The Book of Longings(46)

I winced. “Greet my aunt Yaltha.”

Jesus grinned.

“She’s impertinent,” James said to Jesus, as if she wasn’t standing there.

Rankled, I said, “It’s what makes her so dear to me.”

Jesus, I would discover, was a peacemaker and a provocateur in equal measures, but one could never say which he would be at any given moment. In this moment he became the peacemaker. “You’re welcome here. Both of you. You are our family now.”

“You are indeed,” Mary said.

Judith remained silent, as did Jesus’s brothers. My aunt’s honesty had laid the friction bare.



* * *



? ? ?

    WHEN THE CART WAS UNPACKED, I bid Lavi goodbye. “I will miss you, friend,” I told him.

“Be well,” he said, and his eyes watered, causing mine to do the same. I watched him lead the horse through the gate, listening to the clatter of the empty wagon.

When I turned back, the family had dispersed. Only Yaltha and Jesus stood there. He took my hand and the world righted herself.

We were to marry that same day when the sun set, but without ceremony. There would be no procession. No virgins raising their oil lamps and calling out for the groom. No singing, no feasting. By law, a marriage was the act of sexual union, nothing more and nothing less. We would become husband and wife in the solitude of each other’s arms.

Not allowed to enter the chuppah beforehand, I spent the afternoon in the storeroom, where Yaltha had spread her bed mat. Mary had offered to share her room with Yaltha, but she’d declined, preferring to be on her own amid storage jars, food provisions, wool shares, and tools.

“Do they think we have the spaciousness of a palace?” I said when we were alone, mimicking my soon-to-be sister-in-law.

Yaltha said, “She’s impertinent!” mocking James’s assessment of her.

We fell upon each other laughing. I put my finger to my lips. “Shhhh, we’ll be heard.”

“Am I required to be well behaved and quiet?”

“Never,” I replied.

I began to meander about the little room, touching the tools, running my thumb across a stained dye vat. “Are you worried about entering the chuppah?” Yaltha asked.

I supposed I was—what girl wasn’t nervous her first time?—but I shook my head. “As long as I don’t conceive, I will welcome it.”

“Welcome it then, for you will have no worries there.”

Yaltha had procured blackseed oil for me from a midwife in Sepphoris, a foul liquid more potent than anything my mother had used. I’d been swallowing it for a week. We’d agreed she would conceal it here among her things. Most men knew nothing of the ways in which women avoided pregnancy. When it came to children, they didn’t much consider the agony of birth and the possibility of death; they thought instead of God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply. It seemed to be a command God had devised with men in mind, and it was the only one they were universally good at obeying. I didn’t think Jesus was like other men, but I’d determined for now to keep the blackseed oil to myself.

When it was time, I dressed in a dark blue tunic that my aunt pronounced bluer than the Nile. She smoothed out the wrinkles with her hands and placed the silver headband on my forehead. I draped a white linen shawl over my head.

At exactly sunset, I entered the chuppah, where Jesus waited. Stepping inside the mud-walled room, I was greeted by the smell of clay and cinnamon and a dim miasma pierced with a beam of orange light falling from a high window.

“This will be our abode,” Jesus said, stepping back with a sweep of his arm. He wore his blue-tasseled cloak. His hair was damp from washing.

The room had been arranged with care—whether by Jesus or by the women, I didn’t know. My red rugs had been spread across the dirt floor. Two bed mats lay side by side, sprinkled with ground cinnamon—one freshly woven. My mirror, comb, and a neat stack of my clothes had been placed on a bench, with my chest of cedar set into a corner. My incantation bowl sat on a small oak table beneath the window for all the world to see, so exposed I had an irrational urge to hide it somewhere, but I forced myself to remain still. I said, “If you inspected my bowl, I’m sure you saw the graven image inside it. I drew it myself.”

“Yes, I saw,” he answered.

I watched for traces of condemnation on his face. “It doesn’t offend you?”

“I’m more concerned with what’s in your heart than what’s in your bowl.”

“To look into the bowl is to see into my heart.”

He walked over and peered into it. Could he read Greek? Taking the bowl in his hands, he turned it as he read aloud, “Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart.” Looking up, he held my gaze a moment before continuing. “Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”

He set the bowl back on the table and smiled at me, and I felt the unbearable ache of loving him. I went to him, and there on the thin straw mats in the crumbles of light, I knew my husband and he knew me.





ii.


The morning after I became his wife, I woke to hear him repeating the Shema and then a woman’s voice in the courtyard calling, “Ana, it’s time to milk the goat.”