The Book of Longings: A Novel (18 page)

i.

The day I entered Jesus’s house, his family stood in a silent clump in the courtyard, watching as Lavi led the cart containing me, my aunt, and our belongings through the gate. There were four of them—two men besides Jesus, and two women, one of whom rested her hand across her nearly imperceptible pregnant belly.

“Do they think we have the spaciousness of a palace?” I heard the pregnant one say.

To my mind, we’d brought a bare handful of possessions. I’d packed the plainest of my clothes, one ordinary silver headband, my copper mirror, an ornamental brass comb, two red woolen rugs, undyed bed coverings, my incantation bowl, and most precious of all, my cedar chest. Inside it were my scrolls, reed pens, a sharpening knife, two vials of ink, and the ivory sheet that had nearly gotten me stoned. The clean papyri my father had obtained for me were gone—I’d exhausted them during the brief writing frenzy that had commenced soon after retrieving my possessions from the cave. Yaltha had brought even less than I: three tunics, her bed mat, the sistrum, and the Egyptian scissors.

Still, we were a spectacle. Over my protests Father had sent us off in a cart drawn by a royally bedecked horse from Herod Antipas’s stable. I’m sure he wanted to impress the Nazarenes, to remind them that Jesus
was wedding far above his standing. I offered my new family a smile, hoping to endear myself, but a cart lined with fine woolen rugs, pulled by an imperial horse led by a servant, did nothing to help my cause. Jesus had met us on the village outskirts and even he’d frowned before greeting us.

To worsen matters, Father had also forbidden the wedding under his roof. It was customary for the chuppah to be in the bride’s house, but he feared annoying Antipas by hosting a marriage the tetrarch was certain to resent. Nor did Father want village peasants in his house. His refusal to host Jesus and his family must have been a terrible insult to them. And who knew what tales might have reached them of my fornicating, thieving, and blasphemy?

I let my eyes drift about the little compound. Three small dwellings were cobbled together within the enclosure, built from stacked stones and held together with mud. I counted five or six rooms opening onto the courtyard. A ladder led to the rooftops, which were covered with reed bundles and packed mud, and I wondered if Yaltha and I would be able to sit up there and share our secrets.

I quickly scanned the courtyard. An oven strewn with pots and utensils, firewood, dung pile, mortar and pestle, loom. There was a sun-cooked vegetable garden and a little stable with four chickens, two sheep, and a goat. A single olive tree. I took it all in.
This is where I’ll live.
I tried not to feel the shock that undulated through me.

His family huddled in the shade of the lone tree. I wondered where Jesus’s sister was, the one from the market—the yarn spinner. His mother wore a colorless tunic and a pale yellow head scarf with wisps of dark hair escaping the edges. I guessed her to be near the age of my mother, but she was far more frayed by her years. Her face, so like her son’s, was well worn from chores and childbearing. She had a slight rounding in her shoulders, and the corners of her mouth had begun to droop slightly, but I thought how lovely she looked standing there with
the sun filtering through the leaves, coins of light on her shoulders. Jesus’s confession to me in the cave slipped into my thoughts.
In Nazareth some say I’m Mary’s son, not Joseph’s. They say I was born from my mother’s fornication. Others say my father is Joseph, but that I was illicitly conceived before my parents married.

“Welcome, Ana,” she said, coming to embrace me. “My daughter Salome was married only a few weeks ago and lives now in Besara. One daughter has gone and another has come.” There was a plaintive note beneath her smile, and it occurred to me that not only had her daughter left, but her husband had died only six months before.

The two men were Jesus’s brothers, James, nineteen, and Simon, seventeen, both dark skinned and thick haired like Jesus, with the same short beards and posture—the wide stance, arms crossed—but their eyes had none of the passion and depth Jesus’s did. The pregnant woman with the prickly tongue was Judith, married to James, whose age, I would discover, was fifteen, the same as mine. They looked at me with mute stares.

Yaltha removed her bridle. “One would think a two-headed sheep had arrived in your midst!”

I winced. “Greet my aunt Yaltha.”

Jesus grinned.

“She’s impertinent,” James said to Jesus, as if she wasn’t standing there.

Rankled, I said, “It’s what makes her so dear to me.”

Jesus, I would discover, was a peacemaker and a provocateur in equal measures, but one could never say which he would be at any given moment. In this moment he became the peacemaker. “You’re welcome here. Both of you. You are our family now.”

“You are indeed,” Mary said.

Judith remained silent, as did Jesus’s brothers. My aunt’s honesty had laid the friction bare.

W
HEN THE CART WAS UNPACKED
,
I bid Lavi goodbye. “I will miss you, friend,” I told him.

“Be well,” he said, and his eyes watered, causing mine to do the same. I watched him lead the horse through the gate, listening to the clatter of the empty wagon.

When I turned back, the family had dispersed. Only Yaltha and Jesus stood there. He took my hand and the world righted herself.

We were to marry that same day when the sun set, but without ceremony. There would be no procession. No virgins raising their oil lamps and calling out for the groom. No singing, no feasting. By law, a marriage was the act of sexual union, nothing more and nothing less. We would become husband and wife in the solitude of each other’s arms.

Not allowed to enter the chuppah beforehand, I spent the afternoon in the storeroom, where Yaltha had spread her bed mat. Mary had offered to share her room with Yaltha, but she’d declined, preferring to be on her own amid storage jars, food provisions, wool shares, and tools.

“Do they think we have the spaciousness of a palace?” I said when we were alone, mimicking my soon-to-be sister-in-law.

Yaltha said, “She’s impertinent!” mocking James’s assessment of her.

We fell upon each other laughing. I put my finger to my lips. “Shhhh, we’ll be heard.”

“Am I required to be well behaved
and
quiet?”

“Never,” I replied.

I began to meander about the little room, touching the tools, running my thumb across a stained dye vat. “Are you worried about entering the chuppah?” Yaltha asked.

I supposed I was—what girl wasn’t nervous her first time?—but I shook my head. “As long as I don’t conceive, I will welcome it.”

“Welcome it then, for you will have no worries there.”

Yaltha had procured blackseed oil for me from a midwife in Sepphoris, a foul liquid more potent than anything my mother had used. I’d been swallowing it for a week. We’d agreed she would conceal it here among her things. Most men knew nothing of the ways in which women avoided pregnancy. When it came to children, they didn’t much consider the agony of birth and the possibility of death; they thought instead of God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply. It seemed to be a command God had devised with men in mind, and it was the only one they were universally good at obeying. I didn’t think Jesus was like other men, but I’d determined for now to keep the blackseed oil to myself.

When it was time, I dressed in a dark blue tunic that my aunt pronounced bluer than the Nile. She smoothed out the wrinkles with her hands and placed the silver headband on my forehead. I draped a white linen shawl over my head.

At exactly sunset, I entered the chuppah, where Jesus waited. Stepping inside the mud-walled room, I was greeted by the smell of clay and cinnamon and a dim miasma pierced with a beam of orange light falling from a high window.

“This will be our abode,” Jesus said, stepping back with a sweep of his arm. He wore his blue-tasseled cloak. His hair was damp from washing.

The room had been arranged with care—whether by Jesus or by the women, I didn’t know. My red rugs had been spread across the dirt floor. Two bed mats lay side by side, sprinkled with ground cinnamon—one freshly woven. My mirror, comb, and a neat stack of my clothes had been placed on a bench, with my chest of cedar set into a corner. My incantation bowl sat on a small oak table beneath the window for all the world to see, so exposed I had an irrational urge to hide it somewhere, but I forced myself to remain still. I said, “If you inspected my bowl, I’m sure you saw the graven image inside it. I drew it myself.”

“Yes, I saw,” he answered.

I watched for traces of condemnation on his face. “It doesn’t offend you?”

“I’m more concerned with what’s in your heart than what’s in your bowl.”

“To look into the bowl is to see into my heart.”

He walked over and peered into it. Could he read Greek? Taking the bowl in his hands, he turned it as he read aloud, “Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart.” Looking up, he held my gaze a moment before continuing. “Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”

He set the bowl back on the table and smiled at me, and I felt the unbearable ache of loving him. I went to him, and there on the thin straw mats in the crumbles of light, I knew my husband and he knew me.

The morning after I became his wife, I woke to hear him repeating the Shema and then a woman’s voice in the courtyard calling, “Ana, it’s time to milk the goat.”

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord,” Jesus intoned.

“Can you hear me?” the voice called. “The goat is in need of milking.”

“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

“Ana, the
goat
.”

I lay still, eyeing Jesus across the room, ignoring the urgent need for goat milk, listening to his voice rise and fall, the quiet song of it. Somehow in my privileged ignorance it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be given an equal share of the chores. The thought was faintly alarming—I’d arrived here unskilled at every conceivable task assigned to women.

Jesus faced the window, his back to me. When he lifted his palms, I glimpsed his arms ripple beneath his tunic. The sight summoned forth
the memory of last night, moments so innermost and beautiful, they caused an exquisite ache inside me. I let out an involuntary moan, and he finished his prayer and came to sit on the mat beside me.

He said, “Do you always sleep so late?”

I propped on my elbow, tilting my face to his, and tried to look both coy and innocent. “It’s not my fault. I was kept awake last night.”

His laughter rebounded from the walls to the ceiling, then out through the little window. Pushing the mass and tangle of hair from my face, he drew me against his chest. “Ana, Ana, you have awakened me and made me alive.”

“And you have done the same to me,” I said. “I have only one fear in being here.”

He cocked his head. “And what is that?”

“I have no idea how to milk a goat.”

He laughed his uproarious laugh once more and pulled me to my feet. “Get dressed and I will show you. The first thing you must learn is that this is a very particular goat. She only eats winter figs, almond blossoms, and barley cakes, and insists on being fed by hand and having her ears scratched . . .”

He carried on like this while I slipped a tunic over my undergarment and tied a scarf around my head, giggling at him under my breath. He was still traveling to Sepphoris to work on the theater and it seemed he should’ve been on his way by now, but he appeared to be in no hurry.

“Wait,” I said as he started toward the door. Opening my chest, I retrieved a small pouch, from which I pulled the red thread. “Can you guess where I acquired this?”

His brow wrinkled.

“It fell from your sleeve the day we met in the market,” I said.

“And you kept it?”

“I did, and I shall wear it every day while you’re away.” I held out my arm. “Tie it on for me.”

As he wrapped it about my wrist, he returned to his teasing. “Am I so faint in your thoughts that when I’m away you need this reminder?”

“Without this thread, I would forget I had a husband altogether.”

“Then keep it close,” he said and kissed my cheeks.

We found Judith in the stable. The goat was standing defiantly in the water trough, daring the sheep to drink. She was a dainty creature with a white body, a black face, a white beard, and wide-spaced eyes, one of which rotated in and the other out. I thought her outrageously funny-looking.

“She is a menace!” Judith said.

“I find her endearing,” I replied.

My sister-in-law made a derisive noise. “Then you won’t mind inheriting her care.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “But I need instruction.”

Sighing, she looked at Jesus as if they might commiserate together over my stupidity.

He took my hand, letting his thumb rub against the thread. “I should go. As it is, I’ll have to walk at a quick pace so as not to be late.”

“Your mother has packed your meal,” Judith told him, glancing accusingly at me, and I realized that task, too, belonged to me. I’d never cooked anything but ink.

When he left us, Judith lifted the goat from the water trough, provoking kicks, bleats, and a splatter of water, and dropped her roughly onto the ground. I watched as the animal lowered her head and butted Judith’s thigh.

Already I felt an affinity with the creature.

D
URING THOSE FIRST MONTHS
it was plain to everyone, including me, that I’d spent my life as a pampered rich girl. Yaltha was of little help—she’d read Socrates, but knew nothing about pounding grain into flour
or drying flax. Jesus’s mother gathered me under her wing, trying to teach me, and protected me as best she could from Judith’s reproaches, which gurgled like an unceasing spring: I didn’t light the dung fire correctly. I left chaff in the wheat. I left wool on the sheep. I could not cook pottage without scorching the lentils. My goat cheese tasted like hooves.