The Book of Longings(127)

i.

Tabitha and I found Yaltha in the garden, bent over a row of spindly plants. Absorbed in her work, she didn’t notice us. She smeared her fingers across her tunic, leaving two trails of dirt, an act that filled me with inexplicable gladness. She was fifty-nine now, but she looked almost youthful kneeling in the sunlight among all these green-growing things, and I felt a surge of relief. She was still here.

“Aunt!” I called.

Seeing me, and then Tabitha, running toward her through the barley plants, she opened her mouth and dropped back onto her heels. I heard her exclaim in typical fashion, “Shit of a donkey!”

I tugged Yaltha to her feet and hugged her to me. “I thought I would never see you again.”

“Nor I, you,” she said. “Yet here you are after only a few weeks away.” Her face was a jumble of elation and confusion. “And look who you’ve brought with you.”

As she embraced Tabitha, a shout came from behind us, higher on the slope. “Ana? Ana. Is that you?” Looking back toward the cliffs, I saw Diodora racing down the path with a basket jostling in her arms, and I knew she’d been up there collecting motherwort. She reached us breathless, her hair sprung from her scarf into a riotous fan around her face. She swung me about, sending the spiky-leaved herbs flying.

When I introduced her to Tabitha, she said a priceless thing that Tabitha would remember all her life: “Ana has told me of your bravery.” Tabitha said nothing in response, which I imagined Diodora perceived as shyness, but I knew her silence was about the severed tongue in her mouth, her fear of sounding senseless.

Tabitha helped Diodora gather the spilled herbs, and all the while, Yaltha waited to ask the question, the one I dreaded. I looked out across the hillside, searching for the roof of the library.

“What has brought you back, child?” Yaltha said. Her face looked grave and stony. She’d already guessed the reason.

“Jesus is dead,” I said, feeling how my voice wanted to splinter apart. “They crucified him.”

Diodora let out a cry that I felt inside my own throat. Yaltha took my hand. “Come with me,” she said.

She led us to a little knoll not far from the garden, where we sat beside a cluster of brush pines that had been sculpted into outlandish shapes by the wind. “Tell us what happened,” Yaltha said.

I was weary from travel—we’d trekked for two and a half days from Bethany to Joppa, sailed another six to Alexandria, then jostled for hours in a donkey-pulled wagon that Lavi had hired—but I told the story, I told them everything, and like before with the women in Bethany, it took some of the brightness from my pain.

When the story was spent, we fell silent. Far down the escarpment I could just make out a slice of blue lake. Nearby, one of my goats was bleating in the animal shed.

“It was a relief to see that Haran’s soldiers are no longer encamped on the road,” I said.

“They disbanded not long after you left,” Yaltha said. “It happened exactly as Skepsis predicted: Haran was quickly informed that you’d returned to your husband in Galilee and that I’d taken the vows to remain among the Therapeutae for life. Shortly after that, the outpost was abandoned.”

Returned to your husband in Galilee. The words were like little cleavers.

I noticed Tabitha open and close her fists, as if coaxing the bravery Diodora had spoken about. Then she spoke for the first time. “Ana said the outpost would likely be deserted, but Lavi would not take chances. He insisted we wait in the closest village while he rode on alone to be certain. Only then did he return for us.” She spoke slowly, molding the sounds in her mouth.

As she’d spoken, though, a new concern had clamored at me. “Won’t Lucian inform Haran I’m back?” I asked Yaltha.

Yaltha pressed her lips together and pondered this for the first time herself. “You’re right about Lucian. He will most certainly inform Haran you’re back. But even if Haran decides once again to seek our arrests, he would have a hard time convincing the soldiers to return. Before you left, there were rumors of their discontent. They’d grown weary searching passersby and receiving little pay for it. And Haran is bound to resist doling out more of his money to them.” She laid her hand on my knee. “I think his revenge will go no further. But either way, we’re safe here with the Therapeutae. We can wait to venture beyond the gatehouse after Haran dies. The man is older than me. He can’t live forever.” A wicked grin formed on Yaltha’s face. “We could always write a death curse for him.”

“I’m very good at composing them,” said Tabitha, who may or may not have grasped our lack of seriousness.

“I took the vows,” Yaltha said. “I’m one of them for life now.”

I would never have expected this. She’d spent so much of her life rootless, exiled to places not of her choosing. Now she chose. “Oh, Aunt, I’m glad for you.”

“I took them, too,” said Diodora.

I said, “I will do so as well.”

“And I,” said Tabitha.

Yaltha smiled at her. “Tabitha, dear, in order to take the vows, you’ll need to be here for more than five minutes.”

Tabitha laughed. “Next week, then,” she said.

We rose finally to walk down the hill to find Skepsis and inform her of our return, but we paused first, listening to a bell clang in the distance. Wind was pouring down the cliffs, bringing the smell of the sea, and the air glowed with the saffron light that came sometimes on cloudless days. I remember this small interlude as if it were a sacred occasion, for I looked at the three of them poised before the brush pines and I saw that we had somehow shaped ourselves into a family.