The Book of Longings(61)

“You’re writing,” Jesus said. “I’m glad.”

“Then you, Yaltha, and I are alone in this particular gladness.”

I tried to keep my resentment contained but found it flaring up uncontrollably. “It’s as if your family believes God has decided to destroy the world again, not by flood this time, but by Ana writing. Your mother and Salome have said nothing, but I think even they disapprove. According to Judith and Berenice, the only women who write are sinners and necromancers. I ask you, how do they know this? And James . . . he means to speak to you about me, I’m sure.”

“He has done so already. He met me at the gate.”

“And what did he say?”

“That you broke a water pot in order to write on the shards and then stripped the oven of its kindling to make ink. I believe he fears you’ll smash all the pots and deprive us of cooked food.” He smiled.

“Your brother stood right there in the doorway and said I should give up my perverse craving to write and give myself to prayer and grief for my daughter. Does he think my writing is not a prayer? Does he think because I hold a pen I don’t grieve?”

I took a breath and continued, calmer. “I’m afraid I spoke sharply to James. I told him, ‘If by craving you mean I have a longing, a need, then yes, you’re right, but don’t call it perverse. I dare to call it godly.’ He left me then.”

“Yes, he mentioned this, too.”

“I’m confined here for sixty-eight more days. Salome brought me flax to spin and threads to sort and Mary gave me herbs to grind—but mostly I have a reprieve from daily tasks. At last there’s time for me to write. Don’t take it from me.”

“I won’t take it from you, Ana. Whether you’ll be able to write in the same manner after your confinement—I don’t know, but for now write all you wish.”

He looked so weary all of a sudden. Because of me, he’d returned to find a small war had broken out. I laid my cheek against his and felt his breath skim my ear. I said, “I’m sorry. I tried for so long to belong, to be as they needed me to be. Now I wish to be myself.”

“I’m sorry, Little Thunder. I, too, have kept you from being yourself.”

“No—” He placed his finger at my lips, and I let my protest fall silent.

He picked up the shard on which I’d been writing. There in Greek, in tiny brokenhearted letters: I loved her with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my might.

“You write of our daughter,” he said, and his voice broke.





xvii.


After Jesus observed his seven days of mourning, he found work in Magdala hewing stone for an elaborate synagogue. The city wasn’t as far away as Capernaum, only a day’s walk, and every week he came home for Sabbath with tales of a resplendent building that would hold two hundred people. He told me of a small stone altar on which he’d carved a chariot of fire and a seven-branched menorah.

“Those are the same images on the altar in the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem,” I said, a little aghast.

“Yes,” he said. “So they are.” He didn’t have to elaborate—I knew what he was doing, and it struck me as more radical than anything he’d done before. He was declaring in the most prominent and irrevocable way that God could not be confined any longer to the Temple alone, that his Holy of Holies, his presence had broken out and lodged everywhere.

When I look back on it, I see that act as a kind of turning point, a heralding of what was to come. It was around this time he became more outspoken, openly critical of the Romans and Temple priests. Neighbors began to show up at our house to complain to Mary and James that Jesus had been at the well or the olive press or the synagogue deriding the false piety of the Nazareth elders.

One day a rich Pharisee named Menachem came while Jesus was away. Mary and I met him at the gate and listened as he fulminated. “Your son goes about condemning rich men, saying they build their wealth off the backs of the poor. It’s slanderous! You must appeal to him to cease or there will be little work for your family in Nazareth.”

“We would rather be hungry than silent,” I told him.

When he’d gone, Mary turned to me. “Would we?”

Every week, Jesus came home from Magdala telling me about the blind and sick he saw on the road with no one to help them, stories of widows turned out of their homes, of families so heavily taxed they were forced to sell their lands and beg in the streets. “Why does God not act to bring his kingdom?” he would say.

A fire had been lit in him and I blessed it, but I questioned, too, where the spark had come from. Had Susanna’s death caused him to step from the periphery? Had it stunned him with the brevity of life and the need to seize what we had of it? Or was it all just the fullness of time, the coming of something that was coming anyway? Sometimes when I looked at him I saw an eagle on its branch and the world beckoning. I feared what would happen. I had no branch of my own.

Daily, I penned words behind the walls of my room on potsherds no one would ever read.

I stacked the used pieces of clay into wobbly towers along the walls of the room. Little pillars of grief. They didn’t take away my sorrow, but they gave me a way to make what meaning I could from it. To write again felt like a return to myself.

On the day I inscribed the last of the potsherds, Yaltha was sitting with me, rattling her sistrum. The writing would end now; even my aunt understood this. She’d endured a chastisement from Mary for shattering the pot and couldn’t risk breaking another. She watched me set down my pen and cover the inkpot. She did not cease playing, the percussion of her sistrum darting like a dragonfly about the room.