The Book of Longings(64)

In the hidden forest in my chest, the trees slowly lost their leaves.





xx.


On the one-year anniversary of Susanna’s death, Jesus and I walked to the cave where she was buried and collected her bones into a small limestone ossuary, which he had carved himself. I watched as he placed the stone box on the cave ledge, then left his hand resting upon it for several moments.

The grief in me could be unbearable at times, and I felt it now . . . pain so cutting, I wondered if I could go on standing. I reached for Jesus in the gray light and saw his lips moving in silence. If I bore my grief by writing words, Jesus bore his by praying them. How often had he said to me, “God is like a mother hen, Ana. She will gather us beneath her wing”? But I never felt gathered into that place where he seemed to dwell so effortlessly.

Coming out of the cave into the brightness, I drank in the summer air, green and tart. We were walking down into the valley back toward Nazareth, when Jesus stopped on a plateau where the lilies grew wild.

“Let’s rest awhile,” he said, and we sat among the grasses and the thick, sweet scent. I could feel Susanna everywhere, and perhaps he did as well, because he turned to me and said, “Do you ever picture how she would be if she’d lived?”

The question pierced me, but I seized it, for I ached to talk about her. “She would have your eyes,” I said. “And your very long nose.”

“Is my nose that long?” he asked, smiling.

“Yes, very. And she would have your boisterous laugh. She would be kindhearted like you. But she wouldn’t be nearly so devout. She would take her religion from me.”

When I paused, he said, “I imagine her with your hair. And she would be spirited, just as you are. I would call her Littlest Thunder.”

This brought me a deep and sudden consolation, as if I’d been gathered, if only for a moment, into that most inscrutable place beneath Sophia’s wing.





xxi.


Standing at the village well, I had the peculiar feeling of being watched. During my first years in Nazareth the feeling came often; indeed, every time I left the compound. Look! There’s the rich girl from Sepphoris, now nothing more than a peasant. Eventually, though, I became too familiar for them to notice and the glowering stopped, but once again the hairs on my arms were lifting to attention, that sense of eyes watching me.

It was the first week of Tishri, just past the late-summer fig harvest. I wiped my brow and set the water pot on the stone wall built around the wellspring and looked about. The well was crowded—women milled about with jugs on their shoulders, children clinging to their robes. Journeymen were lined up to fill waterskins. A clump of boys tugged on an obstinate camel. No one seemed interested in me. But I’d come to trust the odd ways I knew things—the images, the dreams, the nudges in my body. Alert, I waited my turn to draw water.

It was when I looped the rope about the handle of my pot and lowered it into the well that I heard footsteps behind me. “Shelama, little sister,” a voice said.

My spirit leapt. “Judas!” He caught the rope as my hands let go of it in surprise. “So it’s you who has been watching me.”

“Yes, all the way from your house.” I reached to embrace him, but he stepped back. “Not here. We shouldn’t bring notice to ourselves.”

His face had turned thin, leather brown, tough as a goat hide. A white scar in the shape of a scorpion tail hooked under his right eye. He looked as if the world had bitten into him and, finding him too gristly, spit him back. As he pulled up my pot from the well, I glimpsed the dagger tucked in his girdle, the way he cut his eyes left and right and over his shoulder.

“Come with me,” he said, and strode off with the pot.

I pulled up the hood on my cloak and hurried behind him. “Where are we going?”

He turned toward the most crowded section of Nazareth, where the houses were pressed together amid a maze of narrow alleys, and stepped into a passageway between two courtyards, empty except for three men. There, amid the fragrance of donkeys, piss, and fermenting figs, he lifted me up and spun me around. “You look well.”

I eyed the men.

“They are with me,” he said.

“Your Zealot friends?”

He nodded. “There are forty of us living in the hills. We do our part to rid Israel of Roman pigs and sympathizers.” He grinned and gave a little bow.

“That sounds . . .” I hesitated.

“Dangerous?”

“I was going to say impractical.”

He laughed. “I see you still speak your mind.”

“I’m sure you and your Zealots are an enormous thorn in Rome’s side. But it’s a thorn, Judas. It’s no match for their might.”

“You’d be surprised how much they fear us. We’re good at inciting revolt, and there’s nothing Rome dreads more than an uprising. Best of all, it’s the surest way to get rid of Herod Antipas. If he cannot keep the peace, Rome will replace him.” He paused, fidgety, looking back toward the alley entrance. “There’s a century of eighty soldiers assigned to capture us, and yet in all these years not one of us has been caught. Some have been killed, but never caught.”

“So, my brother is infamous.” I gave him a good-natured shove. “Of course, here in Nazareth I’ve heard nothing of you.”