The Book of Longings(21)

Blindness, lameness, afflictions of skin, infertility, lack of modesty, disobedience, or other repulsions.

She eyed me with circumspection, waiting for my reaction. Insults caught in my throat. Obscenities I couldn’t have dreamed of until Yaltha. I swallowed them. I could not risk losing my freedom to walk in the hills.

“As you wish,” I said.

She didn’t look entirely convinced. “You will submit gracefully?”

I nodded.

To inspect me as if I were donkey teeth! If I’d known of this, I could’ve given myself a brilliant red rash using gopher pitch. I could’ve washed my hair with garlic and onion juice. I could’ve presented her with any number of repulsions.

The woman greeted me kindly, but without smiling. She was small like her brother, with the same pouched eyes and vinegary face. I’d hoped Mother might leave us, but she posted herself beside my bed.

“Remove your clothing,” Zopher said.

I hesitated, then drew my tunic over my head and stood before them in my undergarment. Zopher lifted my arms, bending close to study my skin as if it was some inscrutable piece of writing. She examined my face and neck, my knees and ankles, behind my ears and between my toes.

“Now your undergarment,” she said.

I looked at her, then at Mother. “Please, I cannot.”

“Remove it,” Mother said. The nectar had been sucked from her voice.

I stood naked before them, sick with humiliation while Zopher walked a circle around me, scrutinizing my backside, my breasts, the patch between my legs. Mother looked away; she at least did me that small courtesy.

I bore my stare into the woman. I wish you dead. I wish your brother dead.

“What is this?” Zopher inquired, pointing at the black dot of a mole on my nipple. It had been all but forgotten to me, but I wanted to bend and kiss it, this magnificent imperfection. “I believe it to be leprosy,” I told her.

Her hand snapped back.

“It’s no such thing,” Mother cried. “It’s nothing at all.” She looked at me. A dagger flew out of her eyes.

I hurried to ameliorate her. “Forgive me. I was trying to soothe my unease over my nakedness, that’s all.”

“Dress yourself,” Zopher said. “I will report to my brother that your body is acceptable.”

Mother’s sigh was like a squall of wind.



* * *



? ? ?

DARK CAME AND THE MOON did not appear. I lay down, but without sleep. I revisited all the things Yaltha had said about her marriage, how she’d rid herself of Ruebel, and I felt hope leak back into me. Making certain to hear the plow of Father’s snores behind his door, I slipped down the stairs to his study, where I pilfered a pen, a vial of ink, and one of the small clay tablets he used for mundane correspondence. Tucking them into my sleeve, I hurried back to my room and closed the door.

Yaltha had asked God to take Ruebel’s life if he must as the just price for his cruelty, and he’d deserved his fate, but I wouldn’t go so far as that. Death curses were common in Galilee, so prevalent it was a miracle the population had not died off entirely, but I didn’t really wish Nathaniel dead. I only wanted him removed from my life.

The tablet was no bigger than the palm of my hand. Its smallness forced me to shrink my letters, which caused the fervency inside them to strain at the ink.

    Let the powers above look with disfavor upon my betrothal. Visit a pestilence upon it. Let it be broken by whatever means God chooses. Unbind me from Nathaniel ben Hananiah. May it be so.



I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls. So it was with the words I wrote. They reveled till dawn.





xvii.


I went in search of Lavi, hoping we might slip away quietly and return to the cave, but Mother had taken him off to the market. Posting myself on the balcony, I waited for their return.

When I was a child, I sometimes woke from sleep knowing things before they occurred: Judas will take me to the aqueduct; Shipra will roast a lamb; Mother will suffer a headache; Father will bring me ink dyes from the palace; my tutor will be late. Shortly before Yaltha arrived, I woke certain that a stranger would come into our lives. These glimmers would manifest as I clambered up from the dregs of sleep. Before I opened my eyes, they were there, silent and pure and clear, like pieces of blown glass, and I would wait to see if they would happen. They always happened.

Sometimes my pre-sights were not about events, but snatches of an image that floated behind my eyes. Once, a shofar appeared and that same day we heard it being blown to announce the Festival of Weeks.

I wasn’t granted these mysteries often, and with the exception of Yaltha’s arrival and the appearance of the ink dyes, they were revelations of the most mundane and useless kind. Why would I need to be informed of the meal Shipra cooked, or the delay of my tutor, or that a ram horn would be blown? There had been no presentiment of my incantation bowl or my betrothal. I’d had no hint of Jesus, the burning of my writings, or the cave.

For nearly a year I’d been free of these premonitions, and happily so, but as I waited there on the balcony, an image appeared in my mind with vividness: a tongue, pink and grotesque. I shook my head to clear it away. Another inane visage, I told myself, but the strangeness of it disturbed me.