The Book of Longings(128)

ii.


In the middle of the afternoon, twenty-two months, one week, and a day after Jesus’s death, rain thundered onto the library roof, waking me from a strange and unintended sleep. My head felt full and fuzzy, like it was stuffed with heaps of newly shorn wool. Lifting my cheek from my writing desk, I looked about—where was I? Gaius, who’d once nailed me into a coffin, had recently built a second room onto the library so I would have a scriptorium and space for cubicles to hold the library’s scrolls, but in those first muddled seconds of waking, I didn’t recognize the new surroundings. I felt a flicker of panic inside, and then of course, my whereabouts in the world returned.

Later, I would think of my old friend Thaddeus, who’d slept every day in the scriptorium in Haran’s house, practically curled up on top of his desk, napping out of boredom and for a time from Yaltha’s spiked beer. I, however, could only blame my somnolence on the passion that had driven me to work late into the night for weeks making copies of my codices. Two copies for the library and another that could be disseminated.

I pushed the bench back from my desk and shook my head, trying to clear the drowsy aftereffect, but the cobwebs clung to me. As I’d slept, the room had darkened and chilled, and I pulled Jesus’s cloak around my shoulders, drew the lamp closer, and turned my attention back to my work. My codex, Thunder: Perfect Mind, lay open on the desk, and beside it was the copy I’d been making of it on a fresh sheet of papyrus. Skepsis planned to send the copy to a scholar at the library in Alexandria with whom she corresponded. I’d taken extra care with the lettering and added my small flourishes, but my chevrons and spirals were wasted. A large, messy ink smear gaped at me from the middle of the papyrus, the place where my face had rested on the manuscript when I’d fallen asleep. The last lines I’d written were barely legible:

    I am the whore and the holy woman

I am the wife and the virgin



I rubbed my finger across my cheek and the tip of it came back with a smear of ink. It seemed ironic, sad, beautiful, almost purposeful that I am the wife had been smudged onto my skin. For nearly two years, I’d worn my grief for Jesus like a second skin. In all that time, the pain of his absence had not diminished. The familiar burning came to my eyes, followed by that sense I often got of wandering inside my heart, desperately searching for what I could never find—my husband. I feared my grief would turn to despair, that it would become a skin I couldn’t shed.

A great tiredness came over me then. I closed my eyes, wanting the dark, empty void.

I woke to silence. The rain had quieted. The air seemed weighted and still. Looking up, I saw Jesus standing across the room, his dark, expressive eyes staring at me.

I drew in my breath. It took several minutes before I could speak. I said, “Jesus. You’ve come.”

“Ana,” he said. “I never left.” And he smiled his funny, lopsided smile.

He didn’t move from where he stood, so I walked toward him, stopping suddenly when I noticed he was wearing his old cloak with the bloodstain on the sleeve. I looked down, taking in the garment draped about my shoulders, his old cloak with the bloodstain on the sleeve, the one I’d worn daily for twenty-two months, one week, and a day. How could he be wearing it, too?

I tried to discern what was happening. This is most assuredly a dream, I thought. Perhaps an awake dream or a vision. Yet I felt the realness of him.

I went and clutched his hands. They were warm and callused. He smelled like sweat and wood chips. His beard bore traces of limestone dust. He looked as he had when we were together in Nazareth. I wondered what he thought of the ink on my cheek.

I sensed he was leaving. “Don’t go.”

“I’ll always be with you,” he said, and he vanished.

I sat at my desk a long while, trying to comprehend. Skepsis had once told me her mother appeared in her holy room three weeks after she’d died. “It’s not an uncommon thing,” she’d said. “The mind is a mystery.”

I believed then, and still now, that Jesus’s visitation was the workings of my own mind, but it was no less a miracle than if he’d been flesh and blood. His spirit returned to me that day. He was no longer lost to me.

I removed his cloak, folded it neatly, and tucked it into an empty cubicle. I said aloud to the shadows in the room, “All shall be well.”





iii.


We climb the path to the cliffs, Diodora, Tabitha, and I, walking one behind the other in the orange light. I walk at the head, holding my incantation bowl against my chest. Behind me, Diodora strikes a goatskin drum and Tabitha sings a song about Eve, the seeker. For thirty years, the three of us have lived together on this hillside.

I glance over my shoulder at them. Tabitha’s hair flutters out behind her in the breezes, smooth and gray as a dove wing, and Diodora’s face has become a tiny field of furrows like her mother’s. We keep no mirrors, but I often see my reflection on the water’s surface—the crinkling around my eyes, my hair still dark except for a streak of white across the front. At fifty-eight I can still move with quickness and ease up the steep incline, as can my two sisters, but today we walk slowly, weighed down by the bulging pouches on our backs. They are stuffed full of codices—thirty leather-bound copies of my writings. All the words I’ve written since I was fourteen. My everything.