The Book of Longings: A Novel (48 page)

“I trust one of you remembers where the tomb lies,” she said. “I was too distraught to take notice and there were many caves there and about.”

“I believe I can find it,” said Salome. “I was careful to observe the way.”

Mary turned back to me. “Ana, I think that you, Salome, and I should remain here in Bethany for the seven days of mourning before we depart for Nazareth. I’ll need to seek out James and Judith in Jerusalem and learn their wishes, but I’m sure they’ll agree. Would this suit you?”

Nazareth.
In my mind, I saw the mud-baked compound with the single olive tree. The tiny room where I’d lived with Jesus, where I’d birthed Susanna, where I’d hidden away my incantation bowl. I pictured the little storage room where Yaltha had slept. The hand loom on which I’d woven reams of poor cloth and the oven where I’d baked loaves of scorched bread.

The air grew very quiet. I felt Mary’s stare. I felt all their stares, but I didn’t look up from my lap. What would it be like to live in Nazareth again, but without Jesus? James was now the eldest, the head of the family, and it occurred to me he might decide to find me a new husband, as he had for Salome when she became a widow. And there was the threat of Antipas. In his letter, Judas had written that the danger to me in Galilee had lessened, but not fully passed.

I pushed to my feet and walked a short distance from them. There was a feeling in me like rising water. It broke over me, finally, leaving behind the thing I knew, but didn’t know. Nazareth had never been my home.
Jesus
had been my home.

Now, with him gone, my home was on a hillside in Egypt. It was Yaltha and Diodora. It was the Therapeutae. Where else could I write with abandon? Where but there could I tend a library and animals both? Where else could I live by the utterances of my own heart?

I breathed in, and it felt like a small homecoming.

Across the courtyard, I saw Lavi securing the opening of his travel pouch with a leather strap. The fear of disappointing Mary, of hurting her, of missing her, hurtled through me.

She called to me, “Ana, what is the matter?”

I walked back and sat beside her. She said, “You do not mean to return to Nazareth, do you?”

I shook my head. “I will return to Egypt to live out my days with my aunt. There’s a community there of spiritual seekers and philosophers. I will live among them.”

I said it gently, but without apology, then I waited for what she would say.

She spoke with her lips close to my ear. “Go in peace, Ana, for you were born for this.”

Those ten words were her greatest gift to me.

“Tell us about this place where you’ll live,” said Salome.

I felt barely composed, astonished suddenly that I would be leaving so quickly, and I was anxious to alert Lavi and begin packing my own provisions, but I did my best to enlighten them about the Therapeutae, the community that danced and sang all night every forty-ninth day. I described the stone huts scattered across a hillside, the lake at its foot, the cliffs at the top, and beyond them, the sea. I told them about the holy room where I’d written my own texts and preserved them in
codices, the library I was trying to restore, the song to Sophia I’d written and sung. I talked on and on, and I felt the longing in me for home.

“Take me with you,” a voice said.

We all turned and looked at Tabitha. I wondered if she’d spoken in jest, but she stared at me with utmost seriousness. I didn’t know how to answer.

“Tabitha!” Martha admonished. “You’ve been like a daughter to us all these years, yet on a whim you want to abandon us for a place unknown to you?”

“I do not know how to explain it,” Tabitha said. “I feel like I, too, am meant to be there.” Her voice was thickening, syllables starting to blunt and fall away. She looked slightly frantic to make her realization understood.

“But you can’t just leave,” said Martha.

“Why can’t she?” I asked. The question arrested Martha.

I looked at Tabitha. “If you’re serious about going, you must know that life within the Therapeutae is not only singing and dancing. There’s work, fasting, study, and prayer.” I didn’t mention Haran and the Jewish militia who’d sought to arrest me. “You must also possess a desire for God,” I told her. “Otherwise you won’t be admitted. I would be wrong not to tell you these things.”

“I wouldn’t mind finding God in this place,” Tabitha said, calmer now, her words intact again. “Could I not seek him in music?”

Skepsis would welcome her; I was sure of it. She would admit her based on that last question Tabitha had posed. And if not, she’d admit her for me. “I can think of no reason you can’t come with us,” I said.

“Do you have money for the ship’s passage?” asked Martha. Practical Martha.

Tabitha’s eyes widened. “I used all the money I had to buy the spikenard.”

I calculated quickly in my head. “I’m sorry, Tabitha, I only have
enough drachmae for Lavi’s passage and my own.” Why hadn’t I thought about this before I encouraged her?

Martha made a noise, a little harrumph that sounded like triumph. “Well, it’s fortunate, then, that I have the money.” She smiled at me. “I don’t know why she can’t just leave if she chooses.”

My sandal lay in Tabitha’s lap, repaired and ready for the long walk to Joppa. She handed it to me, then rose and embraced Martha. “If I had more spikenard, I would bathe your feet,” Tabitha told her.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
,
Lavi, Tabitha, and I slipped from the house before dawn, while the others still slept. At the gate, I looked back, thinking of Mary. “Let’s not say goodbye,” she’d told me the evening before. “We shall surely see one another again.” She’d said this without artifice, with a believing hope so earnest, I thought it might be true. We would, though, never see each other again.

The moon was at its ebb, no more than a faint, curving crust of light. As we followed the path into the Hinnom Valley, Tabitha began to hum, unable to hide her joy. She had tied her lyre onto her back, where its curled arms peeked over her shoulders like a pair of wings. The happiness of home-going was in me, too, but it was lodged beside my sorrow. This was the land of my husband and my daughter. Their bones would always be here. Every step away from them was a pain in my heart.

Walking along Jerusalem’s eastern wall, I begged the darkness to last until we passed the Roman hill where Jesus had died, but the light broke just as we approached, a sudden, harrowing brightness. I let myself take one last glimpse of Golgotha. Then I turned my gaze toward the hillsides in the distance where Jesus was buried, where the women would come soon to wrap him in sweet
spices.

i.

Tabitha and I found Yaltha in the garden, bent over a row of spindly plants. Absorbed in her work, she didn’t notice us. She smeared her fingers across her tunic, leaving two trails of dirt, an act that filled me with inexplicable gladness. She was fifty-nine now, but she looked almost youthful kneeling in the sunlight among all these green-growing things, and I felt a surge of relief. She was still here.

“Aunt!” I called.

Seeing me, and then Tabitha, running toward her through the barley plants, she opened her mouth and dropped back onto her heels. I heard her exclaim in typical fashion, “Shit of a donkey!”

I tugged Yaltha to her feet and hugged her to me. “I thought I would never see you again.”

“Nor I, you,” she said. “Yet here you are after only a few weeks away.” Her face was a jumble of elation and confusion. “And look who you’ve brought with you.”

As she embraced Tabitha, a shout came from behind us, higher on the slope. “Ana? Ana. Is that you?” Looking back toward the cliffs, I saw Diodora racing down the path with a basket jostling in her arms, and I knew she’d been up there collecting motherwort. She reached us
breathless, her hair sprung from her scarf into a riotous fan around her face. She swung me about, sending the spiky-leaved herbs flying.

When I introduced her to Tabitha, she said a priceless thing that Tabitha would remember all her life: “Ana has told me of your bravery.” Tabitha said nothing in response, which I imagined Diodora perceived as shyness, but I knew her silence was about the severed tongue in her mouth, her fear of sounding senseless.

Tabitha helped Diodora gather the spilled herbs, and all the while, Yaltha waited to ask the question, the one I dreaded. I looked out across the hillside, searching for the roof of the library.

“What has brought you back, child?” Yaltha said. Her face looked grave and stony. She’d already guessed the reason.

“Jesus is dead,” I said, feeling how my voice wanted to splinter apart. “They crucified him.”

Diodora let out a cry that I felt inside my own throat. Yaltha took my hand. “Come with me,” she said.

She led us to a little knoll not far from the garden, where we sat beside a cluster of brush pines that had been sculpted into outlandish shapes by the wind. “Tell us what happened,” Yaltha said.

I was weary from travel—we’d trekked for two and a half days from Bethany to Joppa, sailed another six to Alexandria, then jostled for hours in a donkey-pulled wagon that Lavi had hired—but I told the story, I told them everything, and like before with the women in Bethany, it took some of the brightness from my pain.

When the story was spent, we fell silent. Far down the escarpment I could just make out a slice of blue lake. Nearby, one of my goats was bleating in the animal shed.

“It was a relief to see that Haran’s soldiers are no longer encamped on the road,” I said.

“They disbanded not long after you left,” Yaltha said. “It happened exactly as Skepsis predicted: Haran was quickly informed that you’d
returned to your husband in Galilee and that I’d taken the vows to remain among the Therapeutae for life. Shortly after that, the outpost was abandoned.”

Returned to your husband in Galilee.
The words were like little cleavers.

I noticed Tabitha open and close her fists, as if coaxing the bravery Diodora had spoken about. Then she spoke for the first time. “Ana said the outpost would likely be deserted, but Lavi would not take chances. He insisted we wait in the closest village while he rode on alone to be certain. Only then did he return for us.” She spoke slowly, molding the sounds in her mouth.

As she’d spoken, though, a new concern had clamored at me. “Won’t Lucian inform Haran I’m back?” I asked Yaltha.

Yaltha pressed her lips together and pondered this for the first time herself. “You’re right about Lucian. He will most certainly inform Haran you’re back. But even if Haran decides once again to seek our arrests, he would have a hard time convincing the soldiers to return. Before you left, there were rumors of their discontent. They’d grown weary searching passersby and receiving little pay for it. And Haran is bound to resist doling out more of his money to them.” She laid her hand on my knee. “I think his revenge will go no further. But either way, we’re safe here with the Therapeutae. We can wait to venture beyond the gatehouse after Haran dies. The man is older than me. He can’t live forever.” A wicked grin formed on Yaltha’s face. “We could always write a death curse for him.”

“I’m very good at composing them,” said Tabitha, who may or may not have grasped our lack of seriousness.

“I took the vows,” Yaltha said. “I’m one of them for life now.”

I would never have expected this. She’d spent so much of her life rootless, exiled to places not of her choosing. Now
she
chose. “Oh, Aunt, I’m glad for you.”

“I took them, too,” said Diodora.

I said, “I will do so as well.”

“And I,” said Tabitha.

Yaltha smiled at her. “Tabitha, dear, in order to take the vows, you’ll need to be here for more than five minutes.”

Tabitha laughed. “Next week, then,” she said.

We rose finally to walk down the hill to find Skepsis and inform her of our return, but we paused first, listening to a bell clang in the distance. Wind was pouring down the cliffs, bringing the smell of the sea, and the air glowed with the saffron light that came sometimes on cloudless days. I remember this small interlude as if it were a sacred occasion, for I looked at the three of them poised before the brush pines and I saw that we had somehow shaped ourselves into a family.

In the middle of the afternoon, twenty-two months, one week, and a day after Jesus’s death, rain thundered onto the library roof, waking me from a strange and unintended sleep. My head felt full and fuzzy, like it was stuffed with heaps of newly shorn wool. Lifting my cheek from my writing desk, I looked about—where was I? Gaius, who’d once nailed me into a coffin, had recently built a second room onto the library so I would have a scriptorium and space for cubicles to hold the library’s scrolls, but in those first muddled seconds of waking, I didn’t recognize the new surroundings. I felt a flicker of panic inside, and then of course, my whereabouts in the world returned.

Later, I would think of my old friend Thaddeus, who’d slept every day in the scriptorium in Haran’s house, practically curled up on top of his desk, napping out of boredom and for a time from Yaltha’s spiked beer. I, however, could only blame my somnolence on the passion that had driven me to work late into the night for weeks making copies of my
codices. Two copies for the library and another that could be disseminated.

I pushed the bench back from my desk and shook my head, trying to clear the drowsy aftereffect, but the cobwebs clung to me. As I’d slept, the room had darkened and chilled, and I pulled Jesus’s cloak around my shoulders, drew the lamp closer, and turned my attention back to my work. My codex,
Thunder: Perfect Mind
, lay open on the desk, and beside it was the copy I’d been making of it on a fresh sheet of papyrus. Skepsis planned to send the copy to a scholar at the library in Alexandria with whom she corresponded. I’d taken extra care with the lettering and added my small flourishes, but my chevrons and spirals were wasted. A large, messy ink smear gaped at me from the middle of the papyrus, the place where my face had rested on the manuscript when I’d fallen asleep. The last lines I’d written were barely legible:

I am the whore and the holy woman

I am the wife and the virgin

I rubbed my finger across my cheek and the tip of it came back with a smear of ink. It seemed ironic, sad, beautiful, almost purposeful that
I am the wife
had been smudged onto my skin. For nearly two years, I’d worn my grief for Jesus like a second skin. In all that time, the pain of his absence had not diminished. The familiar burning came to my eyes, followed by that sense I often got of wandering inside my heart, desperately searching for what I could never find—my husband. I feared my grief would turn to despair, that it would become a skin I couldn’t shed.

A great tiredness came over me then. I closed my eyes, wanting the dark, empty void.

I woke to silence. The rain had quieted. The air seemed weighted and still. Looking up, I saw Jesus standing across the room, his dark, expressive eyes staring at me.

I drew in my breath. It took several minutes before I could speak. I said, “Jesus. You’ve come.”

“Ana,” he said. “I never left.” And he smiled his funny, lopsided smile.

He didn’t move from where he stood, so I walked toward him, stopping suddenly when I noticed he was wearing his old cloak with the bloodstain on the sleeve. I looked down, taking in the garment draped about my shoulders, his old cloak with the bloodstain on the sleeve, the one I’d worn daily for twenty-two months, one week, and a day. How could he be wearing it, too?

I tried to discern what was happening.
This is most assuredly a dream
, I thought. Perhaps an awake dream or a vision. Yet I felt the realness of him.

I went and clutched his hands. They were warm and callused. He smelled like sweat and wood chips. His beard bore traces of limestone dust. He looked as he had when we were together in Nazareth. I wondered what he thought of the ink on my cheek.

I sensed he was leaving. “Don’t go.”

“I’ll always be with you,” he said, and he vanished.

I sat at my desk a long while, trying to comprehend. Skepsis had once told me her mother appeared in her holy room three weeks after she’d died. “It’s not an uncommon thing,” she’d said. “The mind is a mystery.”

I believed then, and still now, that Jesus’s visitation was the workings of my own mind, but it was no less a miracle than if he’d been flesh and blood. His spirit returned to me that day. He was no longer lost to me.

I removed his cloak, folded it neatly, and tucked it into an empty cubicle. I said aloud to the shadows in the room, “All shall be well.”

We climb the path to the cliffs, Diodora, Tabitha, and I, walking one behind the other in the orange light. I walk at the head, holding my incantation bowl against my chest. Behind me, Diodora strikes a goatskin drum and Tabitha sings a song about Eve, the seeker. For thirty years, the three of us have lived together on this hillside.

I glance over my shoulder at them. Tabitha’s hair flutters out behind her in the breezes, smooth and gray as a dove wing, and Diodora’s face has become a tiny field of furrows like her mother’s. We keep no mirrors, but I often see my reflection on the water’s surface—the crinkling around my eyes, my hair still dark except for a streak of white across the front. At fifty-eight I can still move with quickness and ease up the steep incline, as can my two sisters, but today we walk slowly, weighed down by the bulging pouches on our backs. They are stuffed full of codices—thirty leather-bound copies of my writings. All the words I’ve written since I was fourteen. My everything.

Nearing the clifftops, we veer off the footpath and pick our way over rocks and wind-bowed grasses until we arrive at the spot I’ve selected—a little plateau surrounded by flowering marjoram bushes. I set my incantation bowl on the ground, Diodora stops drumming, Tabitha ceases her song, and we stand there, staring at two mammoth clay jars that are nearly as tall as I am, and then at two deep, round holes that have been dug side by side in the earth. I peer into one of the holes, and a mingling of elation and sadness passes through me.

We peel the heavy pouches from our backs, sighing with relief, making little grunting noises. “Did you have to write so much over the course of your life?” Diodora teases. Pointing at the little mountain of soil that was dug from the holes, she adds, “I imagine the junior who was required to dig these bottomless pits would also like an answer to that.”

Tabitha circumambulates one of the clay jars as if it’s the size of
Mount Sinai. “The poor donkeys who bore these Goliath jars up here would like the question answered as well.”

“Very well,” I say, joining in their fun. “I’ll write an exhaustive answer to the question and we shall return and dig another hole, and bury that writing, too.”

They groan loudly. Tabitha no longer hides her grin. She says, “Woe to us, Diodora; now that Ana is leader of the Therapeutae, we have no choice but to obey her.”

We look at one another and break into laughter. I’m unsure whether it’s because of the weight and volume of my books or because I have indeed become the Therapeutae’s leader. At that moment, both of these things seem remarkably funny to us.

Our levity fades as we remove the codices from the pouches. We grow quiet, even solemn. The day before, I cut Jesus’s cloak into thirty-one pieces. Now, sitting beside the holes dug into the hillside, we wrap the fragments of cloth around the books to protect them from dust and time, and tie them with undyed yarn. We work quickly, listening to the sea slap against the rocks far below, to the marjoram bushes alive with honeybees, the vibrating world.

When the task is done, I stare at the wrapped codices neatly stacked beside the jars and they look like they’re wearing little shrouds
.
I shake away the image, but the worry that my work will be forgotten lingers. Earlier, I recorded exactly where the jars would be buried, writing the location on a sealed scroll that will be passed on within the community after I die. But how long before the scroll is forgotten, before the significance of what’s buried fades?

I take the incantation bowl in my hands and lift it over my head. Diodora and Tabitha watch as I rotate it in slow circles and chant the prayer I wrote as a girl. The longing in it still seems like a living, breathing thing.

As I sing the words, I remember the night on the roof when Yaltha presented the bowl to me. She tapped the bone over my chest, striking
it to life. “Write what’s inside here, inside your holy of holies,” she told me.

Y
ALTHA FEL
L ASLEEP BENEATH
the tamarisk tree in the courtyard four years ago at the age of eighty-five and never woke up. She had all sorts of things to say to me during her life, but at her death there were no parting words. Our last real conversation had taken place beneath that same tree the week before she died.