According to Mary Magdalene (4 page)

O
ne day Mary was reading through what she had written as usual, when she suddenly felt an unexpected tenderness toward this child, snatched away from a primitive peasant village and thrown into an enchanted world.

How much time had gone by before the girl understood?

Not long, she reckoned. First of all, there was Miriam and her misery, dark as an abyss. Then of course there was the language. The child had learned quickly, as children do, and she listened with increasing astonishment, not only to the strange cries slicing through her sleep at night, but also at their midday meal around the great table in the kitchen, when the women exchanged views on the night's guests and their experiences—complaining, laughing, and weeping.

They despised and mocked the men who rang the doorbell of the house at regular intervals. Why? Mary could not make it out, and found it difficult to put together all the stories she heard.

She remembered trying to ask Miriam. Miriam replied by weeping, twisting her hands and rushing out of their bedroom. That was when Mary decided to get up in the middle of the night and slip down to the big room on the ground floor to see for herself. But Euphrosyne caught her, clipped her over the ear, and roughly carried her back to her own room.

The next day Euphrosyne had a long talk with her.

In her room in Antioch, Mary sat thinking: Tomorrow I shall try to remember what she said.

They each sat on a velvet-covered stool in Euphrosyne's office, Euphrosyne sometimes taking Mary's hand in hers, but otherwise, as always, quite unemotional.

She began by telling Mary how children came about, how the man put his member into the woman's vagina and filled it with semen. That was nothing unusual to Mary. She had seen goats and sheep copulating and she could vaguely remember nights when she was awakened by her father's groans as he penetrated his wife.

Euphrosyne called it intercourse, then said it was a great pleasure. That surprised Mary.

“For many it's the only way of being close to another person,” Euphrosyne went on, smiling, which she often did, her smile somehow never quite complete. “That's why they call it love,” she went on with a laugh.

The girl looked at her with surprise, for she had never seen anyone laughing with the corners of her mouth turned down like that.

Euphrosyne paused, as if needing time to choose her lies, for there were limits to what could be said to a seven-year-old about follies and perversions.

“There are women who find great joy in sleeping with a man,” she said. “The girls who work here with me are often that kind.”

Mary thought about her mother. Had she liked it? And she noticed there was some hesitation in Euphrosyne's voice.

“Miriam,” she whispered.

Euphrosyne sighed and admitted it straight out.

“The Jewish girls often have problems.”

She paused again, thinking about the Jewesses she had had, girls full of anguish and feelings of guilt. When they painted themselves for the evening, she had heard them gabbling desperate prayers to the god who alone rules over the hearts of the Jews. But how much could she say to this Jewish child? She hesitated again before going on.

“They've been brought up to believe it is mortal sin to sleep with a man they are not married to. They call us whores. We are unclean in their eyes.”

Mary made an effort to understand, but her memories kept intruding—Mother's voice—“If Mary is a child of sin, then I'm a whore.” In a firm voice, and looking Euphrosyne straight in the eyes, Mary said, “I am unclean.”

Euphrosyne tried to hide her surprise. “You're an innocent child. I can't think why you imagine you're unclean.”

“They told me I was.”

In the long silence that followed, the first autumn rains began to fall on the roses in the garden. The girl noticed. “Why do people grow roses?” she said in a worried voice.

“Because they're beautiful, my child. The rose is also the flower of love, so it is appropriate here. What we do here could be called acts of love.”

Yet another crooked smile, but at that moment, the child believed her. Euphrosyne had that rare ability to be herself, and that invoked trust. She was often exposed to the anger of the women. After difficult nights, they could scream at her that she was heartless, that she exploited them, and they hated her.

But they trusted her.

After a long silence, Mary said, “But why don't you let Miriam go if she's unhappy?”

“She has nowhere to go. She was raped by a soldier and gave birth to a child in secret. Her parents put the child out and drove Miriam away.”

Euphrosyne had been speaking in broken Aramaic and Mary was not sure she had understood correctly. She made an effort to remember word for word what they had said as she walked slowly to the secret cave on the shore where Miriam was waiting. It had stopped raining and a rainbow was arching high over the blue lake.

Miriam flushed with indignation when Mary told her about the acts of love in the house of pleasure.

“She's lying,” said Miriam. “This is a house of sin, where they sell women's bodies at a high price. Whores, that's what we are. So watch out, Mary, so you don't go the same way as I have.”

Mary sat in silence, looking along the shore at the vapor rising from the warm baths where the soldiers were.

“You must know they are lackeys of Satan,” said Miriam, following Mary's gaze over toward the. bathhouse.

All this was very confusing to Mary. Her thoughts went back to how she had learned to hate Romans and Greeks, and to the blue-eyed soldier riding past her home, and to Leonidas, who was so kind. As if reading her thoughts, Miriam said, “They are godless, like all foreigners.”

“Serene prays to God. I've heard her myself.”

“Serene is a Philistine.” Miriam spat out the word. “Her god is an idol, a goddess,” she whispered into Mary's ear.

That frightened Mary. A goddess, that was truly terrible.

She dared not tell Miriam what Euphrosyne had said about her. Maybe that was also a lie. But she reckoned it was probably true, for there must be some explanation for the lovely girl's grief.

Relations between the two of them became more and more complex, Miriam at times hating Mary because she learned Greek so quickly. The child would soon no longer need her, and that meant she would have to go back “to work,” as Euphrosyne put it.

Mary sensed the other girl's anger, but was unable to understand it. She was proud of her progress and all the praise she received because she was so clever.

“She's gifted, has a good head, is ambitious,” the women kept saying at the dinner table.

She learned to read and write, but Miriam's spelling was weak, so Leonidas was displeased.

Some time went by.

Euphrosyne excused Miriam from her teaching duties after the arrival of the new teacher who came to teach Mary Greek and Latin. Erigones disliked his assignment, but as a slave, he had no choice when his owner, a Roman tribune, loaned him to Leonidas.

For Mary, this was the end of playing at learning. She now sat every morning in Euphrosyne's office together with a man with a harsh expression and fierce demands. Latin was beautiful, although at first the grammar tied her brain into knots.

What she liked best was when he read the Greek tales to her, choosing one a day, then telling her to write it down freely during the afternoon. She wrote about Perseus slaying the Gorgon after tremendous adventures; and Aesculapius, son of Apollo and beautiful Coronis, the father of medicine; and about the terrible voyage of the Argonauts when Jason stole the Golden Fleece.

But the story she liked best was about Persephone and Demeter, the girl abducted by the harsh ruler of the underworld. Mary wept with pity for the mother roaming the world in search of her daughter.

Miriam and Mary still shared a room, but their confidential talks became fewer, and Miriam shuddered with horror when Mary told her about Demeter ascending from the underworld every spring to make the fields flower and the seed corn grow.

“Those are idols,” Miriam said. “Don't you see that they're idols?”

The next morning, Mary plucked up her courage and asked her teacher, “Is Demeter an idol?”

He laughed for the first and only time. “You ought to know better, you who belong to the chosen people with the only just god.”

Mary did not understand, but dared not ask again, and when he saw her surprise, he went on, “You could say that both Persephone and Demeter are symbols. A symbol is a sign for something that exists in all our lives but cannot be understood.”

Mary was none the wiser, but she did memorize his words.

Like all visitors to the house of pleasure, Erigones was curious about its activities and was attracted to the honey-colored Serena like a moth to the light. He never neglected any opportunity to greet her and consume her with his eyes, but they never actually spoke, for he was too shy. Serena was flattered and often made excuses to come into the office during lessons, then apologized and went out again challengingly swinging her hips.

Mary was jealous. One day she leaned over toward her teacher and whispered confidentially: “Serena is a heathen.”

This time her teacher did not laugh. He was angry.

“So am I. So are Leonidas and Euphrosyne and all the others here who are kind to you. According to your religion, everyone in the world is a heathen—Romans, Greeks, Dacians, Syrians, Egyptians, Teutons—all except the Jews. I have no desire to influence you, but I find your Jewish faith loathsome, arrogant, and circumscribed.”

Mary found it hard to sleep that night. Erigones' words kept running through her head, and to make things worse, she was ashamed of everything she had not said. About God's alliance with Abraham's seed and about the Holy Scriptures that guided the actions of the faithful. Tomorrow, she thought, or the next day, Leonidas would be coming. I must ask him.

But nothing turned out as she had imagined.

Euphrosyne had hesitated, but had finally pulled herself together and told Miriam that she must return to work, in her own interests, too, she added, for half of what she earned went to herself. “Your purse is thin. You'll need some capital when you go out into the world again.”

Miriam did not reply or meet her eye. A few hours later, she had disappeared. It was evening and Mary finally did what was forbidden, went to find Euphrosyne in the noisy throng in the main hall. They searched, only the two of them at first, then all the girls who were free, throughout the garden and along the lake. The cook and the gardener were sent into the alleyways in toward town, while the women continued along the shore, searching in every nook and cranny and calling out “Miriam, Miriam,” so that it echoed across the lake.

At dawn, her body floated ashore in the far north, lacerated by the sharp rocks.

The seven women sat in anguish in the big kitchen, as if for a moment they had seen in the dead woman their own destinies.

Euphrosyne closed the house. There would be no guests that night. Wrapped in her long black cloak, she strode the streets, tired out, trying with little success not to think about Miriam and what she might have done for the girl—tried to find a Jewish foster home, for instance, or spoken to the rabbi in the Jewish quarter, restricted Miriam to cleaning and cooking? But the latter was the only possibility, for a Jewish family would never have accepted spoiled fruit and the rabbi would never speak to a brothel keeper.

I could have put her to sewing, she thought. But the lovely Miriam was much sought after by the clients.

Unknowingly, she had left the Greek sector and was walking toward the Jewish quarter of town. Euphrosyne was usually hardened to the contempt she met in these streets, children shouting insults at her and adults staring, their eyes burning with ill will and greedy curiosity. But today it troubled her, and she turned back toward home. No more Jewish girls, she thought, then the next moment she remembered Mary. Oh well, she was Leonidas' problem.

They buried Miriam the next day beneath the great rose bushes in the garden. At the open grave, Mary read all the prayers she could remember from the synagogue in Magdala, some in Hebrew, others in Aramaic. Sometimes she mixed both languages and words, perhaps even the meaning of the prayers, but her voice was strong and not once did she stumble.

“Who can count the sand of the sea, the drops of the rain and the days of eternity. And the depths of the sea—or of wisdom. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for great as he is, as great is his mercy.”

Erigones was on the outskirts of the little group around the grave, reluctantly impressed by the beautiful words and the clear voice of the child. The last to join the burial guests was Leonidas, who had been away on one of his many assignments when Miriam had died.

When the child had stopped reading over the grave, she turned and bowed slightly, but was so pale, Euphrosyne was worried and tried to silence the wails of the women tearing their hair and weeping out their despair.

But the girl appeared not to hear them. Her eyes unseeing, she walked stiffly through the group of mourners until a call reached her, the voice of Leonidas.

“Mary, Mary.”

Suddenly she was able to run, straight into the arms of the Greek, who lifted her up and put her head against his shoulder. She was as tense as if the blood had ceased flowing through her limbs. “Dear child, dear child,” was all he said.

He carried her to the room she had shared with Miriam and lay down on the narrow bed with her body close to his own. He was not worried like Euphrosyne, for he had seen many people in shock and knew it seldom took the life of a human being.

“She needs something to drink.”

“I'll bring some hot milk and honey.”

Mary closed her mouth tight as the sweet drink was pressed to her lips.

But Leonidas said, “Drink now, girl,” and she obeyed. To Euphrosyne he said, ‘Til stay here tonight.”

As Euphrosyne left them, she was thinking what a strange love it was binding those two together, a warrior Greek and a Jewish child. Almost a destiny. One weary wine-soaked night, he had said the child was in some inexplicable way bound to his destiny.