The Book of Longings(75)

Overhead, the sun was a tiny larva wriggling from the clouds. We watched it emerge, neither of us speaking. I turned to my aunt. “Lavi and I will go at once to Sepphoris and seek this emissary, Apion. I’ll announce myself as Haran’s niece and strike a bargain for your passage.”

“And if Jesus returns while you’re gone?”

“Tell him that he may wait. I have waited plenty for him.”

She cackled.





xxviii.


James and Simon, thinking it was their duty to impose husbandly restrictions on me in their brother’s absence, forbade me to leave Nazareth and travel to Sepphoris. How mistaken they were. I packed my travel pouch and tied on my red scarf.

While Lavi waited for me at the gate, I kissed Mary and Salome, trying to ignore their petrified looks. “I will be fine; Lavi will be with me.” Then, smiling at Salome, I added, “You yourself used to cross the valley with Jesus to sell your yarns in Sepphoris.”

“James will be unhappy,” she said, and I realized it was not my safety they were concerned about, but my disobedience.

I left without their blessing. But as I walked away, the wind lifted its arms and the olive tree sent a shimmer of leaves onto my head.



* * *



? ? ?

WHEN LAVI POUNDED at the door of my old house in Sepphoris, no one answered. Moments later he shinnied over the back wall and unlatched the gate. Stepping into the courtyard, I came to a standstill. Weeds, hip high, grew between the stones. The ladder to the roof lay on the ground, the rungs like a row of broken teeth. I smelled a stew of fetidness coming from the stairs that led down to the mikvah and knew the conduit had clogged. Bird excrement and flaking mortar. The house had sat empty for little more than six months and already ruin had set in.

Lavi motioned me inside the vaulted storeroom, where we found the door to the servant passage unlocked. Parting the cobwebs, we climbed the steps into the reception hall. The room was the same—the pillowed couches where we’d eaten, the four tripod tables with spiral legs.

We wandered up the stairway onto the loggia, past the sleeping quarters. Peering into my room, I thought of the girl who’d studied and read and begged for tutors, who’d made inks and word altars and dreamed of her face in a tiny sun. In my youth, I’d heard old Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai say that each soul possessed a garden with a serpent that whispered temptations. That girl I remembered would always be the serpent in my garden bidding me to eat forbidden things.

“Come,” Lavi said urgently from the doorway.

I followed him to Judas’s room, where he pointed to a half-full waterskin, mussed bedcovers, partially burned candles, and a fine linen coat tossed on a bench. On a table near the bed, two scrolls had been opened and marked in place with reading spools.

Haran’s emissary had arrived and made himself welcome in our house. No, not our house, I reminded myself. It and everything in it belonged to Haran now.

I walked to the table and glanced over the unfurled scrolls. One contained a list of names—officials and landowners—and next to them, recorded sums of money. On the other, a recording of the house’s contents, room by room.

“He could return at any moment. We should leave and return later when he’s here,” Lavi said. Careful, prudent Lavi.

He was right, yet as we swept past my parents’ room, I stopped. An idea suddenly sat in my head, sunning itself. The flick of a scaly tail. I said, “Wait on the balcony and alert me if you hear anyone.”

A protest formed on Lavi’s face, but he did as I asked.

I stepped into my parents’ room, where the sight of Mother’s bed halted me with a sharp intake of loss. Her oak chest was coated with a glaze of dust. I creaked it open and my mind swept back to my girlhood—Tabitha and I pillaging through the contents, preparing for our dance.

The wooden jewel box was midway down, beneath neatly folded tunics and coats. Its heft in my hands reassured me it was still full. I opened it. Four gold bracelets, two ivory, six silver. Eight necklaces—amber, amethyst, lapis, carnelian, emerald, and gold leaf. Seven pairs of pearl earrings. A dozen jeweled and silver headbands. Gold rings. So much. Too much.

I would have Lavi trade the jewelry in the market for coins.

Thou shalt not steal. Guilt made me pause. Would I now become a thief? I strode across the room and back, shamed to think what Jesus would say. The Torah also said love your neighbor, I reasoned, and wasn’t I taking the jewelry out of love for Yaltha? I doubted I could get her to Alexandria without a substantial bribe. Besides, I’d stolen the ivory sheet from Antipas—I was already a thief.

I said, “This is your parting gift to me, Mother.”

On the balcony, I hurried past Lavi toward the stairs. “Let’s take our leave.”

As we reached the floor below, we heard someone at the door stomping mud from his sandals. We broke for the passageway, but we’d taken only a few strides when a man entered. He reached for the knife at his waist. “Who are you?”

Lavi stepped in front of me. It was as if I had a sparrow caged inside my ribs, flailing about. I edged around Lavi, hoping the man didn’t notice my apprehension. “I’m Ana, niece to Haran of Alexandria and the daughter of Matthias, who was head counselor to Herod Antipas before his death. And this is my servant, Lavi. This was my home before I married. May I ask, sir, who are you?”