Jim Crace - Quarantine

It seemed to Jesus, when he woke and put his hands out to the wind, that he was already dead and living it. Those family faces which he had summoned as his allies and his witnesses, that woody workshop in the Galilee, the fields, the boys, the shady comers in the temple yard, were only feeble memories. Another person’s life. A story toldby someone else. Those pigeons trapped amongst the vegetables would not be freed by Jesus any more. There was no future there for him. No fleshy future anyway. He had surrendered food for dreams. He’d traded in his flesh for everlasting holiness. What would his parents and his neighbours say if they could see him now? They’d say he was a very stupid boy.

But still, of course, he found the strength to drag himself — as good as saved, as good as dead — out of the cave, on to the entrance rock. He clung to it, his body naked to the wind. Already bones had pierced his skin. His chest had folded in on him. Sores on his legs and mouth no longer even tried to heal. His teeth and gums stuck out like balconies across his face. He could not shift the pain behind his eyes, though he was almost blind. He did not feel the cold. In fact, he hardly registered the wind now that he was wrapped in it. He could not separate the wind from al the rushing in his ears. He was as numb as wood. They could have driven nails into his feet. He’d not have felt a thing. His heart was too weak now to send his blood as far as that. His heart had decomposed. ‘Make sacrifices to god, and then prepare yourselffor the winds ofjudgement,’ the scriptures warned. He was prepared. He was the sacrifice.

There was a time of clarity, before his body parted from his soul. There always is. It always comes too late. That’s what makes this moment of departure large and borderless. He summoned up the words for his last prayers. Some Aramaic words, some Greek, some ookuroos, some tok-tok-tok. His prayers were answered in a way. There was a voice, borne on the wind, blown in across the cliffs, a voice not Jewish and not Greek. Jesus’s bones were shaken by the voice. It teased him for a moment with a little hope, even though there was no hope. It raised him from the precipice and placed him in the scrub. If there were any beasts around, then they grew mild. The voice took charge of him. It walked him to the row of distant caves. It led him to the remnants of the flattened tent. It took him to the swelling liver and to the troubled womb. It took him to the badu’s ears. It carried out its ministries on Shim. It worked its miracles. It said, ‘Fat Musa’s dying now. You have to come and save his life. Have pity on the man. There now. That’s it. That’s all there is and ever was. Go back to sleep.’

He was asleep. He slept in the Galilee, Jerusalem, in Caesarea, Greece and Rome. He slept in lands where orange was the orily colour, where all the lakes were full of gold, where every donkey had two tails, where there were lines of strangers waiting to be saved. He placed his fingers on their heads and said, ‘So, here, be weil again.’ A common greeting from the Galilee.

The wind nudged round him, searching for a hold. He lifted slightly, felt his body parting from the rock. The earth had lost its pull on him. He was all surface, no inside. His leafhad fallen finally. He was a dry, discarded page ofscripture now. The wind embraced him, rubbed the words off him. It made him blank. It made him ghostlier than air. Not yet, not me, he might have cried, ifhe’d had any voice. What trick was there, that he could use, to bring companions to his side? What lie, what cowardice, what treachery, would put him back inside his Galilean cot?

This was his final blasphemy. He begged the devil to fly up and save him from the wind. He’d almost welcome the devil more than god. For the devil can be traded with, and exorcized. But god is ruthless and unstable. No one can cast out god. It was too late. Jesus was already standing at the threshold to the trembling world which he had sought, where he would spend his forty everlasting days. So this was death. So this was pain made powerless. So this was fruit turned back into its seed.

Jesus was a voyager, at last, between the heavens and the earth. There was a light, deep in the middle of the night. He tried to swim to it. He tried to fly. He held his hands up to the light. His hands were bluey-white like glass. The light passed through. The mountain shivered from afar. He felt the cold of nothing there. He heard the cold of no one there. No god, no gardens, just the wind.

Musa slept like a donkey. He slept like a dead donkey. Ifsomeone had beaten him with a stick, he wouldn’t have woken up. It was a pity no one came with sticks.

The wind disturbed him finally, though not when it blew. Such winds could not disturb his sleep. But when the sto^ had passed, there was a heavy calm which prodded him awake. His cave had proven warm and comfortable, despite the weather, and so he felt weH rested and alert. He knew exactly where he was and why he’d come, despite the utter darkness. There were no moments of confusion. He’d slept with an erection, ready for his visit to the other cave, so even before he’d opened his eyes the pulsing in his lap reminded him of his great plan. He rubbed his testicles. She’d not escape. She’d not run off. He’d have her trapped inside her cave, as soon as there was any light.

Musa pressed his face into her shawl. There’s still a trace of her, he thought. A trace of spice. Enough to make him salivate. He pulled his own clothes up and untied his undergarments so that he might rub his genitals with her shawl. ‘Give the dog a bit of cloth to smeH,’ that was his policy, ‘and it will sniff the owner out.’ And then? And then he’d put his body in the entrance to her cave. She’d bejust visible to him. It didn’t matter if she screamed. It mattered if she didn’t scream. She’d cower in the shadows or she’d run at him. Perhaps she’d have a stick and try to beat him off. He’d hold her by her ankles or her wrists. He’d press his nails into her flesh. He’d take her lip between his teeth. A woman would not want to tear her lips. She’d stay as still as possible, on tiptoes, with her lip caught in his mouth, her body arched around his stomach. Now he could put his hands exactly where he wanted.

He’d have her naked, with just two tugs, two rips across her back. Her clothes would hang from her, like sample cloths. He’d tie the shawl around her waist and have her sit on him, the flesh and fabric settling and lifting on his thighs, her mouth on his, their ample breasts pressed flat against each other like leavened cakes of bread. If she tried to pull away, the little bag of money on its drawstring round her neck would swing between them like an incense pot. Now Musa had a happy image of himself He’d seize her by her drawstring and pull her breasts and lips back on to his. That’s what he’d do, one of the many things he’d do, when he had trapped her in the cave.

Musa pushed the shawl away from his genitals and let the cold air calm him down. He dared not touch himself again, not yet. He had already come too close to ejaculating. That would be expenditure without returns. How many times he had had sex with women just like this, alone, his penis in his hand, recalling some short encounter from that day. If only he could possess these half-glimpsed women in the flesh, every one of them. If only he could rope them up in bunches and hang them by their ankles from his camel sides, like monkeys. He’d go each night to pick a plump one from the bunch. He was deserving of them ali. If they aroused him, then they should satisfy him too. Women that he’d only glimpsed for moments in a market crowd. Women married to his cousins, caught out half dressed at their ablutions. Older women, careless with their clothes. Girls too young to wear a shawl, too young to care ifMusa saw their legs. Women who had argued with him at his stall, their faces fiery and their shoulders square. Women seen with sickles in their fields as Musa and his camels journeyed by; he’d call to them, and they would stand up, perhaps, arch and stretch their aching backs, and wave at him, shake aU the chaff and dust from off their clothes.