The Book of Longings(60)

I couldn’t be angered by her deceit—it didn’t come from treachery. We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

“You may ask me the question,” she said. “Go ahead.”

I knew which one she meant. I said, “Why did you leave her?”

“I could tell you that I had no choice, and I think that’s mostly true; at least I believed it true at the time. It’s hard now to look back and know for certain. I told you once it was widely believed in Alexandria that I killed my husband with sorcery and poison, and for that I was sent away to the Therapeutae. They didn’t take in children, and I went to them anyway. Who can say now whether I might have found a way to keep my daughter? I did what I did.” Her face shone with pain as if her loss had only just happened.

“What became of her? Where did she go?”

She shook her head. “My brother Haran assured me he would care for her. I believed him. During all those years I was with the Therapeutae, I sent him many messages asking about her, without any response. After eight years, when Haran finally agreed I could leave the Therapeutae if I left Egypt, I begged to take her with me.”

“And he refused? How could he keep her from you?”

“He said he’d given her out for adoption. He would not tell me to whom or where she lived. For days I pleaded with him, until he threatened to revive the old charges against me. In the end I left. I left her behind.”

I pictured the girl, Chaya, with hair like mine. It was impossible to imagine what I might have done had I been in my aunt’s place.

“I made my peace with what happened,” she said. “I reasoned that Chaya was wanted and cared for. She had a family. Perhaps she didn’t even remember me. She was only two when I last saw her.”

She stood abruptly, stepping around the arrangement of broken pottery. She rubbed her fingers as if trying to unpeel them.

“You don’t look at peace,” I told her.

“You’re right, the peace has left me. Since Susanna died, Chaya has come every night in my dreams. She stands on a summit and begs me to come to her. Her voice is like the song of a flute. When I wake, it goes on singing in me.”

I rose and walked past her toward the window, seized by a sudden foreboding that my aunt would leave and return to Alexandria in search of her daughter. I told myself it wasn’t a premonition like the others I’d had, but fear. Only fear. Anyway, by what means could Yaltha possibly leave Nazareth? She no longer had access to my father’s wealth and power, and even if she did, how could a woman travel alone? How could she set about locating a daughter who’d been lost for nineteen years? No matter how haunting the flute’s call, she could not leave.

She tossed back her shoulders as if casting off a heavy cloak and looked down at the potsherds. “That’s enough of my story. Tell me that you will make use of these shards.”

I knelt and picked up one of the larger pieces, hoping to mask my ambivalence. It had been more than seven years since I’d held a reed pen. Seven years since Jesus had wakened and assured me I would write again one day. Without realizing it, I’d given up on one day. I’d even given up on faraway day. I no longer opened the chest of cedar and read my scrolls. The last vial of ink had turned into a thick gum years ago. My incantation bowl was buried at the bottom of my chest.

“I’ve watched you over the years since we arrived here,” Yaltha said. “I see you’re happy with your husband—but in every other way you seem lost to yourself.”

“I have no ink,” I told her.

“Then we shall make some,” she said.





xvi.


When Jesus returned, he found me sitting on the floor of our room, writing on a piece of potsherd. My breasts were dry now, but the ink Yaltha and I had made from red ocher and oven soot flowed each day from my reed pen. I looked up to see him standing in the doorway still clasping his staff. He was covered in dust from the road. I could smell the faint stench of fish on him from across the room.

Ignoring the purity laws, he strode into the room and put his arms about me, burying his face at my shoulder. I felt his body quiver, then a small heaving in his chest. Smoothing my hand across the back of his head, I whispered, “She was beautiful. I named her Susanna.”

When he lifted his face, his eyes were filled with tears. “I should’ve been with you,” he said.

“You are here now.”

“I would’ve arrived sooner, but I was out on the boat when Simon arrived in Capernaum. He waited two days for me to come ashore with our catch.”

“I knew you would come as soon as you could. I had to beg your brothers to send for you. They seem to think your earnings are more important than your mourning.”

I saw his jaw tighten and guessed they’d had words over it.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” I told him. “I’m still considered unclean.”

He pulled me closer. “I’ll go to the mikvah later, and I’ll sleep on the roof, but right now I won’t be denied your nearness.”

I filled a bowl with water and led him to the bench, where I removed his sandals and washed his feet. He leaned his head against the wall. “Oh, Ana.”

I rubbed his hair with a damp towel and brought him a clean robe. As he donned it, his eyes drifted to the potsherds and the inkpot on the floor. One day I hoped to continue writing the lost stories, but the only words that I had now were for Susanna, bits and pieces of grief that fit onto the small jagged shards.