The Book of Longings: A Novel (22 page)

She would remain and I would go. I hated to part, but I knew she would be better off here with Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. They’d made her into a little sister.

“She’ll be safer here, too,” Jesus had pointed out. “In Nazareth she would be too close to Japha.” I hadn’t considered this. If she came to Nazareth, her relatives would surely hear of her presence and come for her. They would send her back to the man in Jericho or sell her all over again.

“Before I go, I want to tell you something,” I said to her.

She set down the lyre.

“Years ago, after that day I came to your house, I wrote down your story on papyrus. I wrote about your ferocious spirit, how you stood in the street and cried out what happened to you and were silenced for it. I think every pain in this world wants to be witnessed, Tabitha. That’s why you shouted about your rape on the street and it’s why I wrote it down.”

She stared at me unblinking, then pulled me to her and clung there.

W
HEN WE CAME
through the compound gate in Nazareth, Yaltha, Mary, Judith, James, and Simon hurried to greet us. Even Judith kissed my cheek. Mary linked her arm through her son’s and led us to the large stone basin across the courtyard. It was the custom in our household that those who remained behind would wash the feet of those who’d
made the Passover pilgrimage. Mary motioned for Judith to remove my sandals, but my sister-in-law, misunderstanding, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, bent and untied Jesus’s sandal strap instead. Mary shrugged, then did me the honor of bathing my feet herself, water splashing cold on my toes, her thumbs circling my ankles.

“How was your time in the Temple?” James asked.

“A most remarkable thing occurred,” Jesus said. “There was a stampede of lambs in the Court of Gentiles. Somehow they escaped their pen.” He grinned at me.

“It was . . .” I searched for the right word.

“Unforgettable,” he said. Beneath the water, his foot nudged mine.

One fall morning, I vomited my breakfast. Even after my stomach emptied, I remained bent over the waste pot retching plain air. When the heaving subsided, I washed my face, cleaned the spatter from my tunic, then went on slow, solemn feet to find my aunt. The blackseed oil had finally failed me.

Over the past few years, the compound had begun to spill over with people. Salome’s husband had died, and we’d all traveled to Besara for the funeral banquet, then brought her home, childless and bereft, her husband’s meager properties having gone to his brother. The following year, Simon’s wife, Berenice, had arrived, and then came a baby, to which Judith had responded by producing her third. Now there would be one more.

It wasn’t long past daybreak, and Jesus was off in the hills with his prayer shawl. I was glad he was absent—I didn’t want him to see my stricken face.

Yaltha was sitting on the floor of the storeroom eating chickpeas and garlic. The smell convulsed my stomach and nearly sent me back to the
waste pot. After she set aside the bowl and its vile-smelling contents, I lay down beside her, resting my head in her lap. I said, “I’m with child.”

She rubbed my back and neither of us spoke for a while. Then she asked, “And you are certain?”

“My bleeding is late, but I gave it little thought—it has been late many times. It wasn’t until I retched my breakfast that I knew. I’m pregnant, I know it.” I sat up, suddenly a little frantic. “Jesus will be back from his prayers soon, and I can’t tell him, not yet, not when I’m like
this
.” I felt possessed by a strange, almost debilitating numbness. Beneath it, though, disappointment, fear, and anger rattled against some lid inside me.

“Give yourself the time you need. If he questions your demeanor, say your belly is unsettled. There’s truth in that.”

I got to my feet. “For six years I’ve swallowed that hellish oil,” I said, the anger leaking out. “Why would it fail me now?”

“No preventative is perfect.” She gave me a mischievous look. “And you have certainly tested the limits of it.”

J
ESUS TRAVELED TO
T
ABOR
the following day to find work, returning four days later. I met him at the gate, kissed his cheeks and hands, then his lips. “You are in need of a haircut,” I said.

The sun was going down, a tiny rampage of color in the sky—red, orange, indigo. He squinted at it and the smile formed, the one I loved. “Am I?” he said. His locks hung about his shoulders. He combed through them with his fingers. “I thought my hair was just right.”

“Then I’m sorry to tell you that tomorrow morning I will accompany you into the hills and wait while you pray, and then I shall cut your hair.”

“I’ve always cut my own hair,” he said, giving me a curious look.

“Which explains why it’s so unkempt,” I teased.

I wanted a way to steal him away from the compound, that was
all—away from all the people and the busyness so we could be alone and uninterrupted. I felt like he guessed this, that he sensed I had some other intention besides his hair.

“I’m happy you’re home,” I added.

He lifted me up then and swung me about, which precipitated a wave of nausea. My unsettled stomach, as Yaltha had called it, didn’t confine itself to the mornings. I closed my eyes and pressed my hand to my mouth, letting the other one float instinctively to the new little mound of my belly.

He watched me in that deep, probing way of his.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“Yes, only a little tired.”

“Then we’ll go and rest.” But he lingered, gazing at the bloodshot sky. “Look,” he said and pointed to the east, where a slivered moon rose, so pale it seemed like nothing more than a winter breath. “The sun is setting while the moon rises.”

He said the words in a deliberate way, and I felt like I knew what he was saying, that this was a sign to us. My mind flashed to the story of Isis that Yaltha had told Tabitha and me so long ago.
Think of it
, she’d said.
Some part of you might die and a new self will rise up to take its place.

It seemed I was seeing my old life die before me in a splurge of color and a faint new life rising up. It was a thing of wonder, and the anguish I’d felt over having the child left me.

“D
ON
’
T TRIM TOO MUCH
,”
he said.

“Like Samson, do you believe your strength lies in your hair?” I asked.

“Like Delilah, are you bent on shearing me?”

Our banter was trifling and playful, but there was a thin layer of tension beneath it, as if we were both waiting to let out our breaths.

Earlier, we’d found a grassy hillock on which to sit and he’d left me
while he went apart to pray, but he’d come back sooner than I’d expected—I doubt he could’ve repeated the Shema more than a dozen times. I’d brought Yaltha’s Egyptian scissors. I held up the long bronze blades.

“I trust you know how to work this thing,” he said. “I’m at your mercy.”

Kneeling behind him, I squeezed the blades, snipping off the ends of his hair. They drifted down like dark, curled wood shavings. I could smell his skin, brown and earthen.

When it grew quiet, I set down the scissors. “There’s something I must tell you.” I waited for him to turn and lift his eyes to mine. “I am with child.”

“It is true, then,” he said.

“You’re not surprised?”

“Last evening, when you placed your hand to your belly, I thought it might be so.” He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them, they were bright with worry. “Ana, tell me truly—are you glad to have this child?”

“I am content,” I said.

And I was. By now, after such a long drought of ink, I could barely remember why I had taken the blackseed oil at all.

W
HEN WE ENT
ERED THE COURTYARD
,
Jesus summoned everyone to the olive tree, which is where the family gathered to announce betrothals, pregnancies, and births, and to discuss matters of household business. Mary and Salome came smelling of mulberries, followed by Judith and Berenice and their small flock of children. James and Simon wandered over from the workshop. Yaltha needed no summons—she’d been waiting there when we arrived. Everyone but my aunt appeared curious, but unsuspecting—it wouldn’t have occurred to them I carried a child. I was Jesus’s barren wife.

I clung to Jesus’s arm.

“We have good news,” he said, turning his eyes to his mother. “Ana is with child!” Several strange moments passed while no one moved, and then Mary and Salome rushed to me, Mary bending to kiss my belly and Salome smiling at me, so much longing in her face that I almost looked away. I thought how incongruous it was that I, who hadn’t wanted a child, should conceive one, while Salome, who yearned for one, could not.

Simon and James slapped Jesus’s back and dragged him to the center of the courtyard, where the three of them folded their arms about one another’s shoulders and danced. His brothers let out whoops and shouts—
Praise God, who has poured his blessing on you. May God grant you a son.

How happy my husband looked out there, his uneven hair swirling about his cheeks.

The months that followed our announcement passed quickly and without incident. Even when I couldn’t hold down my meals, when my back throbbed from my ever-protruding belly, I rose each day to carry out my chores. In my fifth month, I began to feel a little foot or an elbow ripple inside me, the strangest of sensations, and I would experience a burst of love for the child that shocked me in its intensity. When my seventh month arrived, I grew ridiculously cumbersome. Once, observing my struggling efforts to sit up on my sleeping mat, Jesus playfully likened me to an overturned beetle, then placed his arms beneath mine and hoisted me up. How we laughed at my awkwardness. Yet at odd hours in the night when he was away and I couldn’t sleep, I sometimes felt like pieces of me were sloughing away—Ana, the scribe of lost stories, Ana and the tiny sun.

B
IRTHIN
G PAINS WOKE ME
before dawn. Lying on my mat on the earthen floor, muddled with sleep and confusion and a goring pain in my back, I reached for Jesus in the darkness and found his mat empty. It took a moment to remember he’d departed for Capernaum three days ago.

He’s not here.
Our baby would come too soon, and he was not here.

A spasm encircled my belly, tightening. Pressing my fist against my mouth, I listened to a moan escape between my fingers, a quashed, eerie sound. Tighter, tighter, the pain bit down, and I saw how it would be, bearing a child. The fangs would chomp and let go, chomp and let go, and there would be nothing to do but give myself to the slow devouring. I placed my arms around my swollen belly and rocked side to side. Fear sloshed in my chest. I’d only been with child seven months.

For the past few months, Jesus had helped to keep us fed by traveling to Capernaum to fish on the Sea of Galilee. He relied on his comradery with the local fishermen, who took him out on their boats to cast nets and let him barter his portion of the catch for whatever we most needed.

I couldn’t be angry with him for his absence. He may not have detested our separations as much as I did, but neither did he relish them. This time he’d promised to return in less than a month, well before my time came. He couldn’t have known the child would come in this precipitous way. He would be distraught he wasn’t here.

Rolling onto my side, I pushed to my knees, then my feet, reaching for the wall to brace myself as the birth waters broke onto my legs. I began to shake, first my hands, then my shoulders and thighs, the uncontrollable palsy of fear.

I lit the lamp and made my way to the storeroom. “Aunt, wake up,” I cried. “Aunt! The baby is coming.” She didn’t pause for her sandals, but hurried to me in the flickering dark, slinging the midwife bag over
her arm. She was fifty-two now, stooped, her face a drawn pouch. She took my face in her hands and measured my apprehension. “Don’t fear; the baby will live or it will not. We must let life be life.”

No assurance, no platitude, no promise of God’s mercy. Just a stark reminder that death was part of life. She offered me nothing but a way to accept whatever came—
Let life be life
. There was a quiet relinquishment in the words.

As Yaltha led me back to my room, she paused to rap on Mary’s door.

Jesus’s mother shared her room with Salome, and I heard them behind the door, lighting lamps and speaking in low tones. I’d been careful to specify who I wished to attend me. Not Judith, not Berenice. Not the horrid, toothless midwife. Salome, Mary, and Yaltha—this trinity alone would be at my side.

When I was born, my mother had sat on a resplendent chair with an opening in the seat, but I would squat over a crude hole dug in the dirt floor of a mud-walled room. Yaltha had scooped it out the day Jesus left, as if she knew it would be needed early. As I sat before it now on a low stool, pain coiling about my torso, I wished for my mother to be here. I’d seen or heard nothing of her since my marriage and I’d hardly cared, but now . . .

Mary and Salome entered bearing vessels of water, wine, and oil, while Yaltha laid out the contents of the midwife pouch on a piece of flax. Salt, swaddling strips, a snipping knife, a sea sponge, a bowl for the afterbirth, herbs to stop the bleeding, a biting stick, and finally a pillow covered with undyed gray wool on which to lay the newborn.

Mary made an altar, laying an old plank of oak within my view. She stacked three stones on it, one on top of the other. No one acknowledged it—it was simply done whenever women labored to bring forth a life. An offering to Mother God. I watched as she drizzled a libation of Delilah’s goat milk over the stones.

As the hours passed, the early summer heat rose and the moon in my
belly waxed and waned. The women hovered—Mary, a ballast at my back; Salome, the angel at my side; and Yaltha, the sentinel between my legs. It came to me then that my mother wouldn’t want to be here, and even if she did, she would never set foot in such a lowly abode. Yaltha, Mary, Salome—here were my mothers.