The Book of Longings(2)
Tensed, almost breathless, I watched my aunt pore over my efforts.
“It’s as I thought,” she said, her face candescent. “You’ve been greatly blessed by God.”
Such words.
Until that moment I’d thought I was merely peculiar—a disturbance of nature. A misfit. A curse. I’d long been able to read and write, and I possessed unusual abilities to compose words into stories, to decipher languages and texts, to grasp hidden meanings, to hold opposing ideas in my head without conflict.
My father, Matthias, who was head scribe and counselor to our tetrarch, Herod Antipas, said my talents were better suited for prophets and messiahs, for men who parted seas, built temples, and conferred with God on mountaintops, or for that matter, any common circumcised male in Galilee. Only after I taught myself Hebrew and cajoled and pleaded did he allow me to read the Torah. Since the age of eight, I’d begged him for tutors to educate me, scrolls to study, papyrus to write on, and dyes to mix my own inks, and he’d often complied—whether out of awe or weakness or love, I couldn’t say. My aspirations embarrassed him. When he couldn’t subdue them, he made light of them. He liked to say the only boy in the family was a girl.
A child as awkward as I required an explanation. My father suggested that while God was busy knitting me together in my mother’s womb, he’d become distracted and mistakenly endowed me with gifts destined for some poor baby boy. I don’t know if he realized how affronting this must have been to God, at whose feet he laid the blunder.
My mother believed the fault lay with Lilith, a demon with the talons of an owl and the wings of a carrion bird who searched for newborn babies to murder, or in my instance, to defile with unnatural tendencies. I’d arrived in the world during a savage winter rain. The old women who delivered the babies refused to venture out even though my high-ranking father had sent for them. My distraught mother sat on her birthing chair with no one to relieve her pain or protect us from Lilith with the proper prayers and amulets, so it was left to her servant Shipra to bathe me in wine, water, salt, and olive oil, wrap me in swaddling bands, and tuck me into a cradle for Lilith to find.
My parents’ stories found their way into the flesh of my flesh and the bone of my bone. It had not occurred to me that my abilities had been intended, that God had meant to bestow these blessings on me. On Ana, a girl with turbulent black curls and eyes the color of rainclouds.
* * *
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VOICES FLOATED FROM nearby rooftops. The wail of a child, a goat bleating. Finally, Yaltha reached behind her back for the bundle and unwrapped the linen cloth. She peeled away the layers slowly, her eyes alight, casting quick glances at me.
She lifted up the contents. A limestone bowl, glowing and round, a perfect full moon. “I brought it with me from Alexandria. I wish you to have it.”
When she placed it in my hands, a quiver entered my body. I ran my palms over the smooth surface, the wide mouth, the milky whorls in the stone.
“Do you know what an incantation bowl is?” she asked.
I shook my head. I only knew it must be something of great magnitude, something too perilous or wondrous to unveil anywhere except on the roof in the dark.
“In Alexandria we women pray with them. We write our most secret prayer inside them. Like this.” She placed a finger inside the bowl and moved it in a spiraling line around the sides. “Every day we sing the prayer. As we do, we turn the bowl in slow circles and the words wriggle to life and spin off toward heaven.”
I gazed at it, unable to speak. A thing so resplendent, so fraught with hidden powers.
She said, “At the bottom of the bowl, we draw an image of ourselves to make certain God knows to whom the petition belongs.”
My mouth parted. Surely she knew no devout Jew would look upon figures in human and animal form, much less create them. The second commandment forbade it. Thou shalt not make a graven image of anything living in heaven, or on the earth, or in the sea.
“You must write your prayer in the bowl,” my aunt told me. “But take care what you ask, for you shall surely receive it.”
I stared into the hollow of the vessel and for a moment it seemed like a firmament unto itself, the starry dome turned upside down.
When I looked up, Yaltha’s eyes were settled on me. She said, “A man’s holy of holies contains God’s laws, but inside a woman’s there are only longings.” Then she tapped the flat bone over my heart and spoke the charge that caused something to flame up in my chest: “Write what’s inside here, inside your holy of holies.”
Lifting my hand, I touched the bone my aunt had just struck to life, blinking furiously to hold back a tumult of emotion.
Our one true God dwelled inside the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem, and I was sure it was impious to speak of a similar place existing inside humans, and worse still to suggest that yearnings inside girls like me had intimations of divinity. It was the most beautiful, wicked blasphemy I’d ever heard. I could not sleep that night for the ecstasy of it.
My bedstead was lifted off the floor on bronze legs, swathed in pillows dyed crimson and yellow, stuffed with beaten straw, feathers, coriander, and mint, and I lay there in all that softness and those scents long past the midnight hour composing my prayer in my head, struggling to compress the vastness of what I felt into words.
Rousing before dawn, I crept along the balcony that overhung the main floor, moving in bare feet without a lamp, stealing past the rooms where my family slept. Down the stone steps. Through the portico of the reception hall. I crossed the upper courtyard, measuring my steps as if walking on a field of pebbles, fearful of waking the servants who slept nearby.