The Book of Longings(17)

Her directness caused me to choke on a piece of almond. I coughed so fitfully, she leaned forward and pounded my back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m often accused of blurting my thoughts. My father says my mind is weak, and my tongue, weaker.” She looked at me with stricken eyes that began to fill.

I placed my hand on her arm. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I’ve been rude. I’d planned to walk in the hills this morning, and when you came, I felt . . . diverted.” I’d almost said disappointed. She wiped her cheeks with her sleeve, trying to smile.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I added, and it was almost true. My remorse had softened me toward her. “Sing for me and I promise not to read.” There were no scrolls left in my room to tempt me, but even so, I wanted to hear her.

She beamed and her sweet, high-pitched voice poured through the room as she intoned the song the women sang when they went out to meet the bridegroom before the wedding.


Sing, the groom comes soon.

Lift your timbrel. Raise your voice.

Dance with the rising moon.

Let all of creation rejoice.



I’d thought Tabitha shallow, but perhaps she wasn’t superficial so much as lighthearted. She was a girl, that’s all. A playful girl who lifted her timbrel. At that moment she seemed everything I was not, and this came as a small revelation. I had hated in her what I lacked in myself.

You are very serious, she’d told me.

Despite the soreness that lingered in my ankle, I pulled her to her feet, joining my voice with hers, and we twirled in circles to the point of dizziness and collapsed onto the floor, laughing.

Mother’s plot to bring Tabitha back into my life had indeed affected me, though not in the way she’d hoped—I could never be dissuaded from my studies or my walks, but I was far more pleased to sing.





x.


Tabitha came often to our house in the mornings, hindering my quest in the hills. I worried constantly that Shipra or Mother would discover my scrolls and my bowl in Yaltha’s room, and yet I was happy for my friend’s presence. Her visits were bright splotches amid the grimness of anticipating a marriage to Nathaniel. She knew untold songs, most of which she’d composed herself in hexameters and trimeters. There was one about a madwoman who starts laughing and can’t stop; another about a peasant who bakes a worm into a loaf of bread and serves it to the tetrarch; and my favorite, about a girl who escapes a harem by pretending to be a boy.

Even Yaltha would rise earlier than usual from her bed to hear what Tabitha had concocted, bringing an Egyptian rattling musical instrument called a sistrum and shaking it in rhythm with the songs. Tabitha would free her straight black hair from its constraints and, without a trace of shyness, dance out the story as she sang. She had a small, lithe body and a lovely face with high arching brows. Watching her move was like gazing at mesmeric curls of smoke.

One morning when Tabitha arrived, she had an amused, conspiratorial look about her. She said, “Today we shall perform a dance together.” When I protested, she snorted. “You have no choice—I’ve written a song that requires both of us.”

I had never danced, not ever. “What’s the song about?” I asked.

“We shall be two blind girls who pretend we can see in order to keep our betrotheds.”

I didn’t know if I cared for her song’s proposition. “Could we be blind and pretend to see in order to keep our tutors?”

“No girl would enact such an elaborate pretense for a tutor.”

“I would.”

She rolled her eyes upward, but I saw she was more amused than exasperated. “Then you shall pretend that your betrothed is your tutor.”

There was something strangely beautiful about this, the coming together of two ways of life that I’d thought irreconcilable: duty and longing.

We slipped into Mother’s room while she was occupied in the courtyard and lifted the lid on her storage chest, the oak one carved on top with braided circles and fastened with a brass clasp. Tabitha dug out dyed scarves the color of rubies and tied them about our hips. She rummaged among the pouches for a kohl stick and drew a pair of staring eyes atop my closed lids, and when it was my turn to draw the same upon hers, I giggled so uncontrollably the stick of kohl made a streak across her temple. She said, “We will dance with our eyes closed, completely blind, but we will look as if we can see.”

At the bottom of the chest, Tabitha found Mother’s wooden jewel box. Would we now plunder her jewelry, too? I glanced back at the door while Tabitha draped the carnelian necklace about her neck and tied lapis beads about mine. She adorned us with gold and amethyst headbands and pushed gold rings on our fingers. She said, “Just because we’re blind doesn’t mean we can’t look beautiful.”

Coming upon a vial of perfume, she opened it and the sharp smell of a thousand lilies cut the air. Spikenard, the costliest of all the scents.

“Not that one,” I said. “It’s too expensive.”

“Surely we poor blind girls deserve spikenard.” She blinked and the eyes I’d painted on her lids flashed me an imploring look.

I gave in easily, and she placed a drop of the oil on her finger and touched it to my forehead as mothers did when anointing and naming their babies. “I anoint you Ana, friend of Tabitha,” she said and let out a quiet laugh, making it hard to know whether she was being serious or playful, but then she held my eyes and repeated the words friend of Tabitha, and I realized she was being both.