The Book of Longings(123)

I looked at them now—Mary and Salome; Lazarus, Mary, and Martha; Mary of Magdala, Tabitha, and Lavi. They stared back with solemn, devastated faces.

Jesus is dead.

I wished for Yaltha. For Diodora and Skepsis. I forced myself to picture them beneath the tamarisk tree beside the little stone hut. I tried to see the bright, white cliffs at the top of the hill, and Lake Mareotis shining at the foot of it like a piece of fallen sky. I managed to hold all of this in my mind for several moments before the ghastly memories pushed their way back in. I didn’t know how the rubble inside me could ever be put back together.

As the night drew around us, Martha lit three lamps and set them in our midst. All of their faces shone suddenly, cheeks and chins the color of honey. The rain finally stopped. Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.

I broke the silence. I told them about the letter Judas had sent summoning me home. “He wrote to me that Jesus was in danger from the authorities, but I know now that most of that danger came from Judas himself.” I hesitated, feeling a mix of disgust and shame. “It was my brother who led the Temple guard to arrest Jesus.”

“How do you know this?” exclaimed Lazarus.

“I encountered him this morning in the Garden of Gethsemane. He confessed it to me.”

“May God strike him down,” Martha said with fierceness. No one refuted her. Not even I.

I watched their sharp, appalled expressions, how they struggled to comprehend. Mary of Magdala gave her head a shake, the amber light catching in her hair. She lifted her face to me, and I wondered if she knew why I’d not traveled with my husband through the villages and towns around Galilee as she’d done. Were the circumstances of my exile known among his followers? Was I known among them?

“It’s impossible that Judas would betray Jesus,” the Magdalene said. “He loved him. I traveled with the disciples for months. Judas was devoted to Jesus.”

I bristled. I may not have been there for Jesus’s ministry, but I knew my brother. I responded tersely. “I know very well that Judas loved Jesus; he loved him like a brother. But he hated Rome far more.”

A look crossed her face, something crestfallen, and my annoyance vanished. Even then I knew I’d snapped at her out of envy, resentful of the freedom she’d had to follow Jesus around the countryside, while I’d been trapped in Haran’s house.

“I shouldn’t have spoken harshly,” I told her. She smiled and the skin wrinkled around her eyes in that way that makes a woman beautiful.

There came another silence. My mother-in-law placed her hand on my arm, her fingers brushing past the bloodstain on the sleeve of Jesus’s cloak. She had aged deeply in the two years I’d been gone. Her hair was silvering and her face had begun to change into an old woman’s—the plump, sagging cheeks, eyelids slumped onto her lashes.

She rubbed my arm, meant to comfort, but her fingers woke the smells inside the cloak’s fabric. Sweat, cook smoke, wine, spikenard. The scents, so sudden and alive, unleashed a bitter pain inside me, and I understood that I’d spoken to them about Judas because I couldn’t bear to speak about Jesus. I feared it. I feared the power it had to unlock pain from common places.

There was so much, though, to be said, to be understood. I shifted, straightened. “I was on my way to the palace this morning when I came upon Jesus in the street carrying the crossbeam. I know nothing about how he came to be condemned or why he wore those dreadful thorns on his head.” I looked at the women who’d climbed Golgotha with me. “Were any of you there when he was brought before Pilate?”

Mary of Magdala leaned toward me. “We were all there. When I arrived, a large crowd had already gathered on the pavement and Jesus was standing above us on the porch where the Roman governor pronounces his judgments. Pilate was questioning him, but from where I stood, it was impossible to hear what was said.”

“We could not hear him either,” said Salome. “Though for most of it Jesus remained silent, refusing to answer Pilate’s questions. You could tell this aggravated Pilate. Eventually he shouted for Jesus to be taken to Herod Antipas.”

At the mention of Antipas’s name, fear, then hate blazed up in me. Jesus and I had been forced apart for two years because of him. “Why would Pilate send Jesus to Antipas?” I asked.

Mary of Magdala said, “I heard some in the crowd say Pilate would prefer Antipas to pronounce the verdict and save him from blame in case people revolted and blood was shed. He could be recalled to Rome over an outcome like that. Better to wash his hands of it and let the tetrarch do it. We waited on the pavement to see what would happen, and sometime later, Jesus returned with the thorn crown on his head and a purple cape about his shoulders.”

Salome said, “It was awful, Ana. Antipas had costumed Jesus like that to mock him as King of the Jews. Pilate’s soldiers were bowing to him and laughing. I could see that he’d been flogged—he could hardly stand, but he kept his head lifted the whole time and didn’t flinch at their ridicule.” Her face was radiant with the urge to cry.

“Who condemned him to die—Antipas or Pilate?” asked Lazarus, clasping and unclasping his hands.

“It was Pilate,” said Mary of Magdala. “He addressed the crowd saying it was the custom during Passover to release one prisoner. I cannot tell you how my hope leapt at this. I thought he intended to set Jesus free. Instead he asked the crowd who it should be, Jesus or someone else. We women had arrived at the palace separately, but by this time, we’d found one another and we shouted Jesus’s name as loudly as we could. But there were many followers present of a man named Barabbas, a Zealot held in Antonia’s Tower for insurrection. They screamed his name until that was all that could be heard.”