The Book of Longings(24)

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    BECAUSE TABITHA HAD tried so hard to reveal what happened to her and been silenced for it, I removed the last two sheets of papyrus from the goatskin pouch beneath my bed and inscribed the story of her rape and the maiming of her tongue. Once again, I sat with my back against the door, knowing if Mother were to come seeking me, I could not prevent her from entering for long. She would push her way in and find me writing, ransack my room and find my hidden scrolls. I pictured her reading them—the words of love and want that I’d written about Jesus, the blood I’d splashed on the walls in Tabitha’s house.

I risked everything, but I couldn’t stop myself from writing her story. I filled both papyri. Grief and anger streamed from my fingers. The anger made me brave and the grief made me sure.





xix.


The clearing where I’d seen Jesus praying was empty, the air spiky with shadows. I’d come early enough to perform my burial task before he appeared, stealing from the house before the sun hefted its red belly over the summit of the hills. Lavi carried the bundle of my scrolls, the clay tablet on which I’d written my curse, and a digging tool. I bore the incantation bowl beneath my coat. The thought that Jesus might return sent a shock of joy and fright through me. I couldn’t say what I would do—whether I would speak to him or slip away as I’d done before.

I waited at the cave opening while Lavi inspected it for bandits, snakes, and other menacing creatures. Finding none, he beckoned me inside, where it was cool and gloomy, speckled with bat droppings and pieces of stoneware, a few of which I gathered. Holding my head scarf over my nose to lessen the smell of animal dung and moldering earth, I found a spot near the back of the cave, beside a column of stone that I could easily recognize when it was time to reclaim my belongings. Lavi jabbed at the ground with the digging tool, opening a gash in the dirt. Dust flew. Cobwebs floated down to make nets on my shoulders. He grunted as he worked—he was slight, unused to heavy toil, but eventually he fashioned a cavity two cubits deep and two cubits wide.

Lifting up the flax that draped the incantation bowl, I gazed inside it at my prayer, at the sketch I’d made of myself, the gray smudge, the red thread, then placed the bowl into the hole. Beside it, I laid the bundle of scrolls, and last, the clay tablet. I wondered if I would see any of this ever again. I raked the dirt over them and spread the pebbles and bits of pottery I’d collected over the site to conceal that it’d been disturbed.

When we emerged into the sunlight, Lavi spread his cloak on the ground and I sat looking toward the balsam grove. I drank from the wineskin in my pouch and nibbled a piece of bread. I waited past the second hour. I waited past the third.

He did not come.





xx.


On the day Mother announced my betrothal ceremony would take place in thirty days, I’d sewn thirty ivory chips onto a swath of pale blue linen. Each day since, I’d cut one off. Now, alone on the roof of the house, I stared at the cloth, sobered by the meagerness of chips that remained. Eight.

It was the twilit hour. Moroseness didn’t come easily to me—anger did, yes; passion and stubbornness, always—but sitting here, I felt bereft. I’d returned twice to Tabitha’s house but had been denied entry. Earlier today Mother had informed me that my friend had been sent to live with relatives in the village of Japha, south of Nazareth. I was certain I would never see her again.

I was afraid I would never see Jesus again either. I saw nothing but God’s backside.

Had it always been so? When I was five, visiting the Temple in Jerusalem for the first time, I’d attempted to follow Father and Judas up the circular steps through the Nicanor Gate, when Mother yanked me back. Her hand clamped tight on my arm as I tried to twist free, my eyes straining after my brother, who moved toward the gleaming marble and gold gilt of the sanctuary where God lived. The Holy of Holies. She shook my shoulders to get my attention. “Under penalty of death, you can go no further.”

I stared at the smoke plumes rising from the altar beyond the gate. “But why can’t I go, too?”

For years, whenever I recalled her answer, it would bestow on me the same jolt of surprise I’d felt the day she’d uttered it. “Because, Ana, you are female. This is the Court of Women. We can go no further.” In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything.

Taking up the snipping knife, I sliced away another ivory chip from the cloth. Seven.

Eventually I told Yaltha about Jesus. About the colorful threads draped over his fingers in the market stall, and how, but for them, I wouldn’t know of him at all. I described the rough feel of his palm when he’d come to my aid, the sickening thud of his head on the tile when the soldier had shoved him. When I revealed how I came upon him again at the cave as he prayed the Kaddish and the exigency I felt to speak to him but stifled, she smiled. “And now he inhabits your thoughts and inflames your heart.”

“Yes.” I didn’t add that he caused heat and light to move about in my body as well, but I felt she knew that, too.

I could not have borne Yaltha telling me that my longing for him only came from my despair over Nathaniel. It was true that Jesus had stepped into my path at the same moment the rest of my world collapsed. I suppose he was, in part, a consolation. She must’ve known it, but she refrained from saying it. Instead she told me that I had traveled to a secret sky, the one beyond this one where the queen of heaven reigns, for Yahweh knew nothing of female matters of the heart.