254: Longest day of your life (part three)
12:47 pm
Her mother jostles her. Wake up, Zipporah. Time to go to school.
I don't want to.
What of it? Wake up. Wake up. Insistent fingers at her shoulder.
Leave me alone.
Then her mother bites her hard on the hand and she cries out, jerking back to wakefulness, to pain. There's a flurry of wings and a harsh croaking, and she finds herself staring into a beady black eye, intent, recriminating.
Definitely her mother, she thinks, and her head drops back down. Too much. Too much.
She is still again. The bird cocks its red head and moves back in.
"Ai! Lech! Yalak!"
It's a man's voice, and the Hebrew is meaningless, merely sound. More noise follows, and she grimaces. That voice. Familiar. Chaim bar Ari. Sonuvabitch, can't he leave her alone? Can't they all just leave her alone?
A rock hits other rock nearby, and the bird squawks and hops several feet back from her body. "Salak, tzippor!"
She makes the effort to translate, this time. Go away, bird. Huh. He should go away. Who's he to tell her... tell her to do anything... asshole. Asshole.
Maybe he has water.
"Water," she whispers, and then remembers he doesn't speak English and repeats it in Hebrew. "Mayim..."
Above, Chaim hunts another pebble to fling at the vulture. He finds one and hurls it downslope, but at this distance it's little more than a scare tactic. There is his gun, of course, but the bird is damnably close to her, he might hit her...
Yet the woman must be dead. She is fifty feet below him if she is an inch, and he can see blood on her face and soaked through one trouser leg. The foot of that leg is at a bad angle.
"Levine!"
She does not move. Chaim shakes his head. The slope is steep, and he has brought no rope. Can he even get down to her? "Levine!"
Perhaps her head just shifted... no, imagining it. She could not have survived the fall. He rocks back on his heels and considers. For the first time he gives some real attention to the rock he stands on, more than the glimpse he'd spared it when he'd been following the circling birds.
The stone is all marked up, dried blood and scuffed chalk intermingling. He runs a wary fingertip over the nearest line and feels the lingering spark of the sacred. She has worked a powerful thing here, and he frowns at this, that a woman should know so much of the qabalah. Has G-d punished her for this, then, that she lies broken down the cliffside?
Distracted despite himself, Chaim surveys the rest of the site-- an incantation bowl, a knife, a candle, the leather pack she'd had with her. A glass bottle.
His eyes skip over that-- and then return to it, drawn by the sheer menace he can taste in the thing. It floods the back of his mouth like bile and he lifts his left hand and sketches a quick protection with his fingers, then spits threefold, ptui ptui ptui.
There is a piece of crumpled wax paper on the ground. Using that to keep his bare skin from touching it, he lifts the flask.
It looks empty; he knows better. There is a black and hateful and strong thing sealed in the glass, and he sets it down with as much care as his hurry will allow.
What does it all mean? The conclusion's sour in his mind but inevitable: Levine has bound a powerful mazzikim, one-that-does-harm. The woman did this. The soft, ignorant city-dweller American woman... chained a demon that he knows would be beyond his own abilities. Some of the kohen's words to her, and his tolerance of her, become clearer.
Chaim bar Ari reaches out to touch the tools of her work, respectfully. She died victorious, destroying the enemy before she went. He would not be the soldier that he is, a veteran of Israel's never-ending wars with her neighbors, if he did not find this admirable.
He moves back to the rock's edge, drawing his gun. He will shoot the vulture, first, and then-- the plan abandons him as he registers that she is moving. Weak, useless movements, batting at the returned scavenger like a blind kitten-- but moving.
Chaim curses, this time in Hebrew, the blasphemy of it forgotten.
***
12:59 pm
The asshole's gone away but her mother's back, stabbing at her, fuck, what do they want from her life, she's tired, she's so tired, can't she rest, her mother jabs at her with something sharp and even the pain can't keep her from trying to hit back.
Then a door slams, somewhere in the apartment, with a ringing echo that makes her ears hurt, and her mother stops.
"Levine!"
Someone wants her father. They always do. Someone wants to see the rabbi, man that has all the answers, he left her to answer the congregation's questions but she only wants to sleep. Let her mother deal with it.
"Levine! Can you hear me?"
"He's not here right now," she says, except her tongue is swollen in her dry mouth and everything tastes of blood and dust and what actually comes out is a croak. "Come back later..."
"Levine, I'm coming down to you."
You can't come down to me, she wants to tell the caller. I am upstairs, in my bed, and Mameh is waking me for school. Me first, and then Aaron and Isaac, and Papi will be down at the table with the paper and his tea... drinking his tea... from a good Shabbos teacup, white china, blue patterns, this shall be a remembrance to you, my daughter, my daughter, my daughter.
She thinks of tea, sweet tea, wet in the mouth, washing out the dust and the blood. Iced tea. Summer tea in tall plastic glasses. Mint in it, from the neighbor's rooftop garden. Rattle of ice cubes. Eating lemon slices with her brothers, making faces. She could eat the most, more than both of them, she could always take the sour with the sweet, and never backed down, never, never, tougher than the boys, I'm tougher than...
The desert reels around her, far far away. She floats in honeyed tea, in the land of milk and...
Then her mother is back again. Never stops. That's a Jewish mother for you. Can't leave it the hell alone, can you, Mameh? Fingers touching the sharp pain in her temple, making her whimper, then at her neck, then her body, and then the hands move on down to her knee and the world explodes in pain.
The woman screams, and Chaim grimaces in sympathy but continues his exploration. Her neck is unbroken, her ribs too as near as he can tell. She has some bad scrapes and he guesses that under her clothes her skin will be a mottlework of bruises. But the worst of it is her head, the cut his probing fingers felt as they worked through her blood-sticky hair, and the leg.
The leg...
He has to move accumulated dirt and pebbles to get a good look at it. Chaim exhales air between his teeth as he notes that her trousers are ripped, that the shape beneath the fabric is wrong. He digs out his pocketknife and begins to saw at the blood-soaked khaki, knowing that he'll see bone when he peels the cloth gingerly from her skin.
He's right; a jagged shard of white juts from a red mouth. The woman is whimpering, an animal noise that rises to a keen when he touches the surrounding flesh. Chaim takes a deep breath.
How long has she been here? Her skin is pale and moist to the touch. She shows no sign of hearing his questions. There is no way, unless G-d should send his angels down to help carry, that he can get her back up that cliff face-- it was hard enough coming down.
He unslings his canteen and works quickly. Rinsing the dirty wounds first, careful, careful, make nothing worse... once they are clean, he can see they're no longer bleeding. Thank G-d for small mercies.
He dribbles a small quantity from the canteen into her mouth, testing, and she takes it without choking. He gives her some more. Her eyes open, but they do not focus.
"Levine," he murmurs, "I must straighten your leg now. It is going to hurt."
She moans, her eyelids flutter. He doesn't think it's an answer to his words.
He makes the motion quick, efficient. G-d is merciful: she passes out.
The broken skin around the knee trickles only a little more blood, good. So. Shade, water, cover the wounds. There is a bandanna in one of his pockets that should be clean enough; he digs it out and wraps it around the ugly mess of her shattered kneecap. Now, a way to keep her leg still...
This would all be easier, Chaim thinks with a grunt as he looks around him, if they weren't halfway down a cliff, saved from gravity only by a narrow ledge, by the jut of a few boulders. His resources are limited. Very well. First, then, he needs a way to keep her from falling off the rock while he's gone.
He supposes he might pray.
***
1:18 pm
She drifts...
In the ocean things are peaceful, empty. In the ocean nothing bothers her. No thoughts here, in the black sea. No obligations, no duty, no pain. The deep currents are slow and carry her like a fetus safe in its mother's womb.
Only when she drifts near shore is there trouble. She hears it first, the pound of the surf on the beach, slow and dirgelike, louder as the currents drag her toward it. The great deep boom of the salt tide in the channels of her veins, crashing on the rocks of consciousness.
She struggles to get back to deep water, but the strong tides sweep her in, back to land, dragging her along the ocean's bottom, stripping her skin against the rocks and sand... washing her back to pain.
She moans, and hears the sound as her own, as real. Swallows, breathes, slits open an eye.
Light again. Her head spins with the rolling action of the waves, until she remembers there are no waves, no water, only heat and sun and pain. Her stomach heaves within her. Settles. Sensations ebb and flow, fold and unfold. Time dilates.
At some point she becomes aware of a thing above her, between her and the sun. Gray-green. Swimming in and out of focus. She reaches one hand up to it, trusting her fingers more than her eyes and no longer keeping track of what motion causes what pain-- it gives at her touch, a little. Soft. Cloth? Cloth. Is she in a tent? No, she doesn't think so.
That's enough thinking. She lets her hand drop back to her side. Lets the ocean waters drag her back into their blessed cool.
When she comes back to shore again, some time later, things are a little clearer. The pain is sharper, but she breathes with it, keeps pace with it for at least a few steps. She discovers, through careful exploration with the hand that does not hurt much, that there are leather straps looped to her belt. Tactile memory gives her what they are-- her tefillin-- but not their purpose. Not why they should stretch away from her belt tautly and be tied around rough stone.
Did the kohen tell her to do this? She remembers he told her to do something. What was it?
Oh well.
She finds that she cannot move her leg, which is fine. She doesn't want to move it, she knows that much. It hurts.
Drift, drift...
A sound draws her back, an annoying noise. Buzz, buzz. "Buzz away, little bee." She watches shadows moving on the gray-green thing. The tent roof. Is she in a tent? Is she in a tent? Is she... and the question washes away with the tide.
The little buzzing shadows keep moving, dancing little buzzing dances. She wishes they would be quiet. Let her sleep. But bees are good, aren't they? They make honey. She is in the land of milk and honey. This is paradise.
(The flies crawl over the grey-green cotton of Chaim's stretched tank-top, and over the nearby corpse of the jackal, and swarm blackly over her leg.)
Time loops on itself like the black leather straps that knot her to the rock...
The jackal talks to her through a broken jaw. Its eyes teem with dark bodies and glittering wings. "Well, here we are, little sister," it says, and by the voice she knows it was, in fact, female. "I am dead and you are dying."
"I'm sorry about that," she answers. The jackal shrugs.
"I had a good life," she rasps, stagnant blood trickling from the corners of her black lips. "I knew sweet flesh under my teeth and the open hills. I ran free. I had many mates, and I bore kits the color of dust and licked them clean of their birthing blood. Until the shadow took me I had nothing to regret."
"I know exactly what you mean," Zipporah answers. "Listen, do you have any water?"
But there is no answer. She raises her head despite the crazy things this does to the world, sees that the jackal is dead and her mother is eating its flesh. "Hello, mother," she croaks at the hunch-shouldered figure with the bloody beak, and feels the effort of speaking aloud. Her head drops back down to the rock.
Her mother just shakes her head. Her mother is so eloquent with her silences.
Papi had threatened to disown her when she'd told him about Finn, the goy, the man she was going to marry. Mameh had said nothing...
No, not nothing, she thinks as the cool waters close over her again. Mameh had said one thing to her about the marriage. Pursed her lips and said, You will have children with him. She still doesn't know whether this was meant as prophecy, promise, statement-of-ultimate-ill-fortune...
She has no children. She has given nothing back, grown no new life in the pit of her belly. Only taken.
You will have children with him, her mother repeats, shaking out big black wings and croaking harsh oracle to the desert.
(Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only /
(The wind will listen...)
***
2:02 pm
It's easier going down this time. He has a rope.
Chaim's boots rain trickles of dust down onto the woman's body as he rappels down to the ledge, another vulture winging off at his approach. The drone of flies is heavy in the air, and he berates himself for not disposing of the vulture he had shot. There is a jackal, also, half-buried in dirt and pebbles, and he wonders at it before dropping both carcasses over the edge. A few ants cling to his fingers; he brushes them off. There will be more on her.
She hasn't moved much. The rocks and sand he packed on either side of her leg to immobilize it are still in place. Her pulse is steady, her skin still too hot. Chaim slings off his pack.
He rigs a proper sunshade from the tarp, then inspects her injuries. More rinsing, precious water swirling away pink-tinged. Ants and gnats wash away with the blood...
Chaim has radio'ed to Carmel and explained the situation to the kohen, and marked the path from camp. Still, he knows it will be time before any help arrives. Time to get medical supplies, and time for them to drive the old jeep back up through the hills, and time to follow his trail to the cliff. It could be hours.
The bottle of Bactine runs out while he's treating the raw flesh on her right palm. He guesses that she reached out to stop her fall and lost a layer of skin for her pains. Chaim sighs and puts the empty bottle back in his pack, holds her hand awkwardly because the only place to put it is back in the dirt.
Her eyes are open, looking not quite at his face, perhaps at the level of his shoulder. "Levine?" he asks quietly.
She doesn’t answer him verbally, but her fingers tighten on his, and her eyes close.
Her mother's gone. Again. She wishes she'd make up her mind. Tedious, this back-and-forth. Tedious. Like the pain. Nausea still comes in waves, but she thinks, tentatively, it is less often. The lion has something to do with it.
The jackal left when he arrived. He is a black lion, with a Magen David haloing his head. He licked her wounds with a rough tongue, and trickled oasis water into her mouth. Stands guard, the lean desert hunter, flowing over the rocks of Chaim bar Ari's shoulder in stylized ink.
"Daughter of your people," he says to her, his voice a low thunder rolling up from the Negev, "you must stay here now."
Here? she thinks, and feels a wave of sickness at the thought. Here. On the land. It hurts here. She longs for the ocean, for cool and quiet. For a slow sink from surface blue to deep black. Rest. Let the water claim her. Let her drop to the bottom and become bones. Surely she has paid her debt.
(And I who am here dissembled /
(Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love /
(To the posterity of the desert...)
She shudders her refusal. Leave me alone, she pleads of the stoic lion, who tosses his head and mane at her words.
"You must take responsibility." Her father's words, growled by the animal, and so grossly unfair that she begins to weep. Hasn't she? Hasn't she done that yet? She chased Mazreel over half the world. Learned enough to chain him. Did so. Does all this count for nothing?
"Levine," says the lion, except not really him, and someone touches her face. "Can you hear me?"
She nods, but the movement renews pain. Wince with it, feel it settled in the back of your teeth and skull. It hurts. It hurts, dammit!
"The others are coming with help. Until then, I can't do anything more. Here, you need more water."
Water-- a magic word as potent as any she'd written on the rock. Chaim tips the canteen to her mouth and she drinks. He pulls it back far too soon and she begins to cry again, like a child pushed past all frustration.
"Not too much. It will make you sick," he says. Asshole. But he gives her more, and two bitter aspirin that are an ordeal to swallow, and he puts a damp rag on her forehead. She settles in with the pain because the shoreline has her now, the tides are no longer high enough to carry her back out to sea.
Chaim watches the woman's eyes drift half to shut. They're dull with pain but she can hear him, answer him. Good things, these. He holds up one hand.
"How many fingers?"
The question smacks of her father. Trick questions thrown at a child. He had always pushed her, always, until the day she had pushed back and insisted he teach her things she was too young (too female) to learn. (And hadn't that all ended well? A dead child, a self-imposed exile?)
Chaim's hand flickers in front of her like stop-motion photography. Like Finn reshaping the clay. Blur, blur, blur away, little bird. She looks to the lion instead.
The lion rumbles, "How many hands, daughter, to bring you here? Yours, your father's, the demon's..."
"Three," she whispers, and Chaim bar Ari nods. "Good."
The hand with its uncountable fingers reaches for the prayer straps and checks them, and she deals with a sudden comprehension. "You... did that."
"You might have fallen," he says, retying one knot. ("Consider that you have fallen," says the lion.)
She turns her head an inch to the side, all the savage ache in her skull will allow, trying to see how she might have fallen, where she would have gone if she had. Down. She would have gone down. The ocean's bottom. Becoming bones.
"You should have let me fall," she tells him, and closes her eyes again.
Chaim frowns, and lifts the canteen for a measured swallow of his own. This is thirsty work. "How so?" he asks as he lowers the water. She doesn't answer him, and he repeats the question, nudging her unscraped cheek with a finger.
Her eyes slit open again, and for the first time since she regained consciousness he feels she truly sees him. But she says nothing. He caps the canteen; her eyes follow the motion.
"How so, Levine? Why should I have let you fall? How could I do that?"
She shifts a little on the rock, wincing with the motion. Her voice is a croak, a rasp, a broken wheeze through cracked lips. "Come on. You don't even like me."
Chaim considers this, his gaze drifting out over the landscape. Yes, that much remains true. Respect is not the same as affection. He shrugs. "Not so much, no. This has what to do with it? You are one of us."
"I'm--" she stops to cough, and her fingers, somehow still on his hand, grip with spasmic strength as she does so, "--how'm I one of you? I've never been one of you. Tits, remember?"
He thinks of the slick, oily feel of the bottle in his hand and against his soul, the desire to wash his hands that he'd felt after setting it down. He says, "I saw the demon. You are a soldier. You've earned that."
Zipporah chokes at that, and it takes a second for Chaim to realize it was actually a laugh. She's trying to talk, but pain contorts her face and he shakes his head. "Don't waste your strength. Rest."
"Oh fuck you," she hisses, her fingernails cutting into the back of his hand. "Just-- fuck you. I've earned it? I've earned it? You have no-- no idea-- what-- you see him in the fucking bottle and you graciously say, now I've earned being one of you? Now I've proven myself, now I'm your equal?"
She is fire; he is stone. "Yes. Now you have," he says. "We serve the same thing, Levine. Israel. God. They are different gates of the same city... and good warriors for the walls are few. So how should I let a fellow soldier die, whatever I feel for him?" He shrugs.
"There are many more battles to come. We serve by remaining alive to fight them."
Her too-bright eyes stare at him with all the affection one might give to a scorpion, and then she closes up, the battered lines of her faces going blank. "I've done my service," she rasps, and turns her head away. "Leave me alone."
***
4:20 pm
The sun moves on, dragging her, in its wake, onto occasional islands of lucidity. Focusing on Chaim-- making herself speak to him and not the lion-- helps ground her, but it exhausts her, he exhausts her, with his words of holy war and warriors.
Duty. Who is he to speak to her as if she doesn't know about it? Childhood on was a lecture in her responsibilities as the rabbi's daughter, the eldest child, the one whom (it must be admitted) he favored. (Ah, Zipporah, if only you'd been a boy!)
Her responsibilities... Tikkun olam: to perfect the universe. To perform mitzvot. Do good deeds, daughter of your people. Be a protector, a servant, a leader. Be wise and upright and holy. Be chosen, even from among the Chosen.
And she'd eaten it up, fallen in love with it. Fancied herself a damn tzadik. Been so eager to fix little Sophie.
So. See where duty gets you.
Duty gets you the desert, just what her people have always gotten from the hand of the Lord. Promised paradise, then led into the wilderness. Duty gets you four months of sand up your fucking ass, twelve months of living out of a backpack, two years of nightmares, and all the guilt you can eat.
Sour lemons. Proving you can take it, just like the boys.
Well-- her own laugh is a grating echo in her head, jangling the pain awake again-- she has certainly taken it.
Oh, and duty gets you pain, apparently. Pain upon pain upon pain, from the hot little prickles of the biting ants to the stabbing agony that lives in her head.
She licks her dry lips and pokes Chaim's hand. "Talk to me. Not--" he's arching one black brow at her, "--about serving God. Or Israel. Just-- distract me. Please."
He frowns, new lines forming in the topography of his weathered face. "You should breathe with the pain. You know?" She shakes her head. "When you breathe out, the oxygen enters your blood, and endorphins. Breathe deep. Take the pain... put it in a box. Close the box."
He mimes the motion, brown hands slicing through the air, and she has to close her eyes because following his movements just makes the headache worse. His voice continues though, his Hebrew that is rough and chopped and with all its lovely edges eroded away by the polishing action of mundane use. Here in Israel, it is the daily tongue as well as the sacred.
"Put the box behind a door. Close the door. Keep it shut. You say, I can deal with this later, and you trick your body like this. And you keep breathing."
It is not unlike the walls, she thinks. The labyrinth she builds to protect her soul when dealing with evil things. Put the pain into a corner of the fortress, a dark corner, put many gates in front of it, lock them, walk away. Another lesson to be mastered. She refuses to say thank you, teacher.
She tries the exercise, forcing her breathing to even out, forcing cooperation from her mind. She says, "Keep talking."
Chaim grunts and turns his head back out to the desert, wiping his palms on his trousers.
"What about?"
"Anything. I don't care. Tell me about you, your family, I don't know."
He is silent for several seconds, tracing the limestone cliffs with his hawk's eyes. "I have no family," he says eventually. "I never married."
She wrestles with the box, with the pain. Visualize the box. Can't just be some abstraction of a box. A real box, so real in mind she can see the grain of the wood, the joints holding it together... "Parents, then. Everyone has parents."
"They're dead." He says it like he'd say 'it is warm today.'
She gives up on the box. Too much work. She's so tired. "No brothers? Sisters?" she asks, and guesses his answer before he even starts to shake his head. "You're what, in your forties? Why didn't you ever marry, Chaim bar Ari? Isn't it mitzvah, to find a wife?"
"Thirty-five." Her own age. He looks so much older. Then again, she hasn't seen a mirror since they came out to the desert. Perhaps she has the same crow's feet now, the same stretched quality of the skin.
Chaim's hawk eyes rake the cliffs on the other side of the valley, his slight frown the only sign he is considering her question. He purses his lips then says, "Israel... is my wife."
She's bracing for him to start again, but Chaim doesn't bring up service or duty or any other word that might make her scream right now. He touches the cliff face, rubs dry dust between his fingers.
"The land was fertile once. So we are told," he says, and nods at the bare cliffs that surround them. "In David's time these hills grew olives. So we are told. When the Temple is rebuilt, Israel will be paradise again. So we are told.
"Maybe. When Messiah comes. But I do not live in the Israel that may be. I live in the Israel that is, this Israel, what we have today. She is not perfect. Life is not so easy here as for you in America. Half the country is like this: rock, sand, desert. Nothing grows here. So why fight for it, why love it? Because it is mine. Because it is home.
"Because she is like a woman I have been married to many years. I know her moods, her dangers, when she is safe and when not. I live with her, without trying to change her. I know her. And she knows me."
He gestures at the cliffs and the gorges and the wind-carved sandstone. "When I am here-- the desert allows no lies, do you understand that? The lies we tell ourselves and each other, when we are in the cities-- the desert destroys these. It strips the land down to the bone, and the same to people.
"Israel makes me honest. What woman could do that?"
There is silence, the wind hissing over the rock. Zipporah cannot turn her head to see the landscape, but she can see his face, and they are more or less the same. She closes her eyes against the heat and the emptiness.
(The desert in the garden the garden in the desert /
(Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.)
"What?" he says, and she realizes she spoke aloud. She considers trying to translate it, but no, forget it, her mind isn't anywhere near being up to it.
"It's from a poem," she says, and then coughs a laugh. "Written by a man who hated the Jews. Can I have another drink?"
"The canteen is running low," he warns, but he unscrews the cap.
***
6:59 pm
The sun keeps moving. Drops past the invisible line that puts the bulk of cliff between it and them, and they get shade: first a sliver, then a patch...
The aspirin wear off-- they did little more than take the edge off in any case-- and Zipporah sinks back into the shallow tidepools between oblivion and clarity. She believes that the shadow-patches creeping down the cliff are jackals, leaping from stone to stone, coming for her body, held at bay only by the lion's presence. Let them come.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose...
Purpose. She has no purpose, anymore. She had one; it is caged in the bottle, completed, accomplished. The jackals have purpose. They circle her, their paws gliding over rock and thin air alike, and their leader, the dead one, says, "We can wait.
"This is our purpose, to wait for the living to become the dying, the dying to become the dead, who feed us. We are patient. Come down to us, sister. Come down now. Let this business be resolved."
Yes... except-- except all is not resolved. There is a letter in her tent, unsent, unfinished. Her father... he will blame himself, he does already. He taught her, after all.
But she had insisted. He should bear no guilt in this.
She gropes for the lion's arm, the man-who-is-the-lion. "Chaim. Chaim."
He asks her if she needs more water. No. "Chaim-- you must tell my father something. Rabbi Levine, in New York, he will be easy to find. You must tell him-- it wasn't his fault. Tell him-- tell him that I repaired the universe. That I did that much."
He says to her, No, I will not, because you will tell him yourself.
When he says this she understands it is not so much that she wants to die as that she cannot go back. She cannot. Can't go back to Manhattan, can't just pick things up as if she had never left. The demon is stopped but the child is still dead. The child will always be dead. Abe Kaufmann will always be saying What have you done? What have you done?
"I can't go back," she says, and watches the hungry shadows lengthening, drawing closer. But the lion does not give ground. He stares at her from Chaim bar Ari's strong right arm, eyes of ink unblinking: the desert personified. The ruthlessness that allows no deceit.
Israel strips her down to the bone. Israel drags truth from her.
It comes out in fragments, broken by the pain and her delirium. She hasn't told the kohen of this, didn't tell Rabbi Weiss, told her father only the facts. She tells it to him, a man she doesn't even like; a man here with her in the promised land, which more closely resembles the ends of the earth.
She tells him about the child, so silent, the child who had not believed her when she had said it was going to be okay. Tells him what her ego led to.
"Chaim bar Ari," she whispers, "I did a bad thing."
And he, in turn, tells her that sometimes soldiers do.
Chaim tells her soldier stories (soldier confessions). Tells her of covert missions into Jordan and Syria and Lebanon, some on orders and some not. Raids to exact retribution, the eye-for-eye and blood-for-blood war that has been fought ever since Ishmael was born to Abraham's mistress.
The words flow like grains of sand across her ears... and, mingled with the soft susurrus of atrocities committed for ideals, the lion on Chaim's arm speaks as well.
"Of what significance is your guilt, daughter?" he growls. "Is it greater than David's, in whose sign I reside? David whom the Lord deemed worthy of honor?"
Chaim talks of Lebanon in 1982. Rising body counts and politician's lies.
The lion stares her down. "Is what you have done more wicked than the king's murder of his own soldier for the sake of his lust? Are you arrogant enough to believe this, daughter of your people?"
Chaim tells her of dead civilians, on both sides of the border. Bodies mutilated and left for the enemy to find. Things done in the heat of battle, in the cold of vengeance, that would be unthinkable at any other time.
"David received from the Lord's hand his punishment, and you have received yours. It is not for you to decree your own judgment. It is not for you to say your life is forfeit for your sins. Your life, and your death, are in the Lord's keeping."
Chaim is still talking but she cannot make out the words, only the message... one of blood, one of death, such that her own experience pales in comparison, and woven through and around his words is the relentless truth of the lion of the tribe of Judah, whose face has grown to fill her pain-shrouded universe.
"Daughter, you will bear the marks of what happened here all the days of your life. This is your atonement. This shall be a remembrance unto you. But your exile is ended. Go forth from the wilderness. Live, and live with the greater wisdom you have purchased here."
Chaim speaks, but not to her-- he is standing in a quick lurch of motion that dizzies her, and shouting at someone up above them, shouts that are answered back, male voices that she is vaguely aware she should recognize. She closes her eyes again.
The lion follows her into the darkness, stepping down from the tattoo's black on brown and standing over her, massive, tawny, his eyes golden, his warm breath sweet on her face even if it is only the gust of hot desert air as the tarp is removed. His mane brushes her face, and the rough tongue licks the scraped skin of her aching cheek, a benediction, a blessing, a farewell.
"Go home, daughter."
***
7:43 pm
The sun is setting by the time the men hoist her up the cliffside. She ascends by rope, sitting in a field sling made of the tarp that had shaded her, pulled by strong hands. Chaim's voice shouts directions from below her but she barely hears them.
She is suspended halfway between them, between Chaim bar Ari and the others, between heaven and earth. Caught in the dying sun's red light, and rising.
The cliffs are washed in crimson and scarlet, and she looks on this and no longer thinks about blood. Only that there is beauty here, and beauty in the fiery horizon, and beauty in the flight of a hawk that cuts the valley's air.
And the words that fill her mind as she leaves the desert and the jackals behind are not Eliot, are not Ash Wednesday, but the prophet Isaiah:
Console, console My people, says your God. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem and call her, tell her that her time of service is accomplished, that her guilt has been paid off, for she has received from the hand of the Lord double for all her sins.
***
OOC: Due to length, this is being posted in three parts: Part One - Part Two - Part Three.
***
Fandom: OC
Muse: Zippy Levine
Word count: you don't really want to know
Additional: Holy shit I finally got this done now maybe I can start working on other fucking prompts again holy shit
...holy shit
Her mother jostles her. Wake up, Zipporah. Time to go to school.
I don't want to.
What of it? Wake up. Wake up. Insistent fingers at her shoulder.
Leave me alone.
Then her mother bites her hard on the hand and she cries out, jerking back to wakefulness, to pain. There's a flurry of wings and a harsh croaking, and she finds herself staring into a beady black eye, intent, recriminating.
Definitely her mother, she thinks, and her head drops back down. Too much. Too much.
She is still again. The bird cocks its red head and moves back in.
"Ai! Lech! Yalak!"
It's a man's voice, and the Hebrew is meaningless, merely sound. More noise follows, and she grimaces. That voice. Familiar. Chaim bar Ari. Sonuvabitch, can't he leave her alone? Can't they all just leave her alone?
A rock hits other rock nearby, and the bird squawks and hops several feet back from her body. "Salak, tzippor!"
She makes the effort to translate, this time. Go away, bird. Huh. He should go away. Who's he to tell her... tell her to do anything... asshole. Asshole.
Maybe he has water.
"Water," she whispers, and then remembers he doesn't speak English and repeats it in Hebrew. "Mayim..."
Above, Chaim hunts another pebble to fling at the vulture. He finds one and hurls it downslope, but at this distance it's little more than a scare tactic. There is his gun, of course, but the bird is damnably close to her, he might hit her...
Yet the woman must be dead. She is fifty feet below him if she is an inch, and he can see blood on her face and soaked through one trouser leg. The foot of that leg is at a bad angle.
"Levine!"
She does not move. Chaim shakes his head. The slope is steep, and he has brought no rope. Can he even get down to her? "Levine!"
Perhaps her head just shifted... no, imagining it. She could not have survived the fall. He rocks back on his heels and considers. For the first time he gives some real attention to the rock he stands on, more than the glimpse he'd spared it when he'd been following the circling birds.
The stone is all marked up, dried blood and scuffed chalk intermingling. He runs a wary fingertip over the nearest line and feels the lingering spark of the sacred. She has worked a powerful thing here, and he frowns at this, that a woman should know so much of the qabalah. Has G-d punished her for this, then, that she lies broken down the cliffside?
Distracted despite himself, Chaim surveys the rest of the site-- an incantation bowl, a knife, a candle, the leather pack she'd had with her. A glass bottle.
His eyes skip over that-- and then return to it, drawn by the sheer menace he can taste in the thing. It floods the back of his mouth like bile and he lifts his left hand and sketches a quick protection with his fingers, then spits threefold, ptui ptui ptui.
There is a piece of crumpled wax paper on the ground. Using that to keep his bare skin from touching it, he lifts the flask.
It looks empty; he knows better. There is a black and hateful and strong thing sealed in the glass, and he sets it down with as much care as his hurry will allow.
What does it all mean? The conclusion's sour in his mind but inevitable: Levine has bound a powerful mazzikim, one-that-does-harm. The woman did this. The soft, ignorant city-dweller American woman... chained a demon that he knows would be beyond his own abilities. Some of the kohen's words to her, and his tolerance of her, become clearer.
Chaim bar Ari reaches out to touch the tools of her work, respectfully. She died victorious, destroying the enemy before she went. He would not be the soldier that he is, a veteran of Israel's never-ending wars with her neighbors, if he did not find this admirable.
He moves back to the rock's edge, drawing his gun. He will shoot the vulture, first, and then-- the plan abandons him as he registers that she is moving. Weak, useless movements, batting at the returned scavenger like a blind kitten-- but moving.
Chaim curses, this time in Hebrew, the blasphemy of it forgotten.
***
12:59 pm
The asshole's gone away but her mother's back, stabbing at her, fuck, what do they want from her life, she's tired, she's so tired, can't she rest, her mother jabs at her with something sharp and even the pain can't keep her from trying to hit back.
Then a door slams, somewhere in the apartment, with a ringing echo that makes her ears hurt, and her mother stops.
"Levine!"
Someone wants her father. They always do. Someone wants to see the rabbi, man that has all the answers, he left her to answer the congregation's questions but she only wants to sleep. Let her mother deal with it.
"Levine! Can you hear me?"
"He's not here right now," she says, except her tongue is swollen in her dry mouth and everything tastes of blood and dust and what actually comes out is a croak. "Come back later..."
"Levine, I'm coming down to you."
You can't come down to me, she wants to tell the caller. I am upstairs, in my bed, and Mameh is waking me for school. Me first, and then Aaron and Isaac, and Papi will be down at the table with the paper and his tea... drinking his tea... from a good Shabbos teacup, white china, blue patterns, this shall be a remembrance to you, my daughter, my daughter, my daughter.
She thinks of tea, sweet tea, wet in the mouth, washing out the dust and the blood. Iced tea. Summer tea in tall plastic glasses. Mint in it, from the neighbor's rooftop garden. Rattle of ice cubes. Eating lemon slices with her brothers, making faces. She could eat the most, more than both of them, she could always take the sour with the sweet, and never backed down, never, never, tougher than the boys, I'm tougher than...
The desert reels around her, far far away. She floats in honeyed tea, in the land of milk and...
Then her mother is back again. Never stops. That's a Jewish mother for you. Can't leave it the hell alone, can you, Mameh? Fingers touching the sharp pain in her temple, making her whimper, then at her neck, then her body, and then the hands move on down to her knee and the world explodes in pain.
The woman screams, and Chaim grimaces in sympathy but continues his exploration. Her neck is unbroken, her ribs too as near as he can tell. She has some bad scrapes and he guesses that under her clothes her skin will be a mottlework of bruises. But the worst of it is her head, the cut his probing fingers felt as they worked through her blood-sticky hair, and the leg.
The leg...
He has to move accumulated dirt and pebbles to get a good look at it. Chaim exhales air between his teeth as he notes that her trousers are ripped, that the shape beneath the fabric is wrong. He digs out his pocketknife and begins to saw at the blood-soaked khaki, knowing that he'll see bone when he peels the cloth gingerly from her skin.
He's right; a jagged shard of white juts from a red mouth. The woman is whimpering, an animal noise that rises to a keen when he touches the surrounding flesh. Chaim takes a deep breath.
How long has she been here? Her skin is pale and moist to the touch. She shows no sign of hearing his questions. There is no way, unless G-d should send his angels down to help carry, that he can get her back up that cliff face-- it was hard enough coming down.
He unslings his canteen and works quickly. Rinsing the dirty wounds first, careful, careful, make nothing worse... once they are clean, he can see they're no longer bleeding. Thank G-d for small mercies.
He dribbles a small quantity from the canteen into her mouth, testing, and she takes it without choking. He gives her some more. Her eyes open, but they do not focus.
"Levine," he murmurs, "I must straighten your leg now. It is going to hurt."
She moans, her eyelids flutter. He doesn't think it's an answer to his words.
He makes the motion quick, efficient. G-d is merciful: she passes out.
The broken skin around the knee trickles only a little more blood, good. So. Shade, water, cover the wounds. There is a bandanna in one of his pockets that should be clean enough; he digs it out and wraps it around the ugly mess of her shattered kneecap. Now, a way to keep her leg still...
This would all be easier, Chaim thinks with a grunt as he looks around him, if they weren't halfway down a cliff, saved from gravity only by a narrow ledge, by the jut of a few boulders. His resources are limited. Very well. First, then, he needs a way to keep her from falling off the rock while he's gone.
He supposes he might pray.
***
1:18 pm
She drifts...
In the ocean things are peaceful, empty. In the ocean nothing bothers her. No thoughts here, in the black sea. No obligations, no duty, no pain. The deep currents are slow and carry her like a fetus safe in its mother's womb.
Only when she drifts near shore is there trouble. She hears it first, the pound of the surf on the beach, slow and dirgelike, louder as the currents drag her toward it. The great deep boom of the salt tide in the channels of her veins, crashing on the rocks of consciousness.
She struggles to get back to deep water, but the strong tides sweep her in, back to land, dragging her along the ocean's bottom, stripping her skin against the rocks and sand... washing her back to pain.
She moans, and hears the sound as her own, as real. Swallows, breathes, slits open an eye.
Light again. Her head spins with the rolling action of the waves, until she remembers there are no waves, no water, only heat and sun and pain. Her stomach heaves within her. Settles. Sensations ebb and flow, fold and unfold. Time dilates.
At some point she becomes aware of a thing above her, between her and the sun. Gray-green. Swimming in and out of focus. She reaches one hand up to it, trusting her fingers more than her eyes and no longer keeping track of what motion causes what pain-- it gives at her touch, a little. Soft. Cloth? Cloth. Is she in a tent? No, she doesn't think so.
That's enough thinking. She lets her hand drop back to her side. Lets the ocean waters drag her back into their blessed cool.
When she comes back to shore again, some time later, things are a little clearer. The pain is sharper, but she breathes with it, keeps pace with it for at least a few steps. She discovers, through careful exploration with the hand that does not hurt much, that there are leather straps looped to her belt. Tactile memory gives her what they are-- her tefillin-- but not their purpose. Not why they should stretch away from her belt tautly and be tied around rough stone.
Did the kohen tell her to do this? She remembers he told her to do something. What was it?
Oh well.
She finds that she cannot move her leg, which is fine. She doesn't want to move it, she knows that much. It hurts.
Drift, drift...
A sound draws her back, an annoying noise. Buzz, buzz. "Buzz away, little bee." She watches shadows moving on the gray-green thing. The tent roof. Is she in a tent? Is she in a tent? Is she... and the question washes away with the tide.
The little buzzing shadows keep moving, dancing little buzzing dances. She wishes they would be quiet. Let her sleep. But bees are good, aren't they? They make honey. She is in the land of milk and honey. This is paradise.
(The flies crawl over the grey-green cotton of Chaim's stretched tank-top, and over the nearby corpse of the jackal, and swarm blackly over her leg.)
Time loops on itself like the black leather straps that knot her to the rock...
The jackal talks to her through a broken jaw. Its eyes teem with dark bodies and glittering wings. "Well, here we are, little sister," it says, and by the voice she knows it was, in fact, female. "I am dead and you are dying."
"I'm sorry about that," she answers. The jackal shrugs.
"I had a good life," she rasps, stagnant blood trickling from the corners of her black lips. "I knew sweet flesh under my teeth and the open hills. I ran free. I had many mates, and I bore kits the color of dust and licked them clean of their birthing blood. Until the shadow took me I had nothing to regret."
"I know exactly what you mean," Zipporah answers. "Listen, do you have any water?"
But there is no answer. She raises her head despite the crazy things this does to the world, sees that the jackal is dead and her mother is eating its flesh. "Hello, mother," she croaks at the hunch-shouldered figure with the bloody beak, and feels the effort of speaking aloud. Her head drops back down to the rock.
Her mother just shakes her head. Her mother is so eloquent with her silences.
Papi had threatened to disown her when she'd told him about Finn, the goy, the man she was going to marry. Mameh had said nothing...
No, not nothing, she thinks as the cool waters close over her again. Mameh had said one thing to her about the marriage. Pursed her lips and said, You will have children with him. She still doesn't know whether this was meant as prophecy, promise, statement-of-ultimate-ill-fortune...
She has no children. She has given nothing back, grown no new life in the pit of her belly. Only taken.
You will have children with him, her mother repeats, shaking out big black wings and croaking harsh oracle to the desert.
(Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only /
(The wind will listen...)
***
2:02 pm
It's easier going down this time. He has a rope.
Chaim's boots rain trickles of dust down onto the woman's body as he rappels down to the ledge, another vulture winging off at his approach. The drone of flies is heavy in the air, and he berates himself for not disposing of the vulture he had shot. There is a jackal, also, half-buried in dirt and pebbles, and he wonders at it before dropping both carcasses over the edge. A few ants cling to his fingers; he brushes them off. There will be more on her.
She hasn't moved much. The rocks and sand he packed on either side of her leg to immobilize it are still in place. Her pulse is steady, her skin still too hot. Chaim slings off his pack.
He rigs a proper sunshade from the tarp, then inspects her injuries. More rinsing, precious water swirling away pink-tinged. Ants and gnats wash away with the blood...
Chaim has radio'ed to Carmel and explained the situation to the kohen, and marked the path from camp. Still, he knows it will be time before any help arrives. Time to get medical supplies, and time for them to drive the old jeep back up through the hills, and time to follow his trail to the cliff. It could be hours.
The bottle of Bactine runs out while he's treating the raw flesh on her right palm. He guesses that she reached out to stop her fall and lost a layer of skin for her pains. Chaim sighs and puts the empty bottle back in his pack, holds her hand awkwardly because the only place to put it is back in the dirt.
Her eyes are open, looking not quite at his face, perhaps at the level of his shoulder. "Levine?" he asks quietly.
She doesn’t answer him verbally, but her fingers tighten on his, and her eyes close.
Her mother's gone. Again. She wishes she'd make up her mind. Tedious, this back-and-forth. Tedious. Like the pain. Nausea still comes in waves, but she thinks, tentatively, it is less often. The lion has something to do with it.
The jackal left when he arrived. He is a black lion, with a Magen David haloing his head. He licked her wounds with a rough tongue, and trickled oasis water into her mouth. Stands guard, the lean desert hunter, flowing over the rocks of Chaim bar Ari's shoulder in stylized ink.
"Daughter of your people," he says to her, his voice a low thunder rolling up from the Negev, "you must stay here now."
Here? she thinks, and feels a wave of sickness at the thought. Here. On the land. It hurts here. She longs for the ocean, for cool and quiet. For a slow sink from surface blue to deep black. Rest. Let the water claim her. Let her drop to the bottom and become bones. Surely she has paid her debt.
(And I who am here dissembled /
(Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love /
(To the posterity of the desert...)
She shudders her refusal. Leave me alone, she pleads of the stoic lion, who tosses his head and mane at her words.
"You must take responsibility." Her father's words, growled by the animal, and so grossly unfair that she begins to weep. Hasn't she? Hasn't she done that yet? She chased Mazreel over half the world. Learned enough to chain him. Did so. Does all this count for nothing?
"Levine," says the lion, except not really him, and someone touches her face. "Can you hear me?"
She nods, but the movement renews pain. Wince with it, feel it settled in the back of your teeth and skull. It hurts. It hurts, dammit!
"The others are coming with help. Until then, I can't do anything more. Here, you need more water."
Water-- a magic word as potent as any she'd written on the rock. Chaim tips the canteen to her mouth and she drinks. He pulls it back far too soon and she begins to cry again, like a child pushed past all frustration.
"Not too much. It will make you sick," he says. Asshole. But he gives her more, and two bitter aspirin that are an ordeal to swallow, and he puts a damp rag on her forehead. She settles in with the pain because the shoreline has her now, the tides are no longer high enough to carry her back out to sea.
Chaim watches the woman's eyes drift half to shut. They're dull with pain but she can hear him, answer him. Good things, these. He holds up one hand.
"How many fingers?"
The question smacks of her father. Trick questions thrown at a child. He had always pushed her, always, until the day she had pushed back and insisted he teach her things she was too young (too female) to learn. (And hadn't that all ended well? A dead child, a self-imposed exile?)
Chaim's hand flickers in front of her like stop-motion photography. Like Finn reshaping the clay. Blur, blur, blur away, little bird. She looks to the lion instead.
The lion rumbles, "How many hands, daughter, to bring you here? Yours, your father's, the demon's..."
"Three," she whispers, and Chaim bar Ari nods. "Good."
The hand with its uncountable fingers reaches for the prayer straps and checks them, and she deals with a sudden comprehension. "You... did that."
"You might have fallen," he says, retying one knot. ("Consider that you have fallen," says the lion.)
She turns her head an inch to the side, all the savage ache in her skull will allow, trying to see how she might have fallen, where she would have gone if she had. Down. She would have gone down. The ocean's bottom. Becoming bones.
"You should have let me fall," she tells him, and closes her eyes again.
Chaim frowns, and lifts the canteen for a measured swallow of his own. This is thirsty work. "How so?" he asks as he lowers the water. She doesn't answer him, and he repeats the question, nudging her unscraped cheek with a finger.
Her eyes slit open again, and for the first time since she regained consciousness he feels she truly sees him. But she says nothing. He caps the canteen; her eyes follow the motion.
"How so, Levine? Why should I have let you fall? How could I do that?"
She shifts a little on the rock, wincing with the motion. Her voice is a croak, a rasp, a broken wheeze through cracked lips. "Come on. You don't even like me."
Chaim considers this, his gaze drifting out over the landscape. Yes, that much remains true. Respect is not the same as affection. He shrugs. "Not so much, no. This has what to do with it? You are one of us."
"I'm--" she stops to cough, and her fingers, somehow still on his hand, grip with spasmic strength as she does so, "--how'm I one of you? I've never been one of you. Tits, remember?"
He thinks of the slick, oily feel of the bottle in his hand and against his soul, the desire to wash his hands that he'd felt after setting it down. He says, "I saw the demon. You are a soldier. You've earned that."
Zipporah chokes at that, and it takes a second for Chaim to realize it was actually a laugh. She's trying to talk, but pain contorts her face and he shakes his head. "Don't waste your strength. Rest."
"Oh fuck you," she hisses, her fingernails cutting into the back of his hand. "Just-- fuck you. I've earned it? I've earned it? You have no-- no idea-- what-- you see him in the fucking bottle and you graciously say, now I've earned being one of you? Now I've proven myself, now I'm your equal?"
She is fire; he is stone. "Yes. Now you have," he says. "We serve the same thing, Levine. Israel. God. They are different gates of the same city... and good warriors for the walls are few. So how should I let a fellow soldier die, whatever I feel for him?" He shrugs.
"There are many more battles to come. We serve by remaining alive to fight them."
Her too-bright eyes stare at him with all the affection one might give to a scorpion, and then she closes up, the battered lines of her faces going blank. "I've done my service," she rasps, and turns her head away. "Leave me alone."
***
4:20 pm
The sun moves on, dragging her, in its wake, onto occasional islands of lucidity. Focusing on Chaim-- making herself speak to him and not the lion-- helps ground her, but it exhausts her, he exhausts her, with his words of holy war and warriors.
Duty. Who is he to speak to her as if she doesn't know about it? Childhood on was a lecture in her responsibilities as the rabbi's daughter, the eldest child, the one whom (it must be admitted) he favored. (Ah, Zipporah, if only you'd been a boy!)
Her responsibilities... Tikkun olam: to perfect the universe. To perform mitzvot. Do good deeds, daughter of your people. Be a protector, a servant, a leader. Be wise and upright and holy. Be chosen, even from among the Chosen.
And she'd eaten it up, fallen in love with it. Fancied herself a damn tzadik. Been so eager to fix little Sophie.
So. See where duty gets you.
Duty gets you the desert, just what her people have always gotten from the hand of the Lord. Promised paradise, then led into the wilderness. Duty gets you four months of sand up your fucking ass, twelve months of living out of a backpack, two years of nightmares, and all the guilt you can eat.
Sour lemons. Proving you can take it, just like the boys.
Well-- her own laugh is a grating echo in her head, jangling the pain awake again-- she has certainly taken it.
Oh, and duty gets you pain, apparently. Pain upon pain upon pain, from the hot little prickles of the biting ants to the stabbing agony that lives in her head.
She licks her dry lips and pokes Chaim's hand. "Talk to me. Not--" he's arching one black brow at her, "--about serving God. Or Israel. Just-- distract me. Please."
He frowns, new lines forming in the topography of his weathered face. "You should breathe with the pain. You know?" She shakes her head. "When you breathe out, the oxygen enters your blood, and endorphins. Breathe deep. Take the pain... put it in a box. Close the box."
He mimes the motion, brown hands slicing through the air, and she has to close her eyes because following his movements just makes the headache worse. His voice continues though, his Hebrew that is rough and chopped and with all its lovely edges eroded away by the polishing action of mundane use. Here in Israel, it is the daily tongue as well as the sacred.
"Put the box behind a door. Close the door. Keep it shut. You say, I can deal with this later, and you trick your body like this. And you keep breathing."
It is not unlike the walls, she thinks. The labyrinth she builds to protect her soul when dealing with evil things. Put the pain into a corner of the fortress, a dark corner, put many gates in front of it, lock them, walk away. Another lesson to be mastered. She refuses to say thank you, teacher.
She tries the exercise, forcing her breathing to even out, forcing cooperation from her mind. She says, "Keep talking."
Chaim grunts and turns his head back out to the desert, wiping his palms on his trousers.
"What about?"
"Anything. I don't care. Tell me about you, your family, I don't know."
He is silent for several seconds, tracing the limestone cliffs with his hawk's eyes. "I have no family," he says eventually. "I never married."
She wrestles with the box, with the pain. Visualize the box. Can't just be some abstraction of a box. A real box, so real in mind she can see the grain of the wood, the joints holding it together... "Parents, then. Everyone has parents."
"They're dead." He says it like he'd say 'it is warm today.'
She gives up on the box. Too much work. She's so tired. "No brothers? Sisters?" she asks, and guesses his answer before he even starts to shake his head. "You're what, in your forties? Why didn't you ever marry, Chaim bar Ari? Isn't it mitzvah, to find a wife?"
"Thirty-five." Her own age. He looks so much older. Then again, she hasn't seen a mirror since they came out to the desert. Perhaps she has the same crow's feet now, the same stretched quality of the skin.
Chaim's hawk eyes rake the cliffs on the other side of the valley, his slight frown the only sign he is considering her question. He purses his lips then says, "Israel... is my wife."
She's bracing for him to start again, but Chaim doesn't bring up service or duty or any other word that might make her scream right now. He touches the cliff face, rubs dry dust between his fingers.
"The land was fertile once. So we are told," he says, and nods at the bare cliffs that surround them. "In David's time these hills grew olives. So we are told. When the Temple is rebuilt, Israel will be paradise again. So we are told.
"Maybe. When Messiah comes. But I do not live in the Israel that may be. I live in the Israel that is, this Israel, what we have today. She is not perfect. Life is not so easy here as for you in America. Half the country is like this: rock, sand, desert. Nothing grows here. So why fight for it, why love it? Because it is mine. Because it is home.
"Because she is like a woman I have been married to many years. I know her moods, her dangers, when she is safe and when not. I live with her, without trying to change her. I know her. And she knows me."
He gestures at the cliffs and the gorges and the wind-carved sandstone. "When I am here-- the desert allows no lies, do you understand that? The lies we tell ourselves and each other, when we are in the cities-- the desert destroys these. It strips the land down to the bone, and the same to people.
"Israel makes me honest. What woman could do that?"
There is silence, the wind hissing over the rock. Zipporah cannot turn her head to see the landscape, but she can see his face, and they are more or less the same. She closes her eyes against the heat and the emptiness.
(The desert in the garden the garden in the desert /
(Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.)
"What?" he says, and she realizes she spoke aloud. She considers trying to translate it, but no, forget it, her mind isn't anywhere near being up to it.
"It's from a poem," she says, and then coughs a laugh. "Written by a man who hated the Jews. Can I have another drink?"
"The canteen is running low," he warns, but he unscrews the cap.
***
6:59 pm
The sun keeps moving. Drops past the invisible line that puts the bulk of cliff between it and them, and they get shade: first a sliver, then a patch...
The aspirin wear off-- they did little more than take the edge off in any case-- and Zipporah sinks back into the shallow tidepools between oblivion and clarity. She believes that the shadow-patches creeping down the cliff are jackals, leaping from stone to stone, coming for her body, held at bay only by the lion's presence. Let them come.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose...
Purpose. She has no purpose, anymore. She had one; it is caged in the bottle, completed, accomplished. The jackals have purpose. They circle her, their paws gliding over rock and thin air alike, and their leader, the dead one, says, "We can wait.
"This is our purpose, to wait for the living to become the dying, the dying to become the dead, who feed us. We are patient. Come down to us, sister. Come down now. Let this business be resolved."
Yes... except-- except all is not resolved. There is a letter in her tent, unsent, unfinished. Her father... he will blame himself, he does already. He taught her, after all.
But she had insisted. He should bear no guilt in this.
She gropes for the lion's arm, the man-who-is-the-lion. "Chaim. Chaim."
He asks her if she needs more water. No. "Chaim-- you must tell my father something. Rabbi Levine, in New York, he will be easy to find. You must tell him-- it wasn't his fault. Tell him-- tell him that I repaired the universe. That I did that much."
He says to her, No, I will not, because you will tell him yourself.
When he says this she understands it is not so much that she wants to die as that she cannot go back. She cannot. Can't go back to Manhattan, can't just pick things up as if she had never left. The demon is stopped but the child is still dead. The child will always be dead. Abe Kaufmann will always be saying What have you done? What have you done?
"I can't go back," she says, and watches the hungry shadows lengthening, drawing closer. But the lion does not give ground. He stares at her from Chaim bar Ari's strong right arm, eyes of ink unblinking: the desert personified. The ruthlessness that allows no deceit.
Israel strips her down to the bone. Israel drags truth from her.
It comes out in fragments, broken by the pain and her delirium. She hasn't told the kohen of this, didn't tell Rabbi Weiss, told her father only the facts. She tells it to him, a man she doesn't even like; a man here with her in the promised land, which more closely resembles the ends of the earth.
She tells him about the child, so silent, the child who had not believed her when she had said it was going to be okay. Tells him what her ego led to.
"Chaim bar Ari," she whispers, "I did a bad thing."
And he, in turn, tells her that sometimes soldiers do.
Chaim tells her soldier stories (soldier confessions). Tells her of covert missions into Jordan and Syria and Lebanon, some on orders and some not. Raids to exact retribution, the eye-for-eye and blood-for-blood war that has been fought ever since Ishmael was born to Abraham's mistress.
The words flow like grains of sand across her ears... and, mingled with the soft susurrus of atrocities committed for ideals, the lion on Chaim's arm speaks as well.
"Of what significance is your guilt, daughter?" he growls. "Is it greater than David's, in whose sign I reside? David whom the Lord deemed worthy of honor?"
Chaim talks of Lebanon in 1982. Rising body counts and politician's lies.
The lion stares her down. "Is what you have done more wicked than the king's murder of his own soldier for the sake of his lust? Are you arrogant enough to believe this, daughter of your people?"
Chaim tells her of dead civilians, on both sides of the border. Bodies mutilated and left for the enemy to find. Things done in the heat of battle, in the cold of vengeance, that would be unthinkable at any other time.
"David received from the Lord's hand his punishment, and you have received yours. It is not for you to decree your own judgment. It is not for you to say your life is forfeit for your sins. Your life, and your death, are in the Lord's keeping."
Chaim is still talking but she cannot make out the words, only the message... one of blood, one of death, such that her own experience pales in comparison, and woven through and around his words is the relentless truth of the lion of the tribe of Judah, whose face has grown to fill her pain-shrouded universe.
"Daughter, you will bear the marks of what happened here all the days of your life. This is your atonement. This shall be a remembrance unto you. But your exile is ended. Go forth from the wilderness. Live, and live with the greater wisdom you have purchased here."
Chaim speaks, but not to her-- he is standing in a quick lurch of motion that dizzies her, and shouting at someone up above them, shouts that are answered back, male voices that she is vaguely aware she should recognize. She closes her eyes again.
The lion follows her into the darkness, stepping down from the tattoo's black on brown and standing over her, massive, tawny, his eyes golden, his warm breath sweet on her face even if it is only the gust of hot desert air as the tarp is removed. His mane brushes her face, and the rough tongue licks the scraped skin of her aching cheek, a benediction, a blessing, a farewell.
"Go home, daughter."
***
7:43 pm
The sun is setting by the time the men hoist her up the cliffside. She ascends by rope, sitting in a field sling made of the tarp that had shaded her, pulled by strong hands. Chaim's voice shouts directions from below her but she barely hears them.
She is suspended halfway between them, between Chaim bar Ari and the others, between heaven and earth. Caught in the dying sun's red light, and rising.
The cliffs are washed in crimson and scarlet, and she looks on this and no longer thinks about blood. Only that there is beauty here, and beauty in the fiery horizon, and beauty in the flight of a hawk that cuts the valley's air.
And the words that fill her mind as she leaves the desert and the jackals behind are not Eliot, are not Ash Wednesday, but the prophet Isaiah:
Console, console My people, says your God. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem and call her, tell her that her time of service is accomplished, that her guilt has been paid off, for she has received from the hand of the Lord double for all her sins.
***
OOC: Due to length, this is being posted in three parts: Part One - Part Two - Part Three.
***
Fandom: OC
Muse: Zippy Levine
Word count: you don't really want to know
Additional: Holy shit I finally got this done now maybe I can start working on other fucking prompts again holy shit
...holy shit