Jim Crace - Quarantine

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.

The salty scrubland was a lazy and malicious host. Even lizards lifted their legs for fear of touching it too firmly. Why should it, then, disturb itself for human travellers — a pregnant woman and the almost lifeless body of a man — no matter if they were abandoned in the furthest of the hills beyondJerusalem and with none to tum to for some help and salutation except the land itself? It would not, no^aliy at least, have expended its hospitality on them. It was undiscriminating in its cruelties. The scrub, at best, aliowed its brief and passing guests to stub their toes on stones or snag their arms and legs on thorns. It sent these traveliers to Jericho in rags. Or it lamed their animals. Or, should they spend the night with this hard scrubland as their inn, it let its snakes and scorpions take refuge underneath the covers of their beds.

Yet the scrubland welcomed Miri there, to its dead hilis. It gave its hospitality to her. And should she end up on her own, she need not have much cause to fear the night, or hunger, or the animals. It would use what little skills it had to make her life more comfortable, to keep her bedding free from scorpions, her skin unsnagged by thorns, her sleep unbroken. And if it could, it would direct some rainfall to her tent or save her billy from a fall or drive gazelles towards her traps. It would be the one — hooded in a brown mantle — whose breathing twinned with hers. It would be the one, mistaken for a thorn bush or a breeze, that rustled at her side. It would be her shoulder-blades, and then the one that brushed the sand-flies from her lips and eyes. It was bewitched by her already, if that is possible, if the land can be allowed a heart. The stone had stubbed itself upon the toe. The earth was showing kindness to the flesh. It let her pull its stones quite readily out of the ground, so that her husband’s grave grew waist-deep without exhausting her and causing any strains. She only broke her nails, though there were some cuts and bruises on her knees. The torment of her buttocks and her thighs was even eased a little by the exercise.

So this is happiness, she thought. Or this, at least, is what adds up to happiness. Here was the mix that she’d been praying for. There’s hardship and bad luck in happiness, for sure. There’s broken nails. There’s blood. There’s solitude. But there was the prospect, too, with Musa dead, of sleeping peacefully without his bruising fingers in her flesh, of never running after men and camels any more, ofbeing Miri without shame or hesitation, of letting drop her headscarf for a change and loosening her hair from its tight knots so that nothing intervened between her and the sky.

Indeed, her headscarf was pulled off Her coils of hair were left to drop and unravel on their own. She then lay back beside her husband’s grave, put her uncovered head on stones and, open-eyed, the sky her comfort sheet, she almost slept. She was exhausted and invincible. Her pregnancy had made her so; exhausted by the digging and the dying; invincible because that pulsing in her womb was doughty, irresistible. What greater triumph could there be than that — to cultivate a second, tiny heart?

She had been told, when she was small, that the sky was a hard dish. She might bruise her fists on it if only she could fly. It was a gently rounded dish, blue when not obscured by clouds or night or shuddered into pinks and greys and whites by the caprices of the sun. But now she raised her hands into the unresisting air above the open grave and wondered if the dish were soft. And she could fly right through it, only slowed and coddled by its softness, like passing through the heavy, goaty curtains of her tent, like squeezing through the tough and cushioned alleys of the flesh, to take a place in heaven if she wanted, or to find thatplace on earth where she’d be undisturbed.