The Book of Longings(5)
iv.
My mother’s name, Hadar, means splendor, a name she did her best to uphold. She stepped into the room wearing a robe the color of emeralds and her finest carnelian necklace, trailed by Shipra, who was laden with a stack of luxuriant clothes and an array of purses containing jewelry, combs, and eye paint. Balanced on top of her pile was a pair of honey-colored sandals with tiny bells sewn to the straps. Even Shipra, a servant, wore her best coat and a carved bone bracelet.
“We will leave soon for the market,” Mother announced. “And you will accompany us.”
If she hadn’t arrived with such a pressing mission, she might have noticed me glancing at the bowl beneath the bed and wondered at the object of my fascination. But her curiosity wasn’t aroused, and in my relief I didn’t at first question the irrationality of attending the market in such finery.
Shipra removed my robe and replaced it with a white linen tunic heavily embroidered with silver thread. She wrapped an indigo girdle about my hips, slid the musical sandals onto my feet, and admonished me to stand still as she lightened my brown face with chalk and barley flour. Her breath smelled of lentils and leeks, and when I twisted away, she pinched the lobe of my ear. I stamped my foot, unleashing a gust of bell ringing.
“Stand still; we can’t be late,” Mother said, handing Shipra a stick of kohl and watching as she lined my eyes, then rubbed oil into my hands.
I could hold my tongue no longer. “Must we dress so lavishly to attend the market?”
The two women exchanged a look. A patch of red bloomed beneath Mother’s chin and spread across her neck, as it often did when she was being devious. She ignored me.
I told myself there was no reason for unease. Mother’s pageants were not uncommon, though they were typically confined to the banquets she orchestrated for Father’s patrons in the reception hall—extravaganzas of roasted lamb, honeyed figs, olives, hummus, flatbread, wine, glittering oil lamps, musicians, acrobats, a fortune-telling magus. Her exhibitions never included ostentatious walks to the market.
Poor Mother. She seemed always in need of proving something, though I’d never known what, precisely, until Yaltha arrived. During one of our roof talks, my aunt had revealed that my mother’s father had made his living as a poor merchant in Jerusalem selling cloths, and not especially fine ones. Father and Yaltha, however, descended from a noble line of Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria with ties to the Roman authorities. Naturally, arranging a marriage between two families separated by a chasm like this would’ve been impossible unless the bride possessed extraordinary beauty or the groom bore some bodily defect. As it was, Mother’s face was unsurpassed and the thigh bone of Father’s left leg was shorter than his right, causing him to limp ever so slightly.
Realizing that my mother’s displays of grandeur were motivated not by conceit alone, but by an attempt to offset her low bearing, had come as a relief. It made me pity her.
Shipra pinioned my hair with ribbons and fastened a headband of silver coins across my forehead. She draped me in a stifling woolen cloak dyed scarlet, and not from cheap madder root, but from the rich red of female insects. As a last torment, Mother dropped a yoke of lapis beads around my neck.
“Your father will be pleased,” she said.
“Father? He’s coming, too?”
She nodded, pulling a saffron coat about her shoulders and drawing the mantle over her headdress.
When has Father ever walked to the market?
I couldn’t comprehend what was happening, only that I seemed to be at the center of it, and it felt ill-omened. If Judas were here, he would take my part; he always took my part. He insisted to Mother I be exempt from the spindle, loom, and lyre and left to my studies. He asked my questions of the rabbi when I wasn’t allowed to speak at synagogue. I wished for him now with all my heart.
“What of Judas?” I asked. “Has he returned?”
Mother shook her head and looked away from me.
He had always been her favorite, the lone heritor of her adoration. I wanted to believe it was because he accorded her the status that came from having a son or because he’d been troubled and brokenhearted as a child and needed the extra portion. And Judas was, after all, handsome and affable, filled with equal measures of principle and kindness, the rarest of combinations, while I was willful, impulsive, composed of strange hopes and selfish rebellion. I must have been very hard for her to love.
“And Yaltha?” I asked, desperate for an ally.
“Yaltha . . . ” She spit the word. “Yaltha will remain here.”
v.
We moved along the main thoroughfare of Sepphoris like an imperial barge, gliding along the colonnaded street, over the gleaming crushed limestone, forcing people aside—Father leading the way, then Mother, Shipra, and I, flanked by two soldiers, who shouted to passersby to make way. I watched Father’s stocky frame striding ahead, listing a little side to side. He wore a red coat, as I did, and a matching hat that rose from his head like a loaf of bread. His large ears protruded on either side of the hat like little shelves, while underneath, his great bald head, which he considered a reproach from God, was hidden from view.
Earlier, upon seeing me, he’d nodded at Mother in some tacit way and, studying me further, said, “You mustn’t frown so, Ana.”
“Tell me the purpose of our excursion, Father, and I’m sure I’ll appear more agreeable.”