The Book of Longings(3)

The mikvah where we bathed in keeping with the laws of purity was enclosed in a dank room beneath the house and was accessible only from the lower courtyard. I descended, feeling my way along the stair wall. As the trickle of water in the conduit rose and the gloom faded, I made out the contours of the pool. I was adept at performing my ritual ablutions in the dark—I’d been coming to the mikvah since my first bleeding, as our religion required, but doing so at night, in private, for I’d not yet confessed my womanhood to my mother. For several months now I’d been burying my rags in the herb garden.

This time, though, I’d not come to the mikvah for reasons of womanhood, but to make myself ready to inscribe my bowl. To write down a prayer—this was a grievous and holy thing. The act itself of writing evoked powers, often divine, but sometimes unstable, that entered the letters and sent a mysterious animating force rippling through the ink. Did not a blessing carved on a talisman safeguard a newborn and a curse inscription protect a tomb?

I slipped off my robe and stood unclothed on the top step, though it was customary to enter in one’s undergarments. I wished to be laid bare. I wished nothing between me and the water. I called out for God to make me clean so I might write my prayer with rightness of mind and heart. Then I stepped into the mikvah. I wriggled beneath the water like a fish and came up gasping.

Back in my room I robed myself in a clean tunic. I gathered the incantation bowl and my writing implements and lit the oil lamps. Day was breaking. A blurred blue light filled the room. My heart was a goblet running over.





iii.


Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I drew tiny letters inside the bowl with a newly sharpened reed pen and black ink I’d mixed myself from oven ash, tree sap, and water. For a year I’d searched for the best combination of ingredients, for the precise amount of time to cook the firewood, for the right plant gum to keep the ink from clumping, and here it was, adhering to the limestone without run or smear, shining like onyx. The ink’s acrid, smoky scent filled the room, causing my nostrils to burn and my eyes to water. I breathed it like incense.

There were many secret prayers I might have written. To journey to the place in Egypt my aunt had set loose in my imagination. For my brother to come home to us. For Yaltha to remain with me all the days of my life. To be wed one day to a man who would love me for who I was. Instead, I wrote the prayer that lay at the bottom of my heart.

I formed each letter in Greek with slow, reverential movements, as if my hands were building little ink temples for God to inhabit. Writing inside the bowl was more arduous than I’d imagined, but I persevered in adding flourishes that were mine alone—thin upstrokes, thick downstrokes, spirals and chevrons at the ends of my sentences, dots and circlets between the words.

Out in the courtyard, I could hear our servant, sixteen-year-old Lavi, pressing olives, his rhythmic grinding of the millstone echoing from the stone pavement, and when it ceased, a dove on the roof, offering its small sound to the world. The little bird encouraged me.

The sun kindled and the sky paled from pink gold to white gold. Inside the house nothing stirred. Yaltha rarely woke before the noon hour, but by this time Shipra would’ve brought fry bread and a plate of figs. Mother would’ve appeared in my room eager to order me about. She would’ve scowled at my inks, reproached me for accepting such a bold gift, and blamed Yaltha for giving it to me without her permission. I could not imagine what delayed her from inflicting her daily round of persecution.

Nearly finished with my prayer, I cocked one ear for my mother and the other for the return of my brother, Judas. He had not been seen for days. At twenty, his duty was to settle down and seek a wife, but he preferred to madden Father by consorting with the radicals who agitated against Rome. He’d gone off with the Zealots before, but never so long as this. Each morning I hoped to hear him clomping through the vestibule hungry and spent, contrite over the worry he’d put us through. Judas, though, was never contrite. And this time was different—we all knew it, but didn’t say it. Mother feared, as I did, that he’d finally joined Simon ben Gioras, the most inflamed fanatic of them all, for good. It was said his men swooped down upon small bands of Herod Antipas’s mercenaries and General Varus’s Roman soldiers and slit their throats. They also preyed on rich travelers on the road to Cana, taking their money to give to the poor, but leaving their necks intact.

Judas was my adopted brother, the son of my mother’s cousin, but he was closer to me in spirit than my parents. Sensing how separate and alone I’d felt growing up, he’d often taken me with him to wander the terraced hills outside the city, the two of us climbing the stone walls that separated the fields, surprising the girls who tended sheep, plucking grapes and olives as we went. The slopes were pocked with honeycombed caves, and we explored them, calling our names into their gaping mouths, listening for the voice that spoke them back to us.

Inevitably Judas and I would find our way to the Roman aqueduct that brought water into the city, and there we made a ritual of throwing stones at the columns between the arches. It was while we’d stood in the shadows of that massive Roman marvel—he, sixteen, and I, ten—that Judas first told me about the revolt in Sepphoris that had taken his parents from him. Roman soldiers had rounded up two thousand rebels including his father and crucified them, lining the roadsides with crosses. His mother had been sold into slavery with the rest of the city’s inhabitants. Judas, only two, was given shelter in Cana until my parents came for him.