The Book of Longings(114)

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I COULD NOT SLEEP that night, even with Yaltha’s chamomile. My thoughts spun. It was the deep of night, but I rose from my mat and stole past Diodora and Yaltha, who were making quiet slumbering sounds.

Standing in the darkened holy room, I felt the finality of being here. My large woolen travel pouch sat on the table, stuffed full. Diodora and Yaltha had watched in silence as I’d packed it. It contained the pouch that held my red thread, Judas’s letter, the mummy portrait, money, two tunics, a cloak, and undergarments. I’d left the new black-and-red Alexandrian dress for Diodora. I would have no use for it anymore.

I could hardly bear to look at the niche where my ten codices were stacked in a beautiful leaning tower with my incantation bowl perched on top. It wasn’t possible to take them with me. I might’ve carried a second bag and squeezed in five codices, maybe six, but something inexplicable inside me wished the books to remain all together. I wanted them here among the Therapeutae, where they might be read and preserved and perhaps cherished. I moved about the room, telling everything goodbye.

Yaltha’s voice came from the doorway. “I will safeguard your words until you return.”

I turned to her. “I will likely never return, Aunt. You know that.”

She nodded, accepting what I’d said without questioning it.

“After I leave, place my writings in the library with the other manuscripts,” I said. “I’m ready now for others to read them.”

She came and stood close to me. “Do you remember the day in Sepphoris when you opened your cedar chest and showed me your writings for the first time?”

“I’ve not forgotten it, nor will I ever forget it,” I said.

“You were something to be reckoned with. Fourteen years old and full of rebellion and longings. You were the most stubborn, determined, ambitious child I’d ever seen. When I saw what was inside your cedar chest, I knew.” She smiled.

“Knew what?”

“That there was also largeness in you. I knew you possessed a generosity of abilities that comes only rarely into the world. You knew it, too, for you wrote of it in your bowl. But we all have some largeness in us, don’t we, Ana?”

“What are you saying, Aunt?”

“What most sets you apart is the spirit in you that rebels and persists. It isn’t the largeness in you that matters most, it’s your passion to bring it forth.”

I gazed at her, but could not speak. I went down on my knees; I don’t know why, except I felt overcome by what she’d said.

She placed her hand on my head. She said, “My own largeness has been to bless yours.”





xxix.


The coffin lay on the floor in the middle of the woodworking shop smelling of fresh wood. Yaltha, Diodora, and I gathered beside it and stared somberly into the empty cavity.

“Don’t think of it as a coffin,” Diodora advised.

“We mustn’t delay,” Gaius said. “Now that the prayers for Theano are over, members will be lining the path, wanting to proceed behind the wagon as far as the gatehouse. We can’t risk one of them wandering nearby and finding you. Quickly, now.” He gripped my elbow as I stepped into the coffin. I stood there a moment before sitting, unable to think of the wooden box as anything other than what it was. I told myself just not to think at all.

Diodora bent and kissed my cheeks. Then Yaltha. As my aunt hovered over me, I tried to memorize her face. Gaius placed the travel pouch at my feet and the awl in my hand. “Hold on to it.” I lay back and looked up into the bright room. The lid slid over me. Then darkness.

The coffin juddered as Gaius hammered in four nails, causing my head to knock against the bottom. In the stillness that followed, I became aware of two thin beams of light. They reminded me of the fine strands of a spider’s web lit with sunlight and dew. I turned my head and found the source, a tiny perforation on each side. My breathing holes.

The coffin was lifted with a jerk. Unprepared for it, I let out a small cry. “You’ll have to stay quieter than that,” Gaius said, his voice sounding far away.

As they carried me outside, I braced for another jolt, but the coffin slid smoothly into the wagon. I couldn’t tell when Pamphile climbed in, maybe she was there already, but I heard the donkey bray and felt the lurch of the cart as we started down the hill.

I closed my eyes so as not to see the coffin’s lid, which was a hand’s breadth from my nose. I listened instead to the rumble of the wagon, then to the muffled singing that began to follow us. Don’t think, don’t think. It will be over soon.

When we made a sharp turn north, the singing receded into the distance and I knew we’d passed the gatehouse and turned onto the road. Moments later, one of the soldiers shouted “Halt!” and the wheels on the cart ground to a stop. The beat of my heart came so hard, I imagined the sound of it streaming out through the air holes. I was afraid to breathe.

The soldier addressed Pamphile. “We were told a man among the Therapeutae died. Where are you taking him?”

It was difficult to hear her answer. “To his family in Alexandria,” I believed she said.

Relief surged through me. I thought we would be waved on now, but the cart didn’t move. The soldiers’ voices drew closer, seeming to move to the back of the cart. A thread of panic began to unravel in me. My eyes flew open, met by the lid of the coffin. I drew a pant and shut them again. Don’t move. Don’t think.