Quarantine Read Free

this hard scrubland as their inn, it let its
    snakes and scorpions take refuge underneath the covers of their
    beds.
    Yet the scrubland welcomed Miri there, to its dead hills. It
    gave its hospitality to her. And should she end up on her own,
    she need not have much cause to fear the night, or hunger, or
    the animals. It would use what little skills it had to make her life
    more comfortable, to keep her bedding free from scorpions, her
    skin unsnagged by thorns, her sleep unbroken. And if it could,
    it would direct some rainfall to her tent or save her billy from a
    fall or drive gazelles towards her traps. It would be the one -
    hooded in a brown mantle - whose breathing twinned with
    hers. It would be the one, mistaken for a thorn bush or a breeze,
    that rustled at her side. It would be her shoulder-blades, and
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    then the one that brushed the sand-flies from her lips and eyes.
    It was bewitched by her already, if that is possible, if the land
    can be allowed a heart. The stone had stubbed itself upon the
    toe. The earth was showing kindness to the flesh. It let her pull
    its stones quite readily out of the ground, so that her husband's
    grave grew waist-deep without exhausting her and causing any
    strains. She only broke her nails, though there were some cuts
    and bruises on her knees. The torment of her buttocks and her
    thighs was even eased a little by the exercise.
    So this is happiness, she thought. Or this, at least, is what adds
    up to happiness. Here was the mix that she'd been praying for.
    There's hardship and bad luck in happiness, for sure. There's
    broken nails. There's blood. There's solitude. But there was the
    prospect, too, with Musa dead, of sleeping peacefully without
    his bruising fingers in her flesh, of never running after men and
    camels any more, ofbeing Miri without shame or hesitation, of
    letting drop her headscarf for a change and loosening her hair
    from its tight knots so that nothing intervened between her and
    the sky.
    Indeed, her headscarf was pulled off Her coils of hair were
    left to drop and unravel on their own. She then lay back beside
    her husband's grave, put her uncovered head on stones and,
    open-eyed, the sky her comfort sheet, she almost slept. She was
    exhausted and invincible. Her pregnancy had made her so;
    exhausted by the digging and the dying; invincible because that
    pulsing in her womb was doughty, irresistible. What greater
    triumph could there be than that - to cultivate a second, tiny
    heart?
    She had been told, when she was small, that the sky was a
    hard dish. She might bruise her fists on it if only she could fly.
    It was a gently rounded dish, blue when not obscured by clouds
    or night or shuddered into pinks and greys and whites by the
    caprices of the sun. But now she raised her hands into the
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    unresisting air above the open grave and wondered if the dish
    were soft. And she could fly right through it, only slowed and
    coddled by its softness, like passing through the heavy, goaty
    curtains of her tent, like squeezing through the tough and
    cushioned alleys of the flesh, to take a place in heaven if she
    wanted, or to find that place on earth where she'd be undisturbed.

    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 villages, already passing through Muntar,
    Qumran, and Marsaba - who had some weeks ofbusiness in the
    wilderness. They came to live like hermit 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 hermit bats
    - perhaps this is what the proverbs had in mind - possessed no
    vanity.