The Book of Longings(58)

When I was born, my mother had sat on a resplendent chair with an opening in the seat, but I would squat over a crude hole dug in the dirt floor of a mud-walled room. Yaltha had scooped it out the day Jesus left, as if she knew it would be needed early. As I sat before it now on a low stool, pain coiling about my torso, I wished for my mother to be here. I’d seen or heard nothing of her since my marriage and I’d hardly cared, but now . . .

Mary and Salome entered bearing vessels of water, wine, and oil, while Yaltha laid out the contents of the midwife pouch on a piece of flax. Salt, swaddling strips, a snipping knife, a sea sponge, a bowl for the afterbirth, herbs to stop the bleeding, a biting stick, and finally a pillow covered with undyed gray wool on which to lay the newborn.

Mary made an altar, laying an old plank of oak within my view. She stacked three stones on it, one on top of the other. No one acknowledged it—it was simply done whenever women labored to bring forth a life. An offering to Mother God. I watched as she drizzled a libation of Delilah’s goat milk over the stones.

As the hours passed, the early summer heat rose and the moon in my belly waxed and waned. The women hovered—Mary, a ballast at my back; Salome, the angel at my side; and Yaltha, the sentinel between my legs. It came to me then that my mother wouldn’t want to be here, and even if she did, she would never set foot in such a lowly abode. Yaltha, Mary, Salome—here were my mothers.

No one spoke of the cloud that hung everywhere in the room, the knowledge that the baby was arriving too soon. I heard them droning prayers but the words were far away. There were violent seizures of pain and the short, winded respites between them, and that was all there was.

Nearing the ninth hour, squatting over the hole, I pushed the baby from my body. She slipped soundlessly into my aunt’s hands. I watched Yaltha turn her upside down and gently thump her back. She repeated the action once, twice, three times, four times. The baby didn’t move or cry or draw a breath. My aunt slid her finger into the tiny mouth to clear it of mucus. She blew air into her face. She held her by the feet and thumped her harder, harder.

Finally, she laid the child on the pillow. She was tiny as a kitten. Her lips lapis blue. Her stillness terrible.

A sob broke from Salome’s lips.

Yaltha said, “The child doesn’t live, Ana.”

As my aunt tied and severed the birth cord, Mary wept.

“Life will be life and death will be death,” I whispered, and with those words, grief filled the empty place in me where the baby had lain. I would carry it there like a secret all the days of my life.

“Do you wish to bestow a name on her?” Yaltha asked.

I looked at my daughter lying wilted on the pillow. “Susanna,” I said. The name meant lily.



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LATE IN THE AFTERNOON on the same day I gave birth, I wrapped my daughter in the dark blue dress I’d worn when I married, for it was the best cloth I had, and walked with Yaltha and Jesus’s family to the cave where his father was buried. I insisted on carrying the baby in my arms, though the custom was for an infant to be placed in a basket or upon a small bier. I was weak from giving birth only hours before, and Mary walked with her hand beneath my elbow as if I might crumple. She, Salome, Judith, and Berenice wept and wailed. I made no sound.

At the cave, as we repeated the Kaddish, Judith and James’s six-year-old daughter, Sarah, tugged on my tunic. “May I hold her?” she asked.

I didn’t want to relinquish my baby, but I knelt beside her and placed Susanna in her arms. Judith immediately plucked the blue bundle from her daughter and returned it to me. “I will have to take Sarah to the mikvah now to cleanse her,” she whispered. She didn’t say it unkindly, but it stung. I smiled at Sarah and felt her little arms wind around my waist.

As they intoned the Shema, I thought of Jesus. When he returned, I would tell him how our daughter looked lying on the pillow, the smear of dark hair, the trellis of blue on her eyelids, her nails like pearl shavings. I would tell him that as we walked to the cave through the barley harvest, the workers ceased their labor and stood silent as we passed. I would describe how I laid her in a cleft inside the cave and when I bent to kiss her, she smelled of myrrh and coriander leaves. I would say, I loved her the way you love God, with all my heart and soul and might.

As James and Simon pushed the stone slab across the cave opening to seal it, I cried out for the first time.

Salome rushed to my side. “Oh, sister, you will have another child.”



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? ? ?

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I remained in my room, separated from the others. Childbirth rendered a woman ceremonially unclean for forty days if she’d delivered a male child and twice as long if the baby was female. My confinement would last until the month of Elul, when the blister of summer was well formed. We would, according to the custom, then go to Jerusalem to offer a sacrifice and be pronounced clean by a priest, after which I would reenter the cycle of endless chores.

I was grateful for my solitude. It gave me time to mourn. I slept with grief and woke to it. It was always there, a black strap around my heart. I didn’t ask God why my daughter had died. I knew he couldn’t help it. Life was life, death was death. It was the fault of no one. I asked only for someone to find my husband and bring him home.

Days passed and no one sent for him. Salome told me James and Simon argued against it. The day after the burial, the publicans had come to Nazareth and taken a half portion of our wheat, barley, oil, olives, and wine, along with two of the chickens, and Jesus’s brothers were deeply troubled over the loss. According to Salome, they had scoured the village for carpentry work, but in the wake of the tax collectors no one had the resources to pay for a repaired ceiling beam or new door lintel.