barbaraBarbara McKeon, a Dubliner living in Galway since ’98, was for many years a journalist with the Irish Press Group, at which time she had many short stories and plays broadcast on RTE Radio, as well as many more published in newspapers and magazines. She now teaches TEFL English, proofreads at the Galway Advertiser and continues to write fiction at her home in Kinvara, which she shares with her husband and two cats.

 

REMEMBRANCE

 By Barbara McKeon

I am very old and those I have loved are all dead. My hands are crippled and pain drives away sleep most nights. My family take care of me, out of duty, because it is expected of them. Memories are my best companions. People long dead sit with me through the endless days and the emptiness of the dark. I have lived too long. I have seen too much. I wait patiently for death.

My joy is in my great-grandchildren. Only the very young have time for the very old. I was but a girl myself when I gave birth to my first child, not long after we left the old country. I had been betrothed many years to a distant relative’s son and it was he who decided we must leave. It was the condition my future husband set my father, that he would honour his promise to marry me only if I went away with him because he could not bear the shame attached to my family on account of my brother.

Reuben was a good man and he grew to love me and I him. He is dead many a long year. We had nine children here in this new country which they call home but I never can. He set himself up as a wine-maker as he had been in the old country, bringing with him vines from his father’s vineyards. God blessed us and we prospered producing what Reuben called “ambrosia fit for the gods”. I would chide him for blaspheming and he would laugh and embrace me.

It is hot today; the earth is red and the sky so bright it is almost white. The vine trees my husband planted are still producing the best wine in the region. Sometimes this place reminds me so much of the old country. Rebecca is my youngest great-grandchild. She is with me here in the shaded courtyard, playing with a kitten she has found. She reminds me of myself at her age; a time that is burned into my memory, a time that my husband wanted me to forget because of the shame that befell my family.

I was the youngest child with two sisters and three brothers who were much older than me. My father was a skilful wood-worker and my mother good home-maker. We were a happy family, at least that’s the way I remember it and I was especially loved by Emanuel, my oldest brother. I was only seven years old when he died.

Ah, it hurts me to remember those long-ago times. But it hurts even more that no one wants me talk about it. Forget the past, they say, put those bad times out of your mind. Yet how can I erase the past when what happened changed so much?

So I tell Rebecca the stories no one else wants to hear. At least I tell her the good things, and when she’s old enough – if, God willing, I live long enough – I’ll tell her the bad things too. She will hear what happened to her great-granduncle who died almost four score years ago and she will be horrified. But not as horrified as me who witnessed what happened with my own eyes. So much blood was shed, so many people died.

My sisters were handsome girls and many came courting them. Papa chose two brothers from a nearby village who had their own fishing boat and who made a good living from the sea. Some years later I was betrothed to Reuben, a boy I had never met, as was – and still is – the custom of our people. But again my parents chose well, and I was pleased when I saw him for the first time at our wedding.

Two of my brothers were twins and both were apprenticed to a potter. They had inherited papa’s talent for working with their hands but they were always arguing. So many times Emanuel had to separate them as heated words came to blows. Then together they would turn on him with taunts and sneers. I didn’t understand their jibes, I was too young, and they never repeated them in front of mama and papa. Emanuel didn’t have work nor was he apprenticed to any craftsman which might have been a source of acrimony between him and the twins. He was very religious from a young age and spent most of his time reading the Scriptures and praying or discussing points of law that confounded even the rabbi. The twins complained that mama and papa made them work but their eldest son had life too easy. People said Emanuel should become a rabbi but that cost a lot of money and though our family wasn’t poor, it was more than we could afford. A generation later one of my own sons would become a rabbi. Reuben worked hard to make the money to pay for his training; he said it was worth it to have a holy man in the family. I wanted to say we already had a holy man in our family but knew that would only anger my husband.

Even as a child I could see Emanuel was different but I didn’t know why. As I grew up I heard it whispered that mama and papa were not married when she found she was with child and that they had fled to escape the wrath of her father. Ah, but people say all sorts of things out of ignorance. My brother was different all his life. No, more than that. He was special. He was a gifted teacher and he liked nothing better than to sit in the shade of the olive groves and discuss the Scriptures to anyone who wanted to listen or debate. I used to sit beside him and listen to him talking, even when I didn’t understand what he was saying I was enthralled. And when he’d finished speaking to the grown-ups he’d take us children on excursions into the hills and play games with us and then tell us more stories from the Scriptures in words we understood. His voice painted the most wonderful pictures in my head.

Then more and more people started coming to hear Emanuel preach, so he began to travel to other villages and beyond to speak to crowds that gathered. Mama would worry all the time he was gone but papa would say he’d be all right, he knew how to take care of himself. I remember once papa comforting mama and saying to her that no harm would come to Emanuel because ‘his time hadn’t come yet’. And mama wept all the more. I didn’t know then what papa meant but I do now, because I witnessed it.

Rebecca sits at my feet and listens to me talk, just like I used to sit by my brother’s. Tell me more about the old country, tell me about great-granduncle Manny! So I tell her all the good things, like the walks in the desert where we’d look for rare flowers, or me bathing in the sea while my brother helped the fishermen haul in their catch, or climbing the hills together to search for stray sheep.

I don’t tell her how he died. I was only seven years old and the sight of him crucified on the hill of Calvary is still more than I can bear. I saw him whipped by the soldiers. I saw him forced to carry on his own back through the streets of the town the wooden cross that he would be nailed to. I saw my grief-stricken mother and sisters begging the soldiers to stop torturing him. The horror of what I saw still lives with me. How could they do that to my brother? He had done nothing wrong. The horror of his suffering was unimaginable. Through my tears I looked up at him and he smiled down at me. Don’t cry, little one, he said to me and then his head fell to one side and he died.

When he was taken down from the cross he was wrapped in a shroud and laid in a sealed tomb in a cave near Golgotha. I had fallen ill from the shock of what I had witnessed and it was thought I too would die. During that time strange things were happening that I would learn of much later. Emanuel’s body was stolen from the tomb. Then one day Mary Magdalene saw him standing outside the empty tomb and he spoke to her. “Mary,” he said.

“Master,” she replied. She told me this herself. Many times he appeared as a living man to friends and family who had loved and followed him. Thomas saw him but at first refused to believe it. Another time he was seen by close friends early one morning walking by the seashore. More amazing still, those same friends went with him to Bethany which is a little way out of Jerusalem where they witnessed the most miraculous sight. They swore they saw Emanuel rising upwards towards heaven until he disappeared into a golden cloud.

When I recovered from my illness I could remember nothing. My mind had wiped out the memory of my brother’s crucifixion. I stayed close to my mother and together we kept house. Meanwhile, papa found it difficult to get work as a carpenter as people were suspicious of us. It was a time of hardship for us but we never stopped loving Emanuel.

The twins, however, filled with shame at having a brother executed as a criminal, had packed their belongings and moved to another country to get away from the scandal. I only ever saw them again one more time and that was at my own wedding some years later. My sisters and their husbands remained steadfast in their love for Emanuel and continued to meet with his close friends to talk about him over meals where they broke bread and drank wine in remembrance of him.

When I was twelve or thirteen, my papa called Reuben to come and take me for his wife. We were married in Cana at mama’s insistence, for she said Emanuel had presided at a wedding there many years previously and that the marriage had been a happy match. So we were married in Cana, where the best wine was opened in celebration, and then I said goodbye to mama and papa, to my dear sisters and their husbands and their children, and to my twin brothers who returned for my wedding with their wives and children, and went away with my husband to a new life in a new country, never to see my family again. They are all long dead now.

That is why Rebecca is so precious to me. She reminds me of myself when I was her age, a lifetime ago when I was a happy child and innocent of the horror that was to come; a time when I can recall my oldest brother walking with me in the desert looking for rare flowers, or bathing in the Sea of Galilee while he helped fishermen haul in their catch, or climbing hills near the Mount of Olives to look for lost sheep. I tell her these stories and they bring me comfort, they bring me back to the old country.