The Book of Longings(9)
I wanted to scream at her, to hurl words like stones: Where do you think I learned such deceit? From you, Mother, who hides chasteberries and wild rue in the storage room.
I scrutinized the man they’d chosen for me. His beard more gray than black. Curved ruts beneath his eyes. A weariness about his countenance, a kind of bitterness. They meant to give me to him. God slay me. I would be expected to obey his entreaties, oversee his household, suffer his stubby body upon mine, and bear his children, all the while stripped of my pens and scrolls. The thought sent a spasm of rage through me so fierce I clutched my waist to keep from clawing at her.
“He is old!” I finally managed to say, offering the most feeble recrimination of all.
“He’s a widower, yes, with two daughters. He—”
“He wants a son,” I said, finishing her sentence.
Standing in the middle of the market, I paid no heed to the people who stepped around us, to Father’s soldier waving them along, to the utter spectacle we were. “You could’ve told me what awaited me here!” I cried.
“And did you not betray me? An eye for an eye—that would be reason enough to have kept this meeting from you.” She smoothed the front of her coat and glanced nervously toward Father. “We didn’t tell you because we had no wish to endure your fit of protest. It’s bad enough that you raise a dispute now in public.”
She sweetened her tongue, eager to bring an end to my revolt. “Gather yourself. Nathaniel is waiting. Do your duty; much is at stake.”
I glimpsed the sour-looking little man observing us from a distance and jutted out my chin in the defiant way I’d seen Yaltha do when Father forbade her some small freedom. “I will not be inspected for blemishes like a Passover lamb.”
Mother sighed. “One cannot expect a man to enter something as binding as a betrothal without judging his bride worthy. This is how it’s done.”
“And what about me? Shouldn’t I be allowed to judge him worthy?”
“Oh, Ana,” she said. She gazed at me with the tired old sorrow she felt from enduring such a fractious child. “Few girls find happiness in the beginning, but this is a marriage of honor. You will want for nothing.”
I will want for everything.
She gestured for Shipra, who appeared beside us as if she might be called upon to drag me to my fate. The market closed in around me, the feeling of having nowhere to go, no escape. I was not like Judas, who could just leave. I was Ana—the entire world was a cage.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please,” I said. “Do not ask this of me.”
She nudged me forward. The howling in my head returned, but softer, like someone moaning.
I walked toward my father, my feet the carapaces of two turtles, my sandals tolling.
I was a head taller than Nathaniel ben Hananiah, and I could see he was repulsed by the need to look up at me. I rose on my toes even higher.
“Ask her to speak her name so I may hear her voice,” he said to Father, not addressing me.
I did not wait for Father. “Ana, daughter of Matthias.” I half shouted it as if he were old and deaf. Father would be livid, but I would give the man no cause to think me modest or easy to tame.
He glowered at me, and I felt a smidgen of hope that he would find a reason to reject me.
I thought of the prayer inside my bowl, of the girl beneath the cloud. Yaltha’s words: Take care what you ask, for you shall surely receive it.
God, please. Do not desert me.
The moments sagged beneath a thick, implacable silence. Finally, Nathaniel ben Hananiah looked at my father and nodded his consent.
I stared into the dim, hazed light of the market, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, listening to them speak of the betrothal contract. They debated the months until the marriage ceremony, my father arguing for six, Nathaniel for three. Not until I turned away did grief close over me, a dark forsakenness.
My mother, her triumph secured, turned her attention back to the cloth in the silk stall. I walked toward her, fighting to hold myself erect, but midway there the floor tilted and the world slid sideways. Dizzied, I slowed, my red cloak cascading around me, the hem snatching at the bells on my sandals, my foot torquing. I fell onto my knees.
I tried to stand but slumped back, surprised by a sharp pain in my ankle. “She has taken ill,” someone shouted, and people scattered as if to flee a leper. I remember their shoes like hooves, the little dust storm on the floor. I was the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas—no one would dare touch me.
When I looked up, I saw the young man from the yarn stall coming toward me. A tuft of red thread dangled from the sleeve of his robe. It drifted to the floor as he bent in front of me. It occurred to me he’d witnessed everything that had transpired—the argument with my mother, the transaction for my betrothal, my suffering and humiliation. He had seen.
He reached out his hand, a laborer’s hand. Thick knuckles, calluses, his palm a terrain of hardships. I paused before taking it, not from aversion, but fascination that he’d offered it. I leaned against him the slightest bit, testing the weight on my foot. When I turned my face to his, I found my eyes almost level with his own. His beard was so close I could, if I were bolder, nod my head and feel it graze my skin, and it surprised me that I wanted to. My heart bounded up, along with an odd smelting in my thighs, as if my legs might give way once again.