The Book of Longings: A Novel (24 page)

“You are here now.”

“I would’ve arrived sooner, but I was out on the boat when Simon arrived in Capernaum. He waited two days for me to come ashore with our catch.”

“I knew you would come as soon as you could. I had to beg your brothers to send for you. They seem to think your earnings are more important than your mourning.”

I saw his jaw tighten and guessed they’d had words over it.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I told him. “I’m still considered unclean.”

He pulled me closer. “I’ll go to the mikvah later, and I’ll sleep on the roof, but right now I won’t be denied your nearness.”

I filled a bowl with water and led him to the bench, where I removed his sandals and washed his feet. He leaned his head against the wall. “Oh, Ana.”

I rubbed his hair with a damp towel and brought him a clean robe. As he donned it, his eyes drifted to the potsherds and the inkpot on the floor. One day I hoped to continue writing the lost stories, but the only words that I had now were for Susanna, bits and pieces of grief that fit onto the small jagged shards.

“You’re writing,” Jesus said. “I’m glad.”

“Then you, Yaltha, and I are alone in this particular gladness.”

I tried to keep my resentment contained but found it flaring up uncontrollably. “It’s as if your family believes God has decided to destroy the world again, not by flood this time, but by Ana writing. Your mother and Salome have said nothing, but I think even they disapprove. According to Judith and Berenice, the only women who write are sinners and necromancers. I ask you, how do they know this? And James . . . he means to speak to you about me, I’m sure.”

“He has done so already. He met me at the gate.”

“And what did he say?”

“That you broke a water pot in order to write on the shards and then stripped the oven of its kindling to make ink. I believe he fears you’ll smash all the pots and deprive us of cooked food.” He smiled.

“Your brother stood right there in the doorway and said I should give up my perverse craving to write and give myself to prayer and grief for my daughter. Does he think my writing is not a prayer? Does he think because I hold a pen I don’t grieve?”

I took a breath and continued, calmer. “I’m afraid I spoke sharply to James. I told him, ‘If by craving you mean I have a longing, a need, then yes, you’re right, but don’t call it perverse. I dare to call it godly.’ He left me then.”

“Yes, he mentioned this, too.”

“I’m confined here for sixty-eight more days. Salome brought me flax to spin and threads to sort and Mary gave me herbs to grind—but mostly I have a reprieve from daily tasks. At last there’s time for me to write. Don’t take it from me.”

“I won’t take it from you, Ana. Whether you’ll be able to write in the same manner after your confinement—I don’t know, but for now write all you wish.”

He looked so weary all of a sudden. Because of me, he’d returned to find a small war had broken out. I laid my cheek against his and felt his breath skim my ear. I said, “I’m sorry. I tried for so long to belong, to be as they needed me to be. Now I wish to be myself.”

“I’m sorry, Little Thunder. I, too, have kept you from being yourself.”

“No—” He placed his finger at my lips, and I let my protest fall silent.

He picked up the shard on which I’d been writing. There in Greek, in tiny brokenhearted letters:
I loved her with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my might.

“You write of our daughter,” he said, and his voice broke.

After Jesus observed his seven days of mourning, he found work in Magdala hewing stone for an elaborate synagogue. The city wasn’t as far away as Capernaum, only a day’s walk, and every week he came home for Sabbath with tales of a resplendent building that would hold two hundred people. He told me of a small stone altar on which he’d carved a chariot of fire and a seven-branched menorah.

“Those are the same images on the altar in the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem,” I said, a little aghast.

“Yes,” he said. “So they are.” He didn’t have to elaborate—I knew what he was doing, and it struck me as more radical than anything he’d done before. He was declaring in the most prominent and irrevocable way that God could not be confined any longer to the Temple alone, that his Holy of Holies, his presence had broken out and lodged everywhere.

When I look back on it, I see that act as a kind of turning point, a heralding of what was to come. It was around this time he became more outspoken, openly critical of the Romans and Temple priests. Neighbors began to show up at our house to complain to Mary and James that Jesus had been at the well or the olive press or the synagogue deriding the false piety of the Nazareth elders.

One day a rich Pharisee named Menachem came while Jesus was away. Mary and I met him at the gate and listened as he fulminated. “Your son goes about condemning rich men, saying they build their wealth off the backs of the poor. It’s slanderous! You must appeal to him to cease or there will be little work for your family in Nazareth.”

“We would rather be hungry than silent,” I told him.

When he’d gone, Mary turned to me. “Would we?”

Every week, Jesus came home from Magdala telling me about the blind and sick he saw on the road with no one to help them, stories of widows
turned out of their homes, of families so heavily taxed they were forced to sell their lands and beg in the streets. “Why does God not act to bring his kingdom?” he would say.

A fire had been lit in him and I blessed it, but I questioned, too, where the spark had come from. Had Susanna’s death caused him to step from the periphery? Had it stunned him with the brevity of life and the need to seize what we had of it? Or was it all just the fullness of time, the coming of something that was coming anyway? Sometimes when I looked at him I saw an eagle on its branch and the world beckoning. I feared what would happen. I had no branch of my own.

Daily, I penned words behind the walls of my room on potsherds no one would ever read.

I stacked the used pieces of clay into wobbly towers along the walls of the room. Little pillars of grief. They didn’t take away my sorrow, but they gave me a way to make what meaning I could from it. To write again felt like a return to myself.

On the day I inscribed the last of the potsherds, Yaltha was sitting with me, rattling her sistrum. The writing would end now; even my aunt understood this. She’d endured a chastisement from Mary for shattering the pot and couldn’t risk breaking another. She watched me set down my pen and cover the inkpot. She did not cease playing, the percussion of her sistrum darting like a dragonfly about the room.

T
HE NEXT WEEK
,
Jesus didn’t arrive home from Magdala before sunset as he always did. Dusk came, then dark, and he didn’t appear. I stood in the doorway and watched the gate, glad for the fullness of the moon. Mary and Salome delayed the Sabbath meal and sat with James and Simon in a little clump beneath the olive tree.

When he appeared, I disregarded my confinement and ran to him.
He bore a heavy sack on his back. “I’m sorry to be delayed,” he said. “I detoured to Einot Amitai to the vessel workshop at the chalkstone cave.”

The road there was known to be populated with lepers and brigands, but when his mother admonished him about the danger, he lifted his hand to stop her, and without further comment he strode toward our room, where he poured the contents of his sack into a magical heap outside the door.

Potsherds!
Stone
potsherds.

I laughed at the sight. I kissed his hands and cheeks, then chastised him. “Your mother is right. You shouldn’t have traveled such dangerous country for me.”

“Little Thunder, it wasn’t for you,” he teased. “I brought the shards for you to write on in order to save my mother’s pots.”

As the end of my confinement neared, I began to dream of going back to Jerusalem.

A woman was required to present a sacrificial offering at the Temple. If she had the means, she purchased a lamb. If she was needy, she offered two turtledoves. The poor, pilloried dove mothers. They bore a certain stigma, but I didn’t mind becoming one of them. I had no interest in the size of my sacrifice or whether the priest pronounced me clean, unclean, or hopelessly squalid. What I wished for was a respite from the compound—the walls that shrank like figs in the sun, the quiet hostilities, the unchanging daily-ness. Traveling to Jerusalem during the dull month of Elul would be more placid than Passover and a welcome reprieve before returning to my chores. I imagined it daily. Jesus and I would stay again with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. I would revel in seeing Tabitha. We would go to the Pool of Siloam, where I would bid Jesus
to lift the paralytics into the water. At the Temple, we would purchase two turtledoves. I would try to leave the lambs alone.

The thought of these things filled me with elation, but they were not my true intent. I meant to trade my silver headband, copper mirror, brass comb, even my precious ivory sheet for papyri and inks.

“O
NLY A WEEK REMAINS
before my captivity ends,” I whispered to Jesus. “Yet you haven’t spoken of going to the Temple. I will need to make my sacrifice.”

We were reclined on the roof, where I, too, had begun to sleep in order to escape the heat, spreading my bed mat an acceptable distance from his. The entire family, except Yaltha, had taken to sleeping up here. Gazing across the mud thatch, I could see their bodies lined up under the stars.

I waited. Had Jesus heard my question? Voices traveled easily up here—even now I heard Judith at the far end of the roof murmuring to her children, trying to settle them.

“Jesus?” I whispered, louder.

He edged closer so we could keep our voices low. “We cannot go to Jerusalem, Ana. The journey is five days at a quick pace, and five days back. I’m unable to leave my labors for so long. I’ve become one of the head builders of the synagogue.”

I didn’t want him to hear my disappointment. I lay back without responding and looked up into the night, where the moon was just brandishing her forehead.

He said, “You can make your offering to the rabbi here instead. It’s sometimes done that way.”

“It’s just that . . . I hoped—” Hearing the quiver in my throat, I stopped.

“Tell me. What do you hope?”

“I hope for
everything
.”

After a pause, I heard him say, “Yes, I hope for everything, too.”

I didn’t ask what he meant, nor did he ask me. He knew what my everything was. And I knew his.

Soon I heard his breath deepen into sleep.

An image swam into my mind and floated there:
Jesus is at the gate. He’s wearing his travel cloak, a bag strapped over his shoulder. I am there, too, my face full of sorrow.

My eyes broke open. I turned and looked at him with sudden sadness. The rooftop was quiet, the night showering down its heat. I heard a creature of some kind—a wolf, perhaps a jackal—howl in the distance, then the animals restless in the stable. I didn’t sleep, but lay there remembering the admission Jesus had made the night he asked me to become his betrothed.
Since I was
a boy of twelve I’ve felt I might have some
purpose in God’s mind, but that seems less likely to me now. I’ve had no sign.

The sign would come.

His
everything
.

E
IGHTY DAYS AFTER
the birth and death of Susanna, I purchased two turtledoves from a farmer and carried them to the closest thing we had to a rabbi in Nazareth, a learned man who owned the village oil press and who stood there trying to look practiced at pronouncing women clean. He’d been feeding the donkey that turned the grinding stone when I arrived. I was accompanied by Simon and Yaltha; Jesus was not expected home from Magdala for four days.

The rabbi clutched a handful of straw in one hand as he received the doves, which flapped wildly in the little cage. He seemed uncertain whether he was required to quote the Torah in his pronouncement, which occasioned a fascinating blend of Scripture and invention.

“Go, be fruitful again,” the rabbi said as we turned to leave, and I saw Yaltha look at me and lift her eyes.

I pulled my scarf low on my forehead, thinking of Susanna, of the beauty and sweetness of her. My confinement was over. I would take my place once more among the women. When Jesus returned I would be wife to him again. There would be no ink and potsherds. No papyri from Jerusalem.

Walking home from the rabbi’s oil press, Yaltha and I trailed far behind Simon. “What will you do?” she asked, and I knew she referred to the rabbi’s parting words about being fruitful again.

“I don’t know.”

She studied me. “But you
do
know.”

I doubted this was true. All those years I’d used herbs to prevent becoming pregnant, believing I belonged not to motherhood but to some other amorphous life, pursuing dreams I would likely never realize—these things embarrassed me suddenly, this endless reaching for what couldn’t be reached. It seemed foolish.

I thought again of Susanna and my hands slid to my belly. The weight of emptiness there seemed impossibly heavy. “I think I will choose to be fruitful again,” I said.

Yaltha smiled. “You think with your head. You
know
with your heart.”

She doubted me. I stopped and stood my ground. “Why should I not give birth to another child? It would bring my husband joy, and perhaps to me, as well. Jesus’s family would embrace me again.”

“I’ve heard you say more than once you don’t wish to have children.”

“But in the end, I wanted Susanna.”

“Yes. That you did.”

“I must give myself to something. Why shouldn’t it be motherhood?”

“Ana, I don’t doubt you should give yourself to motherhood. I only question what it is you’re meant to mother.”

For two days and nights I pondered her words, so vast and inscrutable. For a woman to birth something other than children and then mother it with the same sense of purpose, attention, and care came as an astonishment, even to me.