Song of the Magdalene (5 page)

Abraham laughed louder. “Demons. Is that who you're blaming for biting me?”

I shook my head hard. My eyes burned with the need to cry. “Don't you believe I'm a sinner? You may be one, too.”

“Sinners?” Abraham sighed. “Oh, Miriam, I wish I could sin. But all I can do is watch.”

I stared at him. “Envy,” I said slowly.

“Yes.” Abraham's voice was heavy and sad.
“Envy is a sin. Coveting is a sin.” His eyes wandered once more. “Yes, I'm a sinner. But you're not, Miriam.”

“I went into the valley alone. Women don't go alone.”

“You didn't sin, Miriam. You broke no law of Moses and Israel. You're not sick because you sinned, Miriam. I'm not sick because I sinned. If there's anything I've figured out in my life, it's that invalids aren't any more sinners than anyone else.”

Abraham's words sounded heretical. I was glad no one else was around to hear them. Yet I was equally glad that I had heard them. If the Torah didn't say that invalids were evil, then it didn't have to be so. And surely babies were not evil. Abraham might be right. How I wanted him to be right.

Perhaps his palsy, perhaps my fits, were just accidents of the body, like stomach pains that came and went, only that much more exaggerated. Maybe healers were the answer, after all. It might just be a matter of finding the right medicine. Something to be gained with searching and luck. I thought of all the herbs Mother had
taught me about. “Abraham, do you know hyssop?”

“Hyssop and bignonia and polygonum and —”

“No, stop.”

“We tried them, Miriam. Between my mother and Daniel, we tried every extract known. When I was small, I drank so many disgusting brews.” Abraham's voice rose.

I couldn't bear it. I wouldn't bear it. There had to be something they hadn't tried. “Then a poultice — yes, a poultice of fish brine or . . .”

“The liver of a marten? Something simple.” Abraham panted, as though out of breath. “Something simple, Miriam? Oh, no. There is nothing simple. Not for me, at least.”

Nothing simple for Abraham. Nothing simple for me. No evil, yet still no escape. “Why?” The words came from deep in my throat, like a howl. “Why am I sick, Abraham? Why do I have fits?”

He looked at me.

I whispered, “Why us?”

“I don't know, Miriam. I don't think anyone knows but the Creator.”

I moved still closer to Abraham, until our
shoulders touched. We sat side by side and looked into the fire. “Is there no hope for us?”

“If you mean, will things turn out well, will we be healed, I cannot answer. I doubt it for me. I cannot guess for you. But if you mean, will things make sense, then maybe, Miriam.”

“Sense,” I said. Maybe my fits made sense. I looked around at the stone walls of our house and I couldn't imagine how any of this made sense.

Abraham and I argued. He said I should hide my fits. He said people didn't understand invalids, people were afraid of invalids, and if I revealed myself, I'd rue the day.

I said people could learn. I had learned.

Abraham laughed at me. He said necessity was a formidable teacher.

I raged against his warning. If Abraham were right and my fits were not the sign of demons, then I wanted everyone to know. I wanted the chance to face everyone and fight out the truth.

One summer night years before, when we slept on the flat roof to catch a bit of air because the khamsin wind from the desert scorched our tongues and throats, Father and a visiting friend sat hunched toward one another in fervent conversation. Father was counseling the man to confront
a foe. Who or what, I couldn't catch. But the firmness of Father's voice, the absolute assurance of it, enveloped me as I drifted into sleep. In the morning the man was gone.

I now knew if I were to talk to Father openly, if Abraham would release me from the promise of secrecy just that much, Father would encourage me, just as he had encouraged that anguished man. I told Abraham that it was right that everyone should know who I was, that it was just for me to face them. I spoke what I knew Father would counsel.

But, despite my words to Abraham, I still harbored the fear that Abraham might be wrong about demons. I still wondered about the possibility of another life, an evil life, parasitic within me. And so my arguments with Abraham lacked conviction.

Eventually we compromised. I didn't tell Father or Hannah about the fits. I didn't tell anyone. But I no longer went to the valley daily. Instead, I went wherever I wanted, all about town or in the valley, as the mood dictated. And I pushed Abraham in the handcart with me everywhere. I went freely, never pausing to think
what would happen if a fit struck right then. I almost wanted a fit to strike. Every step became a sort of challenge, a challenge that at once frightened me and drew me.

Abraham didn't agree to the compromise, but there was nothing he could do about it. I simply lugged him into the cart and off we went. And he loved going new places so much that he soon forgave my unfair tactics.

When we were in the valley, I collected herbs. I didn't hunt for them. Instead, I merely noticed what we passed and I tucked a bit of this, a bit of that into my cloth belt. That way the selection wasn't mine — that way I opened my heart and eyes to whatever path the Creator might set me on. It was an act of faith. I scraped bark with the knife I kept in that belt. I plucked the small, fragrant leaves from stems with the sure fingers of my mother. I was a daughter of a woman, though she was dead. I was a daughter surrendering myself to the power of good. Abraham didn't say anything, but he saw what I did.

Once when I dug up a mandrake root, he insisted on carrying it the rest of the day. He held the root, forked and fleshy, in his right hand and
said it was the hips and thighs of his true love. He laughed, but I stared and heat climbed my cheeks and reverberated in my ears. The mandrake resembled a woman's body, there was no doubt about it.

In the mornings when Hannah was milling or spinning flax, after we had washed the clothes, after I had tended the kitchen garden, I made a strong healing brew from the herbs I'd collected the day before. Abraham and I drank it in silence. I knew he put no hopes in the brew; I knew he thought of the futile brews of his childhood. Yet he was kind: He never refused to take his sips, he never again suggested there was no point. We drank without fail.

And not from just any gray clay cup. I stirred each new brew in the little red pitcher whose black swirls had laughed at me when Mother used to pour from it. And I carefully measured out the liquid into the two yellow bowls with fine ribs of red. I had planned to take them with me when I married. But now I used them daily with Abraham. We drank. Then we went out to meet the world.

Abraham delighted in every moment outside
our home. He especially loved going to the market at the foot of the high tower that our town was named after. We went on the second and fifth days of the week, without fail.

The birds attracted him the most, the partridge and quail that the rich ate, the ducks and geese, even the cheap and plentiful pigeons. We sat among the animals, the weaned kid or lamb, the fatted calf. The animals paid us no mind. We were as though invisible. I knew that Abraham loved the animals for that. It was a respite.

But I would never allow us to stay there too long. I had to be among people. I had to put us on display. I was ready for whatever would happen. Ready for the next fit. I would speak to the moment. That was my decision, arrived at after feeling the eyes of the villagers on our backs day after day, week after week. Oh, yes. I would enlighten the village about illness.

So I pushed the cart through the market crowds with purpose, and Abraham and I marveled at the piles of carp and scaleless catfish from our own Sea of Galilee, and we were proud when buyers came from out of town to take barrels of our muries, the salted fish that made the
name of Magdala known as far as Rome. We wandered through the stacks of melons, figs, olives, the piles of wheat and barley and rice and four different kinds of locusts, weaving our way among all the burdened, braying donkeys. It seemed everyone in the world owned at least one donkey. Abraham loved the whole confused mess. And I welcomed it. I welcomed every chance to stand among all those people. My eyes were alert for the flash of light that signaled a coming fit. I was ready.

•  •  •

But, as it turned out, I had prepared myself for the wrong thing.

One morning a Roman foot soldier passing through town stopped near us in the market as we marveled at the exotic foods crowded together on the spread-out cloth of a traveling peddler from the north. The Roman laughed at our round eyes — for that's what Abraham and I were in those days, just eyes observing the world, me from behind my veil and Abraham from the shell of his cart — and the Roman said, in accented Hebrew, that we hadn't seen anything until we'd seen the great market in
Jerusalem. I'd never been addressed by a Roman before. I'd never talked to any pagan ever, nor even to a man of Israel that wasn't known to my Father. We didn't dare answer him, though questions crowded in our mouths.

But our silence didn't deter him. He told us of hens' eggs that the Romans prepared in so many ways. He told us of the meat of deer and gazelle that graced the tables of kings. He made our mouths salivate with descriptions of the dates from Jericho.

He took an apple from the top of the pile, an apple from Sodom, and ate loudly. Its sweet juice perfumed the air and made his bottom lip shine. Our people never stood as they ate. There was something about this act of eating standing, without a prayer, that put me on edge. I was aware of how his sweat-stained shirt stuck to his chest. I was aware of the coarse black hair on the back of his hands. A vague anxiety made me stand tall and alert, my chin pointing forward, not down.

So when this Roman man cocked his head and spoke again, it was as though I had braced myself
for what he was about to say. Still, the words jolted me. “The cripple will never see Jerusalem. But you might, little lady. With some rouge and nard, I can see you making a bed in Jerusalem, so to speak.” And he laughed again.

We left quickly, for I knew what he meant. The women of Israel loved their scents and ornaments. But he had not spoken to me as a proper woman of Israel, adorning herself for her husband. I knew, and so did Abraham.

A sick feeling settled in my stomach and wouldn't leave. Prostitutes gave up their souls to false gods; they were bestial. I knew the story of the daughter of a priest who turned to whoredom and was burned for her sin. My skin crawled with the horror of burning, a sentence that went so against the law of nature. I was not bestial — a wild dog — nor would ever be. I was an Israelite forever.

It was more than a month before I returned to the market, and then I steered clear of apples.

Later Abraham swore to me that when Daniel finally came back from Alexandria, he would get him to take us both to Jerusalem. I didn't answer.
I knew I could get Father to take me to Jerusalem if I asked, but I knew he wouldn't take Abraham along. It was one thing to have an invalid in the house with Hannah servicing him; it was quite another to think of traveling afar with that invalid.

Would Daniel really take Abraham to Jerusalem? It had been so long since we'd received word of Daniel that I was beginning to doubt he'd ever return. But if he did and if he agreed to take us to Jerusalem, would Father entrust me to Daniel? What would the villagers say?

The Roman had taught me much. The villagers' nervous eyes following us in the market now meant different things to me. They posed a new challenge.

No other decent woman walked freely through the streets, going wherever she wanted with no fixed purpose. Decent women went about their house chores or ran shops. They sold textiles, incense, clothing. They worked at the glassblowers' and made bottles. From their doors they sold olives and braided breads. They worked in the
fields in groups of three or more, never alone. They walked to the house of prayer, but only when the streets were almost empty, only when market time was nearly over. The only people who wandered about the market in our town were men buying and selling, and beggars, and prostitutes.

No other cripples were pushed in carts through the midst of crowds. Cripples sat in one place, calling out relentlessly for alms and food.

No other couple was like Miriam and Abraham.

Hannah had been alarmed from the very first. She said the villagers talked about me and Abraham. She feared that if I became an issue because of Abraham, Father would cast her out. At the time I had thought her fears foolish. I didn't understand what she meant. Not completely. Not until the Roman foot soldier.

But Father also hadn't seemed to give full weight to Hannah's fears. He had quelled them, saying Abraham could never be the cause of problems for our household. He was overcome with gratitude toward Abraham for saving me from the
fire. I was all Father had in this world. He told everyone of Abraham's heroics. They listened and nodded, their faces speaking sympathy.

Oh, Father was confused the first time I passed him on the streets, bumping along with Abraham, that third day of our public wanderings. “Miriam, where are you going?” His hands were open, almost as though he expected me to fall into them, as though I must be in need of great physical support.

I smiled at him, pleased to have happened upon him so soon and so naturally. Pleased to have him know what I was doing without my having had to design a meeting. “Anywhere, Father. Everywhere. We want to see everything.”

He pursed his lips. “You're not on an errand?” His brow crinkled with irritation. “Doesn't Hannah need your help at home?”

“I fetched the water for her before we left. I scrubbed the laundry and hung it. I'll be home in time to help with the evening meal.”