could happen, then it would. That was her latest article of faith. What was destined for ten thousand days would come

about at once. So she had listened to Musa's tale - how he was

healed by the man that he called Gaily - and she had recognized

immediately what it must mean. That fifth figure, dogging them

from Jericho, that shadow on the precipice, that man who, if

Musa spoke a quarter of the truth, could drive out fevers, devils,

death, was sent by god to put the world to rights. He would not

have travelled to the scrub and clambered to his cave only to

minister to rocks and ants. He would have come, her daydream

promised, to minister to her. Their meeting was ordained.

There'd come a time, during the forty days, when he would

swell into the holy king. He'd reach out from his cave into hers

and hold her, cupped inside his giant palm: 'Be well . . . ' He

would build his kingdom in her empty spaces.

These were her waking dreams. But there were others, more

troubling, in which less godly prophecies came true. Her neighbours worried her. Not just the leaping badu or the dying Aphas.

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They were beyond her help and understanding. She was glad of

that. But Shim too. She dreamed about him almost every night,

perhaps because she was uncomfortable and cold, and hardly

ever slept deeply. Sometimes she dreamed he was amongst the

men who watched her in Sawiya when she went down to the

well, the only handsome one. Sometimes he was confused with

Musa and the Galilean man; the tent was caves, the fat was thin,

their quarantine became a feast of uncooked meats, and all three

men leaped over her while she was squatting in the rocks. They

were a trinity as silent and as elegant as deer.

But on the second night of their quarantine, after they'd gone

down to meet the healer and then had come back to their

perching valley in the dark to break and celebrate their fast on

Marta's strangled fowl, she'd had a dream of Shim that would

not fade when she woke up. He came into her cave on draughts

of air. His body was as hard as wood. His arms were snakes. It

was he who swelled and cupped her in his palms and said, Be

well. His seeds were insects running up her leg. Even in her

sleep she knew they were as mad a match as the orange and the

purple wools on Miri's mat. But Marta did not shake herself

awake or let him go. She let her hair and his, the black and

blond, entwine and spin a yam across the cave's damp floor one-ply, two-ply, a braid, a knot that no one could undo or cut.

She'd have to go back to Sawiya with Shim tied into her hair as

evidence of what she'd dreamed.

Marta knew that dreams like this were little more than moths.

They flew by night. They showed their colours in the dark,

and then, once there was any light, they shut their wings and

disappeared. But she was waiting to be blessed by god and fearful

that her sins would show. She wondered if such shaming dreams

as hers might still be visible by day. See how she walks, see how

her face is flushed, see how her nipples have grown broad, they'd

say. Was there a blond hair clinging to her clothes? Could

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anybody tell by looking in her eyes that she had spent her dreams

with Shim; how silent and how beautiful he'd been for her, how

fertile she had been for him? On other nights she dreamed that

Gaily came to work his miracle, but he found Shim inside her

cave and went away.

So it was hard for Marta to face the men. She knew it would

be wise and less embarrassing to spend her days at rest inside the

cave, protected from the sun and wind and from the piercing

judgement ofher neighbours. A woman should be out ofhearing,

out of sight, when she was sick and volatile. But Marta was too

restless to sit still, and too excited by the sober freedoms of the

scrub to stay in darkness. Besides, there was no way of avoiding

her neighbours entirely. They all woke up before break oflight

to meet at the water cistern, and to pray - although, of course,

a woman could not stand amongst the men in prayers, even if

she were not sick and volatile, or tainted by her dreams. Marta

had to stand a little distance off, behind their backs, and she was

content to do so. If she did not arrive in time for their dawn

hosannas in praise of the water and the light, Shim or Aphas

shouted her name or let the badu throw stones at the bushes. by