The Book of Longings: A Novel (28 page)

Instead, I waited, sitting with my back to the tree.

He returned in the hour before daybreak with sweat on his brow. “Ana, I must speak gravely with you.” He sat down on the hard bed of leaves. “I’ve decided to become John the Immerser’s disciple. I will leave Nazareth and follow him.”

The pronouncement startled me, yet there was little surprise in it. If Jesus could hear thunder inside me, I could hear the thud of God’s pursuit inside him. For all the years I’d known him, it had been there, waiting.

“I can’t do otherwise. Today in the river—”

I took his hand. “What happened in the river?”

“I told you once that when my father died, God became father to me, and today in the Jordan I heard him call me son. Beloved son.”

I could see he’d made peace with the boy who’d been rejected by his village, the one, it was whispered, who had no real father, the one in search of who he was. He stood, the ecstasy of his experience seeming to lift him off his feet. “There will be a great revolution, Ana. The kingdom of God is coming—think of it! When I came up from the water, I felt as if God was asking me to help bring it in. You see why I can’t go to Bethany—now that I’ve set my course, I want to avoid delay.”

He became quiet, searching my face. A feeling of loss coursed through me. I would go with him to God’s revolution, of course, but things between us wouldn’t be the same. My husband belonged to God now . . . all of him.

I rose and with great effort said, “You have my blessing.”

The tautness about his lips slackened. He held me to him. I waited for him to say,
You’ll come with me. We’ll follow John together.
Already I was thinking how I would persuade Yaltha to join us.

The silence hardened. “And myself?” I said.

“I will take you home.”

Confused, I shook my head. “But—” I wanted to object, but nothing came from my mouth.
He means to leave me behind.

“I’m sorry, Ana,” he said. “I must take up this mission without you.”

“You can’t leave me in Nazareth,” I whispered. The hurt of saying these words was so great, I felt my legs sinking back toward the ground.

“Before I join John, I must go into the wilderness for a time to ready myself for what’s to come. I can only do that alone.”

“After that . . . then I’ll accompany you.” I heard the desperation in my voice—how I hated the sound of it.

“There are no women among John’s disciples—you saw this, as I did.”

“But you of all people . . . you would not exclude me.”

“No, I would take you if I could.” He raked his fingers through his beard. “But this is John’s movement. The reasons that prophets have no female disciples—”

Incensed, I cut him off. “I’ve heard these reasons tenfold. Traipsing about the countryside exposes us to dangers and hardships. We cause dissension among the men. We are temptations. We are distractions.” My anger swelled, and I was glad for it. It drove away my hurt. “It’s thought we’re too weak to face danger and hardship. But do we not give birth? Do we not work day and night? Are we not ordered about and silenced? What are robbers and rainstorms compared to these things?”

He said, “Little Thunder, I’m on your side. I was going to say, the reasons that prophets have no female disciples are flawed reasons.”

“Yet you will follow John anyway.”

“How else can we hope to alter this wrong? I will do what I can to convince him. Give me time. I’ll come back for you in the winter, or early spring before Passover.”

I looked at him. I’d held the world too close and it had slipped from my arms.

Jesus returned me to Nazareth as he had said he would, and there, with unnecessary haste, he bid us farewell. Those first terrible weeks of his absence, I remained in my room. I didn’t care to witness his mother crying with bitterness or hear the exclamations and questions his brothers and their wives hurled at me.
Was Jesus struck on the head? Is he possessed? Does he mean to follow a madman and leave us to ourselves?

I imagined my husband alone in some dust pit in the Judean wilderness fending off wild boars and lions. Did he have food and water? Did he wrestle with angels like Jacob? Would he come back for me? Was he even alive?

I had no strength for chores. What did it matter if the olives weren’t pressed or the lamp wicks went untrimmed? I took meals in my room, abetted by Yaltha.

I came out of my seclusion only at night and prowled about the courtyard like one of the mice. Worried for me, Yaltha moved her sleeping mat to my room and brought me hot wine spiked with bits of myrrh and passionflower to help me sleep, the same brew she’d given Shipra long ago when Mother had locked me in my room. The draft had sent Shipra into an unshakable sleep, but it did little more than dull my senses.

One morning I found I could not force myself from my pallet, nor swallow my fruit and cheese. Yaltha felt my brow for fever, and finding nothing, bent to my ear and whispered, “Enough, child. You’ve grieved enough. I understand he has abandoned you, but must you abandon yourself?”

Soon after, Salome appeared in my doorway with news that she would be wed in the spring. James had signed a betrothal contract with a man in Cana, someone who was an utter stranger to her.

“Oh, sister, I’m sorry,” I said.

“It isn’t a sorrow to me,” she replied. “The bride price will help keep our family fed, especially with Jesus . . .”

“Gone,” I said for her.

“James says my new husband will be kind to me. The man does not mind that I’m a widow. He’s a widower himself, having lost two wives to childbirth.” She made an effort to smile. “I must weave some bridal clothes. Will you help me?”

It was the thinnest of ploys, obviously meant to lure me back to my duties and to life itself, for who in her right mind would ask
me
to help with spinning and weaving—even ten-year-old Sarah could do it better. Somehow, though, her tactic worked. I heard myself say, “I’ll help you, of course I will.”

I went to my chest of cedar and dug out the copper mirror, the last possession of value I owned. “Here,” I said, placing the mirror in her hands. It caught the sun that slanted through the window, a flash of ginger light. “I’ve looked upon myself in this mirror since I was a child. I want you to have it as a betrothal gift.”

She lifted the mirror to her face. “Why, I am . . .”

“Lovely,” I said, realizing she may not have glimpsed her image this clearly before.

“I cannot accept something so treasured.”

“Please. Take it.” I didn’t tell her I wished to be rid of the self I saw reflected there.

After that, I returned to life within the compound. Salome and I spun threads from flax and dyed them in a rare solution of alizarin red, which came from the roots of a tincture tree. Yaltha had procured it through means I wished not to know. It was possible she’d traded for it with Judith’s carved spindle, which mysteriously went missing around this time. We wove sitting in the courtyard, sending our shuttles back and forth, creating bright scarlet cloths that Judith and Berenice found immodest.

“There’s not a woman in Nazareth who would wear such a color,” Judith said. “Certainly, Salome, you won’t get married wearing it.” She complained to Mary, who must’ve had misgivings of her own, but she ignored Judith’s grievances.

I sewed a red head scarf and wore it every day as I went about my duties. The first time I paraded into the village in it, James said, “Jesus would not want you to go about in such a scarf.”

“Well, he isn’t here, is he?” I said.

Winter came slowly. I marked the months of Jesus’s absence on Yaltha’s calendar.
Two full moons. Three. Five.

I wondered if by now he’d convinced John the Immerser to let me join the disciples. I kept thinking about the image that had come into my mind near the end of my confinement. Jesus and I had been on the rooftop trying to sleep when I’d envisioned him at the gate wearing his travel cloak and pouch, and I was there, too, crying. It had seemed such a gloomy omen then—Jesus leaving, while I wept—but my visions could be unpredictable and cunning. Wasn’t it entirely reasonable that I’d pictured myself at the gate because I was leaving
with
Jesus, not saying goodbye to him? Perhaps I was sorrowful over my separation from Yaltha. The explanation gave me hope that Jesus would sway John to accept me.
Yes
, I thought.
He’ll appear soon, saying, “Ana, John bids you to come and join us.”

I asked Yaltha to move her sleeping mat back to the storeroom and I laid Jesus’s mat beside my own. As the days passed, my eyes drifted to the gate. I jumped at slight sounds. Whenever I could slip away from my tasks, I climbed to the roof and scanned the horizon.

Then, with winter nearly past, on a cold day full of windy light, I stood in the courtyard boiling soapwort root and olive oil to make soap, and looking up, I saw a hooded figure at the gate. I dropped the spoon, and oil splashed across the hearthstone. I was wearing the red head scarf, which had faded in the sun. I heard it snap at my ears as I ran.

“Jesus,” I cried, though I could see how different the figure was from my husband. Shorter, thinner, darker.

He drew back his hood.
Lavi.

M
Y DISAPP
OINTMENT THAT
Lavi was not who I’d thought left quickly after I recognized my loyal old friend. I led him to the storeroom, where Yaltha brought him a cup of cool water. He bowed his head, slow to accept it, for he was still a slave and unaccustomed to being waited upon. “Drink,” she ordered.

Though it was midday, she lit a lamp to break apart the shadows, and we sat, the three of us, on the packed dirt and stared at one another in wordless wonder. We’d not seen him since the day of my wedding when he’d led the horse-drawn wagon through the gate.

His face had ripened, his cheeks fleshier, his brow more jutting. He was clean-shaven in the Greek manner, his hair cut short. Hardship had tilled furrows at the corners of his eyes. He was no longer a boy.

He waited for me to speak. I said, “You’re a welcome sight, Lavi. Are you well?”

“Well enough. But I bring . . .” He stared into his empty cup.

“You bring news of my father?”

“He has been dead for almost two months.”

I felt the cold from the doorway. I could see my father standing in the luxurious reception hall of our house in Sepphoris in his fine red coat and matching hat. He was gone. Mother, too. For a moment I felt strangely abandoned. I looked at Yaltha, remembering that my father was also her brother. She stared back at me, that look that said,
Let life be life and death be death
.

I said to Lavi, my voice quivering a little, “When Judas came to report my mother was dead, he told me Father was ill, so I’m not surprised at this news, only that it’s you who delivers it. Did Judas send you?”

“No one sent me. I’ve not seen Judas since last fall when he brought your message for the tetrarch’s wife.”

I didn’t move or speak.
Did Phasaelis receive my warning, then? Is she safe? Is she dead?

Lavi went on with his story. It poured, unstoppered. “I was with my master when he died. Antipas had been back from Rome for only a few weeks and he was angry the plot to make him King of the Jews had yielded nothing. As your father lay dying, he muttered his sorrow that he’d failed Antipas. It was the last thing I heard him say.”

Father. He’d groveled before Antipas until the end.

“When he was gone, I was sent to work in the kitchen, where I was beaten for spilling a vat of grape syrup,” Lavi said. “I determined then I would leave. I stole away from the palace six nights ago. I’ve come to be your servant.”

He meant to live with us in this impoverished compound? There was no room to spare, the food stores were stretched as it was, and it was doubtful I would even be here much longer. No one kept servants in Nazareth—the thought was preposterous.

I cut my eyes to Yaltha.
What can we say to him?

She was plainspoken, but kind. “You cannot stay here, Lavi. It would be better for you to serve Judas.”

“Judas is never in one place. I would not know how to find him,” Lavi
said. “When I last saw him, he spoke of joining the prophet who baptizes in the Jordan. He believed him to be a Messiah.”

I pushed to my feet. Father was dead. Lavi had run away and proclaimed himself my servant. And apparently, Judas had become a follower of John the Immerser. Standing in the doorway, I saw the weather had turned, the clouds boiling and blackening, the spring rains arriving early. For months, we’d gone with no tidings at all, and suddenly news fell on us in the manner of a hailstorm.

“You can remain here until you decide where to go,” I said. With Jesus away, perhaps James wouldn’t mind Lavi being here for a while; maybe he would welcome the help Lavi could provide. Lavi was a Gentile, though. James wouldn’t take well to that.

“You have always been kind to me,” Lavi said, which caused me to wince. Mostly I’d paid little attention to him.

I could be patient no longer. I returned to sit beside him. “You must tell me—did you give my message to Phasaelis?”

He looked down, as was his habit, but it gave me the sense there was news he dreaded to impart. “I befriended the kitchen steward who carried food to her room and asked him to place the ivory sheet on her tray. He was reluctant to do so; there are spies even within the palace. But Antipas was away in Rome then, and with the help of a small bribe, the steward slid the ivory beneath a silver flagon.”

“You’re sure she read it?”

“I’m certain of it. Three days later, she left Tiberias for Machaerus, saying she wished to spend time there taking the waters at Antipas’s palace. Once there, she snuck away with two servants and slipped across the border into Nabataea.”

I let out a breath. Phasaelis was safe with her father.

“I should like to have seen Antipas when he returned from Rome with his new wife and found his old one gone,” Yaltha said.

“They say he raged and tore his robe and overturned furniture in
Phasaelis’s quarters.” I hadn’t known Lavi to talk so freely. I’d thought him quiet, cautious, diffident, but then we’d never sat and spoken as equals. How little I really knew him.