The Book of Longings Page 13

  We sat in a puddle of sunlight near the cave mouth and broke bread, wrapping it about small hunks of cheese. We nibbled the dates and spit the pits and talked haltingly of small, heedless things. Throughout, he lifted his hand to shield his face from the glare and glanced toward the path through the balsam grove. When a long and awful silence fell over us, I made up my mind. I would speak as I wished to speak. Say what I wanted to say.

  “You call God Father?” I asked. Referring to God in that way was not unheard-of, but it was unusual.

  After pausing, perhaps out of surprise, he said, “The practice is new to me. When my father died, I felt his absence like a wound. One night in my grief, I heard God say to me, ‘I will be your father now.’”

  “God speaks to you?”

  He stifled a grin. “Only in my thoughts.”

  “I’ve just observed my own time of mourning,” I said. “My betrothed died five weeks ago.” I refused to lower my eyes, but I kept the gladness from reaching them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Am I right to think he was the rich man in the market?”

  “Yes, Nathaniel ben Hananiah. I was made to go to the market that day by my parents. It was the first time I’d ever seen Nathaniel. You must have witnessed my revulsion for him. I regret I showed no subtlety, but a betrothal to him felt like dying. I was given no choice.”

  Silence, but this time it lit upon us like something winged. He watched my face. The earth hummed. I saw his body sigh and the last of his inhibitions fall away.

  “You’ve suffered much,” he said, and it seemed he spoke of more than my betrothal.

  I got to my feet and stepped into the shadow that edged the cave opening. I’d been deceitful with him before and I didn’t wish to be so again. I would have him know the worst. “I cannot be unfair to you,” I said. “You should know with whom you speak. Since Nathaniel’s death, I’ve become a scourge to my family. In Sepphoris, I’m a pariah. It’s falsely rumored that I’m a fornicator. And because I’m the daughter of Herod Antipas’s chief scribe and counselor, it has become a grand and notorious scandal. When I leave our house, people cross the road to avoid me. They spit at my feet. They shout ‘harlot.’”

  I wanted to protest my innocence further, but couldn’t bring myself to do so. I waited to see if he would withdraw, but he rose, coming to stand with me in the thin shade, his expression unchanged.

  “The ways of people can be cruel,” he said. Then, quieter, “You’re not alone in this suffering.”

  Not alone. I met his eyes, trying to understand his meaning, and I saw again how everything floated there.

  He said, “You should know with whom you speak as well. I am also a mamzer. 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. I’ve lived all twenty years of my life with this stigma.”

  My lips parted, not in surprise at what he’d said, but that he’d chosen to divulge it to me.

  “You’re shunned still?” I asked.

  “As a boy I wasn’t allowed in synagogue school until my father went and pleaded with the rabbi. When he was alive, he shielded me from gossip and slights. Now that he’s gone, it’s made worse. I believe it’s why I can find no work in Nazareth.” He’d been rubbing the hem of his sleeve between his fingers as he talked, and he let go now, straightening. “But that is as it is. I only mean to say I know the pain you speak of.”

  He appeared uncomfortable that he’d turned the conversation to himself, but I couldn’t cease my questions. “How have you endured their scorn for so long?”

  “I tell myself their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw.” He laughed. “Lashing out at them did no good. As a boy, I was always coming home scraped and bloodied from some fight. You’ll think me soft compared to other men, but now when I’m reviled, I try to look the other way. It does the world no good to return evil for evil. I try now to return good to them instead.”

  What manner of person is this? Men would think him weak, yes. Women, too. But I knew the strength it took to forgo striking back.

  He began to pace. I could sense some stirring inside him. “So many suffer this kind of contempt,” he said. “I cannot separate myself from them. They are cast down because they’re destitute or diseased or blind or widowed. Because they carry firewood on the Sabbath. Because they’re not born a Jew but a Samaritan or they’re born outside of marriage.” He spoke like someone whose heart had overflowed its banks. “They are condemned as impure, but God is love. He would not be so cruel as to condemn them.”

  I didn’t answer. I think he was struggling to understand why God, his new father, did not plead more insistently with his people to take these outcasts in, just as Jesus’s father, Joseph, had pled with the rabbi to let him into synagogue school.

  “Sometimes I can’t bear what I see around me. Rome occupies our land; Jews sympathize with them. Jerusalem is filled with corrupt Temple priests. When I come to pray here, I ask God to bring his kingdom to earth. It cannot come soon enough.”

  He went on speaking of God’s kingdom much like Judas did—as a government free of Rome with a Jewish king and righteous rule, but also as a great feast of compassion and justice. At our last meeting I’d called him a stonemason, a carpenter, a yarn sorter, and a fisherman. I saw now he was, in truth, a sage, and perhaps like Judas, an agitator.

  But even that didn’t fully explain him. I knew of no one who put compassion above holiness. Our religion might preach love, but it was based on purity. God was holy and pure; therefore we must be holy and pure. But here was a poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore we must be love.

  I said, “You speak as if God’s kingdom is not just a place on earth, but a place inside us.”

  “So I believe.”

  “Then does God live in the Temple in Jerusalem or in this kingdom inside us?”

  “Can he not live in both?” he asked.

  I felt a sudden blazing up inside and threw my arms open. “Can he not live everywhere?”

  His laughter resounded off the cave walls, but his smile lingered on me. “I think for you, too, God cannot be contained.”

  Having grown chilled in the shade, I went to sit on a rock in the sun, thinking of the endless debates I’d held in my head about God. I’d been taught God was a figure similar to humans, only vastly more powerful, which failed to comfort me because people could be so utterly disappointing. It reassured me suddenly to think of God not as a person like ourselves, but as an essence that lived everywhere. God could be love, as Jesus believed. For me, he would be I Am Who I Am, the beingness in our midst.

  Jesus gazed toward the sky as if to judge the hour, and in the hush of that moment, in my exhilaration of being near him, of conversing with him about divine immensities, I said, “Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.”

  His laugh rose and fell and rose again, and I told myself I could love him for that alone.

  “I would like to hear further how we might set God free,” he said. “But I must be on my way. I work now at the amphitheater.”

  “No longer in the quarry?”

  “No; I’m glad to be in the open air. I hew stones into blocks that will serve as seats. Perhaps one day you’ll attend the theater and sit on a stone I myself have chiseled and fitted.”

  We’d found our alikeness, our bond, but his words, though meant kindly, reminded me of how we were divided—he was the one who hewed the stone; I was the one who sat on it.

  I watched him fasten his tool belt. He hadn’t asked me why I’d come here—perhaps he thought it would be prying, or he assumed I was simply walking in the hills as I’d claimed before—but I wished now to tell him. Nothing hidden.<
br />
  “I’m a scribe,” I said. The audacity of the claim momentarily stalled my breath. “Since I was eight, my father has allowed me to study and write, but when I was betrothed, the privilege was taken from me and my scrolls were burned. I salvaged what I could of them, and buried them in this cave. I came this morning to dig them up.”

  “I could tell you were different from other women. It wasn’t very difficult.” He looked back at my digging tool balanced on the rock. “I’ll help you.”

  “No,” I said quickly. I wanted to do it alone. I wasn’t ready for him to see my writings, my bowl, or the curse I’d written. “You mustn’t tarry. I’ll dig them up myself. I spoke of them because I wish you to know and understand me.”

  He offered me a parting smile and strode off toward the balsams.

  Finding the spot where my treasure was buried, I drove the tool into the hard-packed dirt.

  xxxii.

  Eight days later, Herod Antipas summoned me to the palace to view the completed mosaic. I’d sworn never to return and begged to be excused, but Father refused my pleas. I feared defying him too strongly—I couldn’t risk ruining my newfound freedom. Already I’d made a fine new ink and, working through the mornings and sometimes at night, I’d completed my narratives of the women in the Scriptures who’d been raped. I’d bound them together with Tabitha’s story. I named them “The Tales of Terror.”

  At midafternoon, my father accompanied me to the palace, making an uncommon effort at appeasement. Did I find the papyri he’d brought me to my liking? Was I pleased to have Phasaelis as a friend in the palace? Was I aware that while Herod Antipas was thought to be ruthless, he was kindly to those loyal to him?

  I began to hear a noise in my head, a voice of warning. Something was not quite right.

  * * *

  • • •

  ANTIPAS, PHASAELIS, AND MY FATHER gazed at the mosaic as if it had been dropped from heaven. I could barely bring myself to look at it. The tiny tiles replicated my face with near perfection. They shimmered in the dimness of the frigidarium, the lips seeming to part, the eyes blinking, a deception, a trick of light. I watched them watching it—Herod Antipas leering, his eyes hungry and salivating, and Phasaelis, too crafty not to see his lust. My father had placed himself between me and Antipas as if forming a barrier. Now and then, he patted the place between my shoulders, but rather than comforting me, his unctuous behavior added to my wariness.

  “Your face is beautiful,” Phasaelis said. “I see that my husband thinks so, too.” Antipas’s philandering was well known, and so, too, was Phasaelis’s intolerance of it. In the Nabataean kingdom of her father, infidelity was regarded as a heinous disrespect to a wife.

  “Leave us!” he bellowed at her.

  She turned and addressed me so all could hear. “Be cautious. I know my husband well. But whatever happens, don’t fear, we shall still be friends.”

  He shouted again, “Leave us!”

  She walked out slowly, as if departing was her idea. I wanted to rush after her. Take me with you. Something treacherous had slipped into the room. I felt it on the back of my neck.

  Antipas took my hand, resisting my tug to pull it away. He said, “I would have you for my concubine.”

  I jerked my hand from him and stepped backward until the back of my knees collided with the stone bench that encircled the wall. I sank onto it. Concubine. The word slithered before me on the floor.

  Father came and sat beside me, leaving Antipas to stand alone beside the mosaic, arms crossed over his belly. Father spoke in a low, groveling tone that was foreign to my ears. “Ana, daughter of mine, for you to be the concubine of the tetrarch is the best we can hope. You would be like a second wife.”

  I turned narrowed eyes on him. “I would be what they whisper I am, a harlot.”

  “A concubine is not a harlot. She is faithful to one man. She differs from a wife only in the status of her children.”

  I realized he had agreed to this despicable notion already, yet he seemed to want my consent. He couldn’t risk me inflaming Antipas with my disgust and rejection. His status in the tetrarch’s court would surely be affected.

  “Our fathers Abraham and Jacob had concubines that bore them children. King Saul and King Solomon kept concubines, as did Herod Antipas’s own father, King Herod. There is no shame in it.”

  “There’s shame in it for me.”

  Across the room, Antipas watched us. His eyes glowed yellow. A fat hawk judging his prey.

  “I will not consent.”

  “You must be reasonable,” he said, angering. “You are no longer marriageable. I can find no husband for you now that you are widowed and besmirched, but the tetrarch of all Galilee and Peraea will have you. You’ll live in the palace and be well cared for. Phasaelis has promised to befriend you, and Antipas has granted my request that you be allowed to read, write, and study to your content.”

  I stared straight ahead.

  “A concubine does not receive a bride price,” he went on. “Yet Antipas has agreed to pay the sum of two manehs. It shows your great worth. There will be a contract drawn to protect your rights.”

  His patience exhausted, Antipas strode across the room and stood before me. “I’ve prepared a gift for you.” He motioned to his steward, Chuza, who brought a tray laden with a stack of ivory sheets like the one on which Phasaelis had sent her invitation. There were reed pens and vials of dyed inks—two green, one blue, three red. He was followed by a servant who carried a sloped lap desk made from red wood and carved with two dragons.

  The sight of these things created both longing and nausea in me. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth. “My answer is no.”

  Antipas shouted at my father, “Why doesn’t she obey as women should?”

  I leapt to my feet. “I will never submit,” I said. I looked at the lap desk and the tray bearing his gifts—all that beauty and bounty, and on impulse I picked up a single sheet of the ivory and slid it into the pocket inside my sleeve. “I take this as your parting gift to me,” I said, and turning, I fled the room.

  Behind me, I heard Antipas shout, “Chuza! Bring her back.”

  I broke into a run.

  xxxiii.

  On the street I pulled my mantle over my head and walked briskly, staying beneath the roofed sidewalks along the cardo, looking behind me for Chuza and now and then entering a small shop in hopes of avoiding him. It was the day before the Sabbath and the city was thronged with people. I tried my best to disappear among them.

  I thought of hiding myself in the cave, a shelter no one but Jesus and Lavi knew about, but I could not sleep or eat there, nor would Jesus come at this hour. He would be at the building site for the theater on the northern slope. The realization halted me, as if a hand had been laid on my shoulder. I heard Yaltha’s voice float up: Your moment will come, and when it does, you must seize it with all the bravery you can find. . . . Your moment will come because you’ll make it come.

  I turned toward the northern slope.

  The building site was a commotion of pounding mallets and pluming limestone dust. I stood on the street and stared at two-wheeled carts lurching through the bustle, wooden cranes and hoists lifting unhewn stones, men stirring mortar with long staves. I hadn’t expected so many workers. I spotted him finally near the top of the ridge, bent over a stone, smoothing it with a trowel.

  The sun was dipping toward the valley and the shadow from a nearby scaffold fell across his back, forming a tiny ladder. The poet’s words began to sing in me of their own accord. Under the apple tree I awakened you . . . Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it . . .

  Around me, the street was busy with vendors peddling tools, bolts of cheap flax, butchered animals, and stews for the workers, a second-rate bazaar compared to the market in the basilica. I found a spot beside a vegetable stall where I could wait fo
r the day’s labor to end.

  The sun slid deeper into the valley and my spirits thinned with the slippage of light. Lost in my brooding, I jumped at the sound of a ram’s horn being blown. Abruptly, the hammering ceased and the men began to put away their tools. They streamed up the hill onto the street, Jesus among them, his cheeks and forehead dusted with stone powder.

  A man shouted, “Seize her!”

  Jesus turned toward the cry, and then I, too, reeled about. Chuza stood on the sidewalk a short distance from me, pointing. “Seize her!” he cried again. “She has stolen from my master.”

  Workers, vendors, shoppers, passersby stopped. The street muted.

  I drew back into the market stall. Yet he followed me into the baskets of onions and chickpeas. He was an old man, but he was strong. Grabbing my wrist, he dragged me into the crowd, into their stares and spit and invective.

  Hemmed in by a host of angered people, I was struck with fear like a slash of lightning moving from the crown of my head, down my back, along my legs, to the nubs of my toes. I looked at the sky, the breath gone from me.

  Chuza lifted his voice. “I charge her with thievery and blasphemy. She stole a precious sheet of ivory from my master, and she sat for an artisan while he made a graven image of her face.”

  I closed my eyes and felt the heaviness of my lashes. “I have stolen nothing.”

  Ignoring me, he spoke to the crowd. “If there’s no ivory in the pocket of her sleeve, I will be satisfied she’s not a thief. Either way, she cannot deny the graven image made of her face.”

  A woman pushed her way through the swarm of people. “She’s the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, and known to be a fornicator.”

  I called out again in protest, but my denial was swallowed by the black odium that boiled out of their hearts.

  “Show us your pocket!” a man yelled. One by one, they took up the petition.