The Book of Longings(12)

I cursed the world God had created. Could he not have thought up anything better than this? I cursed my parents for bartering me off without a care for my feelings, and Nathaniel ben Hananiah for his dismissiveness, his sneer, his silly purple hat—what was he trying to offset by wearing that towering protuberance? I cursed the rabbi Ben Sira, whose words flapped through the synagogues of Galilee as if borne by angels: “The birth of a daughter is a loss. Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good.”

Offspring of serpents. Bags of rotten foreskins. Decayed pig flesh!

I leapt to my feet and kicked the damnable incantation bowl and its empty words, wincing at the pain that jarred through my injured ankle. Dropping back on the bed, I rolled side to side, my body possessed by a soundless keening.

I lay there until my rage and grief subsided. I caressed the red thread tied on my wrist, rubbing it between my thumb and forefinger, and his face flared in my mind. This deep, clear sense of him. We hadn’t exchanged a word, Jesus and I, but I felt the ripple of intimacy when his hand had clasped mine. It caused a voracious pining at the center of me. Not for him, I didn’t think. For myself. Yet a thought pushed into my mind, a sense that he was as wondrous as inks and papyrus, that he was as vast as words. That he could set me free.

Dusk came, then nightfall. I did not light the lamps.





vii.


I dreamed. No, not a dream exactly, but a memory echoing in the coils of my sleep.



* * *



? ? ?

I AM TWELVE, studying with Titus, a Greek tutor my father has hired after giving in to my inconsolable begging. Mother has assured me I would have a tutor over her dead and buried body, and yet she did not succumb. She lived to rail at me, at Father, and at the tutor, who was no more than nineteen and terrified of her. On this day, Titus hands me a true wonder—not a scroll, but a stack of dried palm leaves evenly bound with a leather cord. On them are Hebrew words in black ink and embellishments along the margins in a lustrous golden color I could never have imagined, an ink prepared, he says, from yellow arsenic. I bend close and sniff it. It smells strange, like old coins. I rub my finger across the color and touch the residue to my lips, unleashing a tiny eruption on my tongue.

He compels me to read the words aloud, not in Hebrew but in Greek. “Such a thing is beyond me,” I tell him.

“I doubt that’s so. Now begin.”

The exercise maddens me with the need to stop and dissect entire passages, then piece them back together in a different tongue, while all I really want is to tear through the story on the palm leaves, which is as great a wonder as the golden ink. It’s the tale of Aseneth, an arrogant Egyptian girl forced to marry our patriarch Joseph, and the ferocious tantrum she throws as a result. I fight through the tortures of translation in order to discover her fate, which must have been the strategy all along.

After Titus departs, I lift my copper mirror and gaze at my face as if to assure myself it was really I who accomplished that impossible feat, and as I do, a tiny pain pricks my right temple. I think it’s nothing more than the strain of thinking so hard, but then I’m engulfed by a curdling in my stomach and a searing headache, which is followed by a flash of light behind my eyes, a ferocious brightness that flares out and swallows the room. I stare, mesmerized, as it contracts into a red disk that hovers before my eyes. Inside it floats the image of my face, a precise reflection of what I’ve just seen in the mirror. It startles me with a blinding sense of my own existence: Ana who shines. Gradually it crumbles, becoming ash in the wind.



* * *



? ? ?

MY EYES SHOT OPEN. The darkness in the room was suffocating, like being inside a ripe, black olive. Shipra’s snores thudded against the door. I got up and lit a single clay lamp and quenched my thirst from the stone pitcher. It was said that if one slept with an amethyst, it would cause a momentous dream. I’d had no such stone in my bed, yet what had unfolded in my sleep felt auspicious and God-sent. I’d dreamed the incident exactly as it’d happened two years ago. It had been the most peculiar event of my childhood, yet I’d told no one. How could they understand? I myself couldn’t fathom what had happened, only that God had tried to tell me something.

For weeks afterward I scavenged the Scriptures, discovering the strange tales of Elijah, Daniel, Elisha, and Moses and their visions of fire, beasts, and chariot thrones. Was it hubris to think God had sent me an apparition, too? At the time I couldn’t decide if my vision was a blessing or a curse. I wanted to believe it was a promise that the light in me would shine forth one day, that I would be seen in this world, I would be heard, yet I feared it was a warning that such desires would come to nothing. It was entirely possible the vision meant little more than that I was possessed of some demonic illness. With time I thought of the episode less and less, and finally not at all. Now here it was once more.

Across the room my incantation bowl lay on its side, a small abused creature. I went over and righted it, muttering my sorrow. Holding the bowl in my lap, I loosened the red thread from my wrist and laid it inside the bowl, circling it about the figure of the girl.

I breathed out and the sound swept over the room, and then the door creaked open and closed. “My child,” Yaltha whispered.

I ran to her, oblivious of my sore ankle. “How did you get past—where’s Shipra?”