Jim Crace - Quarantine

She’d not be undisturbed for long. It was the first new moon of spring that night, and there were travellers — already heading from the towns and vilages, already passing through Muntar, Qumran, and Marsaba — who had some weeks ofbusiness in the wilderness. They came to live like he^it bats, the proverbs said, for forty days, a quarantine of daylight fasting, solitude and prayer, in caves. Could hermit bats be said to pray? Certainly they were so pious that rather than avert their eyes from heaven they passed their hours looking upwards, hanging by their toes. Their ceiling was the floor. Their fingered wings were folded like the vestments of a priest. Discomfort was their article of faith. And he^it bats

— perhaps this is what the proverbs had in mind — possessed no vanity. No need for colours or display. There was no vanity in caves.

The caves near Musa’s grave, for all their remoteness, were known to be hospitable, much prized by those who sought the comfort of dry, soft floors while they were suffering, much prized by desert leopards, too. Inside were the black remains of fires and, on the walis, the charcoal marks where visitors had counted off their quarantines in blocks of ten.

There were other caves in Miri’s wilderness as weli, less prized, in the sheer and crumbling precipice below the tent, which only goats and lunatics could reach and in which only goats and lunatics — and bats — would choose to pass a night — though at this time ofyear it might seem that lunatics werejust as numerous as goats. This was the season of the lunatics: the first new moon of spring was summoning those men — for lunatics are mostly men. They have the time and opportunity — to exorcize that part of them which sent them mad. Mad with grief, that is. Or shame. Or love. Or illnesses and visions. Mad enough to think that everything they did, no matter how vain or trivial, was of interest to their god. Mad enough to think that forty days of discomfort could put their world in order.

Not all the cavers were insane. That spring there had been fever in Jerusalem and many deaths. Musa wasn’t the only one to leave his mouth unguarded. Most of the travellers heading eastwards for the solace of the hills were the newly bereaved who wished to contemplate the memory of a mother or a son in privacy, and for whom the forty days were not remedies but requiems. There was a group of nine or ten of these — ali Jews

— who, for a modest rent paid to the shepherd, had taken up their grieving residence in natural caves above a stream on the trading route just south of Almog, where their deprivations would be slight. There were produce markets at the waterhead, an undemanding walk away, where they could eat once the daylight fast had ended and take their ritual baths, and the caves were relatively warm. Bereavement’s punishment enough, they thought. Why starve? Why freeze at night? Why hide away? How would that help the dead, or bring them back?

There was another group of twenty-four — all men, and zealots, pursuing the instructions of Isaiah, ‘Prepare straight to the wilderness a highway for our god’ — who were keeping to the Dead Sea valley, looking for the Essene settlements. They’d spend their forty days in artificial, dug-out caves, waiting for the world to end (Please God the world won’t end in forty days and one. .) and sharing their possessions and their prayers, with only the palm trees their companions.

But those who made it to the perching valley where Miri — half open-eyed — was sleeping, and where Musa and the fever devil were bargaining the final hours ofhis life, sought something more remote and testing than requiems and communal prayers. There were five of them — not in a group, but strung out along the road where earlier that morning the caravan of uncles had passed by. Three men, a woman and, too far behind for anyone to guess its gender, a fifth. And this fifth one was bare-footed, and without a staff No water-skin, or bag of clothes. No food. A slow, painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising, mirage heat, as if someone had thrown a stone into the pool of air through which it walked and ripples had diluted it.

The first four — their problems? Madness, madness, cancer, infertility — had started their journeys that morning from the same settlement in the valley. Though they had observed the proprieties of pilgrimage by keeping some distance apart, they had at least endeavoured to keep each other within sight and hearing. There were robbers in the hills, army deserters, lepers, devils, animals, avalanches of dry scree, and a threatening conspiracy of rocks, wind and heat which made the landscape treacherous and unpredictable. It was a comfort to have some help close by. By the time they’d clambered up the shifting landfall to the plateau at the top ofthe precipice and were walking through the flatter scrub towards the tent, they had become separated by only a few hundred paces. They were more hesitant and slow. Exhausted, obviously; but also uncertain of the way, uncertain even ifthis quarantine were wise. They were searching for the wayside marks, carved in the largest rocks by some holy traveller years before and now much eroded, which indicated where the caves were found. The marks directed them towards the higher ground. They had to leave the camel tracks and the cliff-top path before they reached or even saw the tent, with its abandoned invalid. They walked along the flood-beds of the little valley, and none of them could miss the opportunity to make their own marks by stamping on the soft clay before they headed for the scarp and for the dry and warmer caves behind the poppies and the grave. So Miri woke, startled by sudden noises. The first ofthe temporary hermits was scrambling through the loose stones of the scarp to choose his place to sleep. Miri could not see who had disturbed her, but she recognized the sound ofhuman feet, slipping in the scree. She could hear others approaching from below.

Miri curled into a ball, a porcupine without the quilis. She was no longer undisturbed. Whose unsteady feet were these? She wished that she could disappear into the ground. That was possible. There was an open and inviting grave for her, within arm’s reach. She only had to roll the once. A few stones clattered into the grave with her, but they were not noticed. Four pairs of climbing feet were making greater noises of their own and, anyway, no wild land is ever entirely still and silent. It has its discords and its detonations. Earth collapses with the engineering of the ants; lizards smack the pebbles with their tails; the sun fires seeds in salvos from their pods; pigeons misconnect with dry branches; and stones, left loosely to their own devices, can find the muscle to descend the hill. So Miri settled in to Musa’s grave and, for the moment, was not seen or heard.

She had been dreaming about her child, of course. The usual mix: anxiety and joy. Her sleep had shut her husband out. But, in those alarming moments when she woke, became a porcupine, became percussion in the scrub, became the first trembling resident of her husband’s grave, she had convinced herself that it was Musa who’d woken her. Who else? He had disturbed her sleep so many times before. So it had been his stiff and bloodless feet which sent the small stones tumbling. He’d died, alone, with no one there to mediate. That was the fate that’s worse than death. Now he’d come to find his wife. She wasn’t hard to find. There was the recent kicked-up trail which led out from the tent across the flat scrub, into the valley, up to the scarp. There was the abattoir of stones, clawed out for him. There was her mocking headscarf, thrown off, snagged on a thorn, and left to flag him to her. There was the grave, and Miri crouching in it, hardly hidden, the tiny sobbing woman in the fat man’s hole. How could he miss her? And, then, how could he let her go unpunished? Musa was no mystery to her. He’d use his fists and feet. He’d pick up rocks and earth to finish her. The living would be buried by the dead. That’s what the prophets said. The world would end that way.