The Book of Longings(105)
“I know nothing about composing a song,” I blurted.
“Then how fine it is that you’ll have this chance to learn. Someone is required to write a new composition for every vigil and the songs have become sadly alike and unadventurous. The community will be glad to have a fresh hymn.”
A hymn. To Sophia. And she wished me to perform it. I felt both petrified and captivated. “Who will teach me?”
“You will teach yourself,” she said. “There won’t be another vigil for forty-six days—you have ample time.”
Forty-six days. Surely I would not still be here.
xx.
The first two weeks I moved through my days as if wandering about in some languorous trance. Hours of solitude, prayers, reading, writing, antiphonal singing, philosophy lessons—I’d dreamed of such pursuits, but the sudden flood of them conjured the sensation of walking around without my feet touching the ground. I had dreams of floating, of ladders stretching into the clouds. I would sit in the holy room of the house and stare half-seeing, digging my nails into the pads of my thumbs to feel the flesh of myself. Yaltha said my untethered feeling derived from the simple shock of being here.
Soon thereafter, Skepsis assigned me to the animal shed, which quickly cured me. Chickens, sheep, and donkeys. Manure and urine. Grunting and mating. The insect blizzard at the water trough. Hoof-churned dirt. It even came to me that these things might be holy, too, a sacrilege I kept to myself.
* * *
? ? ?
ON THE FIRST COLD DAY after our arrival, I lugged the water vessel down the hillside to gather water for the animals from the spring near the gatehouse. The summer inundation, when the Nile floods, was over and cool winds were sweeping in from the sea on one side of the ridge and up from the lake on the other, creating a little maelstrom. I wore a shaggy goatskin cloak supplied by one of the juniors, which was so impossibly large it dragged on the ground. By my count we’d been here five and a half weeks. I tried to determine what month it would be in Galilee—Marcheshvan, I thought. Jesus would not yet be in his woolen cloak.
He hovered constantly in my thoughts. When I woke, I would lie there and picture him rising from his sleeping mat. When I ate the first meal of the morning, I imagined him breaking his bread in that unhurried way of his. And on those days, as I listened to Skepsis teach the symbolic way of reading our Scriptures, I saw him on the hillside Lavi had told us about, preaching to the multitudes.
As I descended the path, I came upon the hall where the forty-ninth-day vigils took place. The vigil was in eight days, and though I’d spent hours trying to write a song, I’d made no progress. I made up my mind I would inform Skepsis she should abandon all expectations of me either composing or performing one. She wouldn’t be pleased, but I couldn’t believe she’d send me away.
There were thirty-nine stone huts scattered across the hillside, each designed for one person, though most of them held two. Yaltha and I shared a house, sleeping side by side on reed mats. Skepsis offered to restore Yaltha to her senior status, but my aunt had refused in order to work in the garden. She spent her afternoons in our minuscule courtyard, sitting under the lone tamarisk tree.
Now that I’d found my equilibrium again, I liked having the holy room to myself. It had a wooden writing board and a stand on which to unfurl a scroll, and Skepsis had sent papyrus and inks.
Reaching the spring, I squatted on the ground to fill my vessel. When I heard men’s voices in the gatehouse, I paid little attention—peddlers often came and went, the woman selling flour, the boy bearing sacks of salt—but then I caught certain words: “The fugitives are here. . . . Yes, I’m certain of it.”
I set down the vessel. Pulling the shaggy cloak to the top of my head, I crept on all fours toward the voices until I dared edge no closer. The junior who kept the gatehouse was nowhere in sight, but one of the seniors was there speaking with two men who wore short tunics, leather sandals laced to their knees, and short knives at their belts. It was the garb of the Jewish militia. “My men will keep vigil along the road in case they attempt to leave,” the taller one said. “I’ll send word to Haran. If you have intelligence for us, you may leave your missives at the gatehouse.”
It wasn’t a surprise Haran had found us, only that it’d taken him so long. Yaltha and Skepsis devoutly believed he wouldn’t defy the sanctity of the Therapeutae by sending someone inside to apprehend us. “The Jews of Alexandria would most assuredly turn against him,” Skepsis had said. I didn’t feel as confident.
When the soldiers departed, I hugged the ground and waited for our betrayer to pass by on his way back up the hill. He was a thin, bent man with eyes like dried grapes, the one called Lucian, who was second in seniority to Skepsis. When he was out of sight, I recovered the water vessel and rushed to the garden to inform Yaltha.
“That snake Lucian was Haran’s spy when I was here before,” she said. “It seems he hasn’t improved with age. The man has fasted too much and been celibate too long.”
* * *
? ? ?
TWO DAYS LATER, I glimpsed Skepsis and Yaltha hurrying toward me in the animal shed.
I’d been gathering green grasses to feed the donkeys. I set down the rake.
Without bothering to greet me, Skepsis lifted a parchment. “This arrived today from Haran. One of the soldiers who guards the road delivered it to the gatehouse.”