The Book of Longings(55)

Approaching the tables where the merchants and money changers sat, Jesus paused a moment to stare. “There is the den of thieves,” he said to me.

We pushed our way through the Gate Beautiful into the Court of Women, then wound through the masses to the circular steps where my mother had once restrained me from going any farther. Only men . . . only men.

“Wait for me here,” Jesus said. I watched him climb the steps and meld into the crush of men beyond the gate. The lamb was a white blur bouncing above the fray.

Jesus returned with the animal hanging lifeless about his shoulders, dribbles of blood on his tunic. I tried not to look at the animal’s eyes, two round black stones.

Passing back by the money changers’ tables, we saw an old woman weeping. She wore a widow’s robe and blew her nose on the folds of it. “I have only two sesterce,” she cried, and hearing this, Jesus stopped abruptly and turned around.

“Three are required!” the money changer snapped. “Two to purchase the lamb, one to change your money into Temple coins.”

“But I have only two,” she said, holding the coins out to him. “Please. How am I to observe Passover?”

The money changer pushed her hand away. “Go, leave me!”

Jesus’s jaw tightened, his face dark red, the color of ocher. I thought for a moment he would seize the man and give him a shake, or perhaps give the widow our own lamb, but surely he wouldn’t deprive us of Passover. “Do you have the sesterce from the Samaritan?” he asked.

I pulled it from my pouch and watched as he strode over and slammed the coin onto the table before the money changer. The din was too frenetic for me to hear what Jesus was saying, but I could tell he was expounding on the shortcomings of the Temple, gesturing indignantly, the slaughtered lamb on his back, jostling about.

Can God not live everywhere? Let us set him free. That’s when I knew I would love you, Ana.

Those words welled up in me, and I remembered the story he’d told me just before we found Tabitha on the road, the one in which he’d freed the doves from their cages. I didn’t pause to think. I walked to the crowded paddock that held the lambs, undid the latch, and yanked open the gate. Out they poured, a white flood.

Frantic merchants rushed to herd them back into the pen. A man pointed at me. “There. She’s the one who opened the gate. Stop her!”

“You rob poor widows,” I shouted back and fled into the small pandemonium—lambs and people merging like two rivers, bleating and shouting.

“Stop her!”

“We must go,” I said, finding Jesus at the money changer’s table. “Now!”

Scooping up a passing lamb, he placed it into the widow’s arms. We hurried from the court, down the staircase, and into the street.

“Was it you who set them loose?” he asked.

“It was.”

“What possessed you?”

“You did,” I said.





xii.


The day we departed Bethany, I found Tabitha in her room strumming her lyre. Already she could make it sing. I paused unnoticed in the doorway as she sang a new song she seemed in the midst of composing. The best I could tell, it was about a lost pearl. When she looked up and saw me, her eyes were glittering.

She would remain and I would go. I hated to part, but I knew she would be better off here with Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. They’d made her into a little sister.

“She’ll be safer here, too,” Jesus had pointed out. “In Nazareth she would be too close to Japha.” I hadn’t considered this. If she came to Nazareth, her relatives would surely hear of her presence and come for her. They would send her back to the man in Jericho or sell her all over again.

“Before I go, I want to tell you something,” I said to her.

She set down the lyre.

“Years ago, after that day I came to your house, I wrote down your story on papyrus. I wrote about your ferocious spirit, how you stood in the street and cried out what happened to you and were silenced for it. I think every pain in this world wants to be witnessed, Tabitha. That’s why you shouted about your rape on the street and it’s why I wrote it down.”

She stared at me unblinking, then pulled me to her and clung there.



* * *



? ? ?

WHEN WE CAME through the compound gate in Nazareth, Yaltha, Mary, Judith, James, and Simon hurried to greet us. Even Judith kissed my cheek. Mary linked her arm through her son’s and led us to the large stone basin across the courtyard. It was the custom in our household that those who remained behind would wash the feet of those who’d made the Passover pilgrimage. Mary motioned for Judith to remove my sandals, but my sister-in-law, misunderstanding, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not, bent and untied Jesus’s sandal strap instead. Mary shrugged, then did me the honor of bathing my feet herself, water splashing cold on my toes, her thumbs circling my ankles.

“How was your time in the Temple?” James asked.

“A most remarkable thing occurred,” Jesus said. “There was a stampede of lambs in the Court of Gentiles. Somehow they escaped their pen.” He grinned at me.

“It was . . .” I searched for the right word.

“Unforgettable,” he said. Beneath the water, his foot nudged mine.