The man put down his curling stick and cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Come out. And talk to us,’ he caled in breathless bursts. His voice was like the echo of a voice, an almost-dead man’s voice, reduced and watery and pale. ‘Come out, Gaily. Let’s see. Your face.’ Gaily? The big man knew him, knew the nickname that his Galilean neighbours used. He knew where he was from. ‘Gaily. Gaily. I’m the one. From yesterday.’ A chilling phrase. ‘You drove the fever out. A miracle. Come out and. Show yourself. .’
Jesus knew that angels and devils could not be told apart just by their looks. Handsome was not virtuous. It was not sinful to be fat. But he could tell the difference. Angels left you calm of spirit when they stepped into your life. Devils left you troubled. Here was a devil then, sent to the wilderness, with death and fever as his friends, attended by four mad, unbelonging souls, to be adversaries to god. Jesus would not come out of the cave, no matter what they said, no matter what their slander was, no matter what they offered him. They’d come to tempt him from the precipice with their thin cries.
15
Slugs came in the night and marked their silver maps on Marta’s legs; and when she woke she had to shake the cave lice out of her clothes. She felt as if a kittle bug had crawled across her face while she was sleeping and laid its gritty eggs along her eyelashes. Her head was full of flies. It seemed she’d swaHowed something in her sleep. It left its scales and bitter mucus on her lips. It bruised her throat. It wrapped itself inside her abdomen and jabbed her stomach every time she moved. A sand-fish or a heavy snake, perhaps? The galing spirit of the scrub fowl whose vertebrae she’dsnapped? The cave had made her grubby, panicky and il.
She had to walk off several times a day, and in the night, to the plug ofboulders where the valley ended, to retch and defecate. There wasn’t any privacy amongst the rocks. She always had an audience of lizards, birds and flies, and there were snakes and leopards observing her in her mind’s eye. Her husband, Thaniel, and all the elders ofSawiya gathered round, disguised as shadows. ‘She’s giving birth to dung,’ he said. ‘That’s the best she can do.’ Once, beyond midnight, her clothes bunched up around her waist, her bowels hot and mutinous, she’d been discovered by the badu. He’d leapt between two boulders, above her crouching body. His naked foot had ahnost struck her head, and both of them had cried out their ala^ in unison. This was only the second time she’d screamed in ahnost ten years, since her marriage night with Thaniel, in fact. The first time had been a day or two before when she’d been struck in the face and chest by the birds hurtling from the grave. If anybody in Sawiya had cried out so loudly there’d be a crowd before the echo died. But this was scrubland, out ofhearing of the caves. No one came.
At first she feared that she’d caught Musa’s fever or that something venomous had bitten her. Anything was possible, in that haggard and incautious land. That’s why she’d persevere with her quarantine, despite her sickness, and the filth. She would not flee back to Sawiya as her good sense and her stomach told her to. If anything could happen, then it would. The good, not just the bad. She was a practised optimist, and her optimism was enhanced by fasting. The desert mystics that she’d heard about from scriptures, prepared a path for god by emptying their 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 il-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 al seemed possible. The ^most-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 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. Al 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 pains were smaller miracles and brought about by those changes in her womb which she had come into the hils 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 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 ofanimals 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 ofher 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. You’ll lose yourself up there. You’H fry. But no one had foretold how she would find a godly pattern to herjourney 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.