The Book of Longings: A Novel (23 page)

No one spoke of the cloud that hung everywhere in the room, the knowledge that the baby was arriving too soon. I heard them droning prayers but the words were far away. There were violent seizures of pain and the short, winded respites between them, and that was all there was.

Nearing the ninth hour, squatting over the hole, I pushed the baby from my body. She slipped soundlessly into my aunt’s hands. I watched Yaltha turn her upside down and gently thump her back. She repeated the action once, twice, three times, four times. The baby didn’t move or cry or draw a breath. My aunt slid her finger into the tiny mouth to clear it of mucus. She blew air into her face. She held her by the feet and thumped her harder, harder.

Finally, she laid the child on the pillow. She was tiny as a kitten. Her lips lapis blue. Her stillness terrible.

A sob broke from Salome’s lips.

Yaltha said, “The child doesn’t live, Ana.”

As my aunt tied and severed the birth cord, Mary wept.

“Life will be life and death will be death,” I whispered, and with those words, grief filled the empty place in me where the baby had lain. I would carry it there like a secret all the days of my life.

“Do you wish to bestow a name on her?” Yaltha asked.

I looked at my daughter lying wilted on the pillow. “Susanna,” I said. The name meant lily.

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON
on the same day I gave birth, I wrapped my daughter in the dark blue dress I’d worn when I married, for it was the
best cloth I had, and walked with Yaltha and Jesus’s family to the cave where his father was buried. I insisted on carrying the baby in my arms, though the custom was for an infant to be placed in a basket or upon a small bier. I was weak from giving birth only hours before, and Mary walked with her hand beneath my elbow as if I might crumple. She, Salome, Judith, and Berenice wept and wailed. I made no sound.

At the cave, as we repeated the Kaddish, Judith and James’s six-year-old daughter, Sarah, tugged on my tunic. “May I hold her?” she asked.

I didn’t want to relinquish my baby, but I knelt beside her and placed Susanna in her arms. Judith immediately plucked the blue bundle from her daughter and returned it to me. “I will have to take Sarah to the mikvah now to cleanse her,” she whispered. She didn’t say it unkindly, but it stung. I smiled at Sarah and felt her little arms wind around my waist.

As they intoned the Shema, I thought of Jesus. When he returned, I would tell him how our daughter looked lying on the pillow, the smear of dark hair, the trellis of blue on her eyelids, her nails like pearl shavings. I would tell him that as we walked to the cave through the barley harvest, the workers ceased their labor and stood silent as we passed. I would describe how I laid her in a cleft inside the cave and when I bent to kiss her, she smelled of myrrh and coriander leaves. I would say, I loved her the way you love God, with all my heart and soul and might.

As James and Simon pushed the stone slab across the cave opening to seal it, I cried out for the first time.

Salome rushed to my side. “Oh, sister, you will have another child.”

I
N THE DAYS THAT FO
LLOWED
,
I remained in my room, separated from the others. Childbirth rendered a woman ceremonially unclean for forty days if she’d delivered a male child and twice as long if the baby was female. My confinement would last until the month of Elul, when the
blister of summer was well formed. We would, according to the custom, then go to Jerusalem to offer a sacrifice and be pronounced clean by a priest, after which I would reenter the cycle of endless chores.

I was grateful for my solitude. It gave me time to mourn. I slept with grief and woke to it. It was always there, a black strap around my heart. I didn’t ask God why my daughter had died. I knew he couldn’t help it. Life was life, death was death. It was the fault of no one. I asked only for someone to find my husband and bring him home.

Days passed and no one sent for him. Salome told me James and Simon argued against it. The day after the burial, the publicans had come to Nazareth and taken a half portion of our wheat, barley, oil, olives, and wine, along with two of the chickens, and Jesus’s brothers were deeply troubled over the loss. According to Salome, they had scoured the village for carpentry work, but in the wake of the tax collectors no one had the resources to pay for a repaired ceiling beam or new door lintel.

I asked Salome to summon James. He appeared hours later, standing beyond the doorway so as not to become fouled. Seated on the bench across the room, I said, “I beg you, James, send for my husband. He must come and mourn his daughter.”

He spoke not to me but to a scrim of sunlight on the window. “We all wish for him to be here, but it’s better he should remain in Capernaum for the entire month as he planned. We are desperate to resupply our food stores.”

“We don’t live by bread alone,” I said, repeating words I’d heard Jesus speak.

“But still, we must
eat
,” he said.

“Jesus would want to be here to grieve his child.”

He would not be moved. “You would have me force him to choose between feeding his family and grieving his child?” he said. “I would think he’d be glad to have the burden removed from him.”

“But James, it’s
his
decision. His child has died, not yours. If you take the choice from him, he will be angered.”

My words struck.

He sighed. “I’ll send Simon to him. We’ll let Jesus decide.”

Capernaum was a day and half walk. I couldn’t expect to see my husband for four days, three at best. I knew Simon would press him with news of the tax collectors and describe our food stores with direness. He would urge Jesus to delay his return.

Surely, though, he would come.

The following day, Yaltha came to my room carrying the broken pieces of a large clay pot in the folds of her robe.

“I broke it with a mallet,” she said.

As she spread the fragments across the rug, I gaped at her in astonishment. “You did this on purpose? Why, Aunt?”

“A broken pot is almost as good as a stack of papyrus. When I lived among the Therapeutae, we often wrote on the shards—inventories, letters, contracts, psalms, missals of all kinds.”

“Pots are precious here. They’re not easily replaced.”

“It’s only the pot for watering the animals. There are other pots that can replace it.”

“All the rest are stone pots, and they are pure—you can’t use them for the animals. Oh, Aunt, you know this.” I gave her a stern, baffled look. “For you to shatter a pot just for me to write upon . . . they’ll think you’re possessed.”

“Then let them take me to a healer and have the demon cast out. You just make certain I didn’t break the pot for no reason.”

For the past two days, my chest had been bound with tight rags, but
now I felt milk engorge my breasts, followed by a thick clot of pain. Dark, wet circles appeared on my robe.

“Child,” Yaltha said, for even though I was a woman, she still sometimes called me by her pet name. “There’s no worse feeling than one’s breasts filled with milk and no one to suckle.”

The words opened a raw, furious place in me. She wanted me to write? My daughter was dead. My writing was dead, too.
One day
had never come.
I
was the shattered pieces on the floor. Life had taken a mallet to me.

I lashed out. “How would you know how I feel?”

She reached for me, but I wrenched away and dropped onto my bed mat.

Yaltha knelt down and cradled me with her body as I wept for the first time since Susanna had died. When I was spent, she re-bound my breasts with clean rags and wiped my face. She brought a wineskin and filled my cup and we sat awhile in silence.

Out in the courtyard the women were in the heat and throes of work. Curls of smoke from the dung fire drifted in through the window. Berenice was shouting at Salome to return to the village well for more water, blaming her for the parched plot of vegetables. Salome yelled back that she was not a pack donkey. Mary complained that the pot used to water the animals had gone missing.

Yaltha said, “I do know what it’s like to have full breasts and no baby.”

I remembered then the story she’d told me many years ago of birthing two sons, neither of whom had lived, and of her husband, Ruebel, who’d punished her for it with his fists. Remorse scorched my cheeks. “Forgive me. I forgot your dead sons. My words were cruel.”

“Your words were understandable. I remind you of my loss only because I wish to tell you something. Something I left out of my story.” She drew a deep breath. Outside the sun dipped and the room guttered.
“There were two sons who died in infancy, yes. But there was also a daughter who lived.”

“
A daughter.
”

Her eyes brimmed—a rare sight. “When I was sent to the Therapeutae, she was two years old. Her name is Chaya.”

All at once a memory unwound. “Back in Sepphoris when you contracted the fever sickness, there was one night when you were lost in delirium and you called me by her name. You called me Chaya.”

“Did I? I can’t say I’m surprised. If Chaya is alive, she would be twenty-one years, almost as old as you. She had unruly hair like yours. I often think of her when I look at you. I’ve dreaded telling you about her. I feared what you would think of me. I left her behind.”

“Why do you tell me about her now?” I didn’t mean it cruelly. I truly wished to know.

“I should have told you long ago. I do so now because the death of your daughter has made my loss fresh again. I thought it might be a small solace for you to know I’ve suffered in a similar way, that I comprehend what it is to lose a daughter. Oh, child, I want no secrets between us.”

I couldn’t be angered by her deceit—it didn’t come from treachery. We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

“You may ask me the question,” she said. “Go ahead.”

I knew which one she meant. I said, “Why did you leave her?”

“I could tell you that I had no choice, and I think that’s mostly true; at least I believed it true at the time. It’s hard now to look back and know for certain. I told you once it was widely believed in Alexandria that I killed my husband with sorcery and poison, and for that I was sent away to the Therapeutae. They didn’t take in children, and I went to them anyway. Who can say now whether I might have found a way to keep my
daughter? I did what I did.” Her face shone with pain as if her loss had only just happened.

“What became of her? Where did she go?”

She shook her head. “My brother Haran assured me he would care for her. I believed him. During all those years I was with the Therapeutae, I sent him many messages asking about her, without any response. After eight years, when Haran finally agreed I could leave the Therapeutae if I left Egypt, I begged to take her with me.”

“And he refused? How could he keep her from you?”

“He said he’d given her out for adoption. He would not tell me to whom or where she lived. For days I pleaded with him, until he threatened to revive the old charges against me. In the end I left. I left her behind.”

I pictured the girl, Chaya, with hair like mine. It was impossible to imagine what I might have done had I been in my aunt’s place.

“I made my peace with what happened,” she said. “I reasoned that Chaya was wanted and cared for. She had a family. Perhaps she didn’t even remember me. She was only two when I last saw her.”

She stood abruptly, stepping around the arrangement of broken pottery. She rubbed her fingers as if trying to unpeel them.

“You don’t look at peace,” I told her.

“You’re right, the peace has left me. Since Susanna died, Chaya has come every night in my dreams. She stands on a summit and begs me to come to her. Her voice is like the song of a flute. When I wake, it goes on singing in me.”

I rose and walked past her toward the window, seized by a sudden foreboding that my aunt would leave and return to Alexandria in search of her daughter. I told myself it wasn’t a premonition like the others I’d had, but fear. Only fear. Anyway, by what means could Yaltha possibly leave Nazareth? She no longer had access to my father’s wealth and
power, and even if she did, how could a woman travel alone? How could she set about locating a daughter who’d been lost for nineteen years? No matter how haunting the flute’s call, she could not leave.

She tossed back her shoulders as if casting off a heavy cloak and looked down at the potsherds. “That’s enough of my story. Tell me that you will make use of these shards.”

I knelt and picked up one of the larger pieces, hoping to mask my ambivalence. It had been more than seven years since I’d held a reed pen. Seven years since Jesus had wakened and assured me I would write again one day. Without realizing it, I’d given up on one day. I’d even given up on faraway day. I no longer opened the chest of cedar and read my scrolls. The last vial of ink had turned into a thick gum years ago. My incantation bowl was buried at the bottom of my chest.

“I’ve watched you over the years since we arrived here,” Yaltha said. “I see you’re happy with your husband—but in every other way you seem lost to yourself.”

“I have no ink,” I told her.

“Then we shall make some,” she said.

When Jesus returned, he found me sitting on the floor of our room, writing on a piece of potsherd. My breasts were dry now, but the ink Yaltha and I had made from red ocher and oven soot flowed each day from my reed pen. I looked up to see him standing in the doorway still clasping his staff. He was covered in dust from the road. I could smell the faint stench of fish on him from across the room.

Ignoring the purity laws, he strode into the room and put his arms about me, burying his face at my shoulder. I felt his body quiver, then a small heaving in his chest. Smoothing my hand across the back of his head, I whispered, “She was beautiful. I named her Susanna.”

When he lifted his face, his eyes were filled with tears. “I should’ve been with you,” he said.