The Book of Longings(122)

I took a deep breath and gazed up at him. “Jesus.” His head slumped toward his shoulder and I saw he was looking at me. He didn’t speak, nor did I, but I told myself later that everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering.

Mary rushed to him, followed by the others. She wrapped her hands about her son’s feet like she was holding a tiny bird that had fallen from its nest. I wrapped my hands about hers and then the other three women did the same, our hands like the petals of a lotus. Not one of us wept. We stood there mute and full and held up that flower for him.

The soldiers did not tear themselves from their game of knucklebones to chase us away.

They no longer seemed to care we were there. We watched Jesus’s eyes grow glassy and distant. I felt the moment come, the severing. It was gentle, like a touch on the shoulder.

“It is finished,” Jesus said.

There was a sound like a rush of wings in the blackish clouds, and I knew his spirit had left him. I imagined it like a great flock of birds, soaring, scattering, coming to rest everywhere.





v.


We prepared Jesus for burial by the flicker of two oil lamps. Kneeling on the cave floor beside his body, I felt oddly numb. How could this be my husband?

I looked at the other women in the tomb as if observing them from a corner of the sky. Mary, his mother, was cleansing his feet and legs while the others sang the songs of lament. Their faces were smeared and wet, their voices bounding and rebounding off the cave walls. A towel and a ewer of water sat beside me, waiting for me to join them in readying him for burial. Pick up the towel. Pick it up. But gazing at it, I was seized with panic. I understood that if I took hold of the towel, if I touched Jesus, I would fall from my niche in the sky. His dying would become real. Grief would swallow me.

My eyes wandered to the stacks of bones at the back of the cave neatly separated into skulls, ribs, long bones, short bones, fingers, toes—countless dead people mingled together in a morbid communion. No one who’d been buried here, it seemed, had the means to purchase an ossuary to hold their bones. This was a pauper’s tomb.

We were fortunate to have any tomb at all. Rome’s custom was to leave a crucified man hanging on the cross for weeks, then toss his body into a pit to finish decaying. Jesus would’ve suffered that abomination except for the goodness of a stranger.

He’d been no older than Jesus and adorned in an expensive robe and finely dyed blue hat. He’d approached us moments after a soldier thrust a spear into Jesus’s side to ensure his death. The act had sickened and appalled me, and I swung away, turning my back on the gruesome scene, almost careening into the man. His eyes were red and weighted.

He said, “I’ve located a tomb not far from here. If I can convince the centurion to turn over Jesus’s body, my servants will take him there.”

I eyed him. “Who are you, sir?”

“I’m one of Jesus’s followers. My name is Joseph. I come from Arimathea. You women must be his family.”

Mary stepped forward. “I’m his mother.”

“And I’m his wife,” I told him. “Your kindness is welcome.”

He bowed slightly and strode off, tugging a money bag from his sash. He placed a denarius in the centurion’s palm. I watched it grow into a column of silver.

When he returned to us, he held out more denarii. “Go into the city and purchase what you need to prepare the body. But you must hurry. The centurion wishes to hand over the body quickly.” He glanced up into the half-light. “And he has to be buried before sunset. The Sabbath will be upon us soon.”

Salome scooped the coins from his hand, and grabbing Mary of Bethany by the hand, she pulled her down the hillside. “We’ll wait for you here. Be quick!” he called after them.

Now, in the cave, the lamp flames darted. Light spattered across Jesus’s skin. His skin. His. I reached out and touched it. I let my fingers brush the inside of his elbow. Then I dampened the towel and wiped the dirt and blood from his hands, arms, chest, and face, from the coils of his ears and the creases in his neck, all the while falling and falling, slamming into myself, into the boundless pain.

We rubbed his skin with olive oil, then anointed him with nothing but myrrh. It had been the only sweet spice Salome had been able to obtain in the city at the late hour, and this had dismayed Mary. “When the Sabbath ends,” she said, “we’ll return to the tomb and anoint him more properly with cloves and aloe and mint.”

I watched Salome draw a broken wooden comb through his hair. I’d witnessed his slaughter and not a tear had crossed my cheeks, but I cried in silence now at the comb passing through his locks.

Mary of Magdala grasped the edges of the shroud and drew it slowly down the length of him, but in that last instant before his face was gone from me, I bent and kissed both his cheeks.

“I will meet you in the place called Deathless,” I whispered.





vi.


That evening Martha turned the Sabbath meal into the funeral feast, but no one cared to eat. We were sitting on the damp courtyard tiles, huddled beneath a canopy. All around us were the coming dark and the plop of rain drizzle . . . and silence, a great stunned silence. No one had spoken of Jesus since we’d left the tomb. We had squeezed through the cave opening, where Lavi waited for us, heaved the stone across it, and left our voices inside. Then we’d walked slowly to Bethany, shocked, weary, mute with horror—I, still barefoot, and Lavi, carrying my sandals.