The Book of Longings: A Novel (25 page)

The evening before Jesus was due to arrive, I gathered up the potsherds, all of them covered now with words, placed them in a wool sack, and set them in the corner. I swept our room, filled the clay lamps, then beat our bed mats.

When darkness fell, I heard the others climb to the roof, but I didn’t join them. I slept in the fragrance of the mat and dreamed.

I am giving birth, squatting over the hole in the corner. Susanna slips from me into Yaltha’s hands, and I reach for her, surprised that this time she cries out, that her tiny fists wave in the air. When Yaltha places her in my arms, though, I’m startled to see the baby is not Susanna. She is myself. Yaltha says, “Why look, you are the mother and the baby both.”

I woke in the dark. When first light arrived, I stole to Yaltha’s bedside and gently shook her awake.

“What is it? Are you well?”

“I’m well, Aunt. I’ve had a dream.”

She pulled a shawl about her. I thought of her own dream of Chaya on the summit calling for her, and wondered if she thought of it, too.

I told her what I’d dreamed, and then placing my silver headband in her hands, I said, “Go to the old woman and trade my headdress for blackseed oil. And for extra measure, wild rue and fennel root.”

I
SET OUT THE HERBS
on the oak table in our room. When Jesus arrived late in the day, I greeted him with a kiss, and watched his eyes pass over my collection of preventatives. It was important to me that he understood. He acknowledged the herbs with a nod—there would be no more children. I sensed relief in him, a sad, wordless relief, and it came
to me that if the time ever came for him to truly leave, it would be much simpler for him without children.

As we lay together, I clutched him to me, feeling my heart would break open and pour itself out. His fingers touched my cheek. “Little Thunder,” he whispered.

“Beloved,” I answered.

I rested my head on his chest and watched the night slipping past the high window. Pale-fringed clouds, floating stars, wedges of sky. I thought how alike we were, both of us mutinous, venturesome, shunned. Both seized by passions that needed to be set loose.

When he woke, even before he prayed the Shema, I described the dream to him that had caused me to trade my silver headband for the herbs. How could I keep it from him? “The newborn was myself!” I exclaimed.

A tiny shadow passed over his face—concern, it seemed, for what the dream augured for the future—then it passed.

He said, “It seems you will be born again.”

Like God’s, women’s toil had no beginning and no end.

As the burnt summer gave way and the months passed, weariness hung along my bones like loom weights. It was hard then to imagine how my life could ever be different than it was now. Rising in the early hours to take up my chores, my fingers raw from the pestle and the loom. Jesus crisscrossing the towns and villages around the Sea of Galilee, home two days of seven. Judith’s and Berenice’s sharp judgments.

In the hidden forest in my chest, the trees slowly lost their leaves.

On the one-year anniversary of Susanna’s death, Jesus and I walked to the cave where she was buried and collected her bones into a small limestone ossuary, which he had carved himself. I watched as he placed the stone box on the cave ledge, then left his hand resting upon it for several moments.

The grief in me could be unbearable at times, and I felt it now . . . pain so cutting, I wondered if I could go on standing. I reached for Jesus in the gray light and saw his lips moving in silence. If I bore my grief by writing words, Jesus bore his by praying them. How often had he said to me, “God is like a mother hen, Ana. She will gather us beneath her wing”? But I never felt gathered into that place where he seemed to dwell so effortlessly.

Coming out of the cave into the brightness, I drank in the summer air, green and tart. We were walking down into the valley back toward Nazareth, when Jesus stopped on a plateau where the lilies grew wild.

“Let’s rest awhile,” he said, and we sat among the grasses and the thick, sweet scent. I could feel Susanna everywhere, and perhaps he did as well, because he turned to me and said, “Do you ever picture how she would be if she’d lived?”

The question pierced me, but I seized it, for I ached to talk about her. “She would have your eyes,” I said. “And your
very
long nose.”

“Is my nose that long?” he asked, smiling.

“Yes, very. And she would have your boisterous laugh. She would be kindhearted like you. But she wouldn’t be nearly so devout. She would take her religion from me.”

When I paused, he said, “I imagine her with your hair. And she would be spirited, just as you are. I would call her Littlest Thunder.”

This brought me a deep and sudden consolation, as if I’d been gathered, if only for a moment, into that most inscrutable place beneath Sophia’s wing.

Standing at the village well, I had the peculiar feeling of being watched. During my first years in Nazareth the feeling came often; indeed, every time I left the compound.
Look! There’s the rich girl from Sepphoris, now nothing more than a peasant.
Eventually, though, I became too familiar for them to notice and the glowering stopped, but once again the hairs on my arms were lifting to attention, that sense of eyes watching me.

It was the first week of Tishri, just past the late-summer fig harvest. I wiped my brow and set the water pot on the stone wall built around the wellspring and looked about. The well was crowded—women milled about with jugs on their shoulders, children clinging to their robes.
Journeymen were lined up to fill waterskins. A clump of boys tugged on an obstinate camel. No one seemed interested in me. But I’d come to trust the odd ways I knew things—the images, the dreams, the nudges in my body. Alert, I waited my turn to draw water.

It was when I looped the rope about the handle of my pot and lowered it into the well that I heard footsteps behind me. “
Shelama
, little sister,” a voice said.

My spirit leapt. “Judas!” He caught the rope as my hands let go of it in surprise. “So it’s you who has been watching me.”

“Yes, all the way from your house.” I reached to embrace him, but he stepped back. “Not here. We shouldn’t bring notice to ourselves.”

His face had turned thin, leather brown, tough as a goat hide. A white scar in the shape of a scorpion tail hooked under his right eye. He looked as if the world had bitten into him and, finding him too gristly, spit him back. As he pulled up my pot from the well, I glimpsed the dagger tucked in his girdle, the way he cut his eyes left and right and over his shoulder.

“Come with me,” he said, and strode off with the pot.

I pulled up the hood on my cloak and hurried behind him. “Where are we going?”

He turned toward the most crowded section of Nazareth, where the houses were pressed together amid a maze of narrow alleys, and stepped into a passageway between two courtyards, empty except for three men. There, amid the fragrance of donkeys, piss, and fermenting figs, he lifted me up and spun me around. “You look well.”

I eyed the men.

“They are with me,” he said.

“Your Zealot friends?”

He nodded. “There are forty of us living in the hills. We do our part to rid Israel of Roman pigs and sympathizers.” He grinned and gave a little bow.

“That sounds . . .” I hesitated.

“Dangerous?”

“I was going to say impractical.”

He laughed. “I see you still speak your mind.”

“I’m sure you and your Zealots are an enormous thorn in Rome’s side. But it’s a
thorn
, Judas. It’s no match for their might.”

“You’d be surprised how much they fear us. We’re good at inciting revolt, and there’s nothing Rome dreads more than an uprising. Best of all, it’s the surest way to get rid of Herod Antipas. If he cannot keep the peace, Rome will replace him.” He paused, fidgety, looking back toward the alley entrance. “There’s a century of eighty soldiers assigned to capture us, and yet in all these years not one of us has been caught. Some have been killed, but never caught.”

“So, my brother is infamous.” I gave him a good-natured shove. “Of course, here in Nazareth I’ve heard
nothing
of you.”

He smiled. “Regrettably, my glory seems confined to the cities. Sepphoris, Tiberias, Caesarea.”

“But Judas, look at you,” I said, turning serious. “You’re hunted, sleeping in caves, committing acts of defiance that could get you killed. Have you never wanted to give it up for a wife and children?”

“But I have a wife—Esther. She lives with four other Zealot wives in a house in Nain. It’s overfilled with children, three of whom are mine.” He beamed. “Two boys, Joshua and Jonathan, and a girl, Ana.”

Hearing of his children, I thought of my Susanna and felt the knife cut that came every time her memory appeared. I decided not to speak of her. Feigning brightness, I said, “Three children—I hope to meet them one day.”

He let out a sigh, and I heard the pining in it. “I haven’t seen Esther in many months.”

“Nor has she seen you.” I wished to remind him
she
was the one left behind.

There was a clattering of horse hooves and men’s voices, and Judas’s
hand went instinctively to the hilt of his dagger. He drew us deeper into the alley.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked.

“Lavi. He keeps me informed of many things.”

So, my faithful friend had become his spy. I said, “You disappeared from my life, and now you appear—there must be a reason.”

He frowned into the slanted light and the scorpion tail lifted on the ridge of his cheek as if poised to sting. “I have grim news, sister. I’ve come to tell you our mother is dead.”

I didn’t make a sound. I became a piece of cloud, looking down, seeing things as birds see them, aloof and small. My mother’s face was faint and far away.

“Ana, did you hear me?”

“I heard you, Judas.”

I gazed at him impassively and thought of the night she locked me in my room, shouting, “Your shame falls on
me
. You will remain confined here until you offer your consent to the betrothal.”

Why was I remembering these terrible things now?

“Do you know the last thing she said to me?” I asked. “She told me I would live out my days as a peasant in a wretched backwater village, that it was what I deserved. She said this a month before I left Sepphoris and wed Jesus, and she never uttered another thing to me. On the day I climbed into the cart and Lavi led the horse away, she didn’t leave her room to see me off.”

“She could be cruel to you,” Judas said. “But she was our mother. Who will mourn her if not us?”

“Let Shipra mourn her,” I said.

Judas gave me a reproachful look
.
“Your grief will come. Let it be sooner, than later.”

I didn’t think he was right about this, but I said, “I’ll try, brother.” Then, unable to help myself, I asked, “Why did you never come back to
see me? You left me with Mother and Father and never returned. I married and you were not there. You were married and you didn’t think to tell me. I didn’t know if you were dead or alive. All these years, Judas.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry, little sister. I couldn’t return to Sepphoris for fear of being caught, and it would’ve been dangerous for you to have me about. After you married, I didn’t know your whereabouts—I only began obtaining information from Lavi not long ago. But you’re right—I could’ve tried sooner to find you. I’ve been too wrapped up in my war on the Romans.” He gave me a repentant smile. “But I’m here now.”

“Come home and stay the night with us. Jesus is there. You must meet him. He, too, is a radical. Not in the same way as you, but in his own way. You will find him worth meeting. You’ll see.”

“I’ll gladly come and meet him, but I can’t stay the night. My men and I must leave Nazareth well before dawn.”

We walked side by side, the jar on my shoulder and the men trailing at a distance. I’d not returned to Sepphoris once in all these years, not even to attend the market, and I was eager for news. I said, “Jesus says Father is once again Antipas’s chief scribe and counselor. It’s hard to imagine him in Tiberias now. Harder still to imagine Mother buried there.”

“You don’t know, do you? When Antipas moved his government to Tiberias, your father went with him, but our mother refused. These past five years, she has lived in Sepphoris with no one but Shipra.”

The revelation startled me, but only for a moment. It would’ve elated Mother to finally be rid of Father. I doubted he minded leaving her behind either.

“What of Lavi?” I asked.

“Your father took him to Tiberias to be his personal servant. It has worked out well for me.”

“
My
father. Twice you’ve called him that. Do you no longer claim him?”

“Do you forget? He disowned me—it was written in a contract and signed by a rabbi.”

I
had
forgotten. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Father could be as cruel to you as Mother was to me.”

“I’m glad to have no association to him. My only regret is that I won’t inherit the house in Sepphoris. With Mother gone, it lies empty now. When your father dies, it will go to his brother, Haran. They’ve exchanged letters about it. Lavi slipped them to me. Haran wrote that when the time came, he would send an emissary from Alexandria to sell the house and its contents.” It would happen as Mother had predicted: the house would belong to Haran, Yaltha’s old adversary.

I said, “If Father is writing to his brother about such things as this . . . is he unwell?”

“According to Lavi, he suffers with a cough and sometimes sleeps sitting up in order to breathe. He no longer travels, but otherwise carries out his duties.”