The Book of Longings(95)

He pushed himself up from the bench. “When you go to Isis Medica, ask for Diodora. It’s the only name Chaya knows. She was raised as an Egyptian, not a Jew.”

As he turned to leave, I said, “The men in the library who wear the white tunics and climb the ladders . . . who are they?”

“We call them librarians. They keep the books ordered and cataloged and retrieve them for scholars at the university. You will see them running at great speed delivering them. Some of them sell copies to the public. Others assist the scribes in procuring inks and papyri. A fortunate few are sent on expeditions to purchase books in distant lands.”

“Lavi would make an excellent librarian,” I said, looking at my friend to judge his reaction. He straightened. From pride, I thought.

“Does the position pay well?” Lavi asked.

“Well enough,” Apollonios said, suddenly wary and surprised, it seemed, that Lavi spoke to him directly. “But the positions are hard to acquire. Most are passed from father to son.”

“You said you wished to repay me for your part in Haran’s sin,” Yaltha said. “You can do so by obtaining this employment for our friend.”

Flustered, Apollonios opened and closed his mouth several times before saying, “I don’t know—it would be difficult.”

“You have much influence,” Yaltha said. “There must be many people who owe you favors. Securing the post for Lavi won’t make up for selling my daughter, but it would repay your debt to me. It will make the burden of guilt you’ve carried lighter.”

The old man glanced at Lavi. “He would start as a low-paying apprentice and the training is rigorous. He must be able to read Greek. Can he do that?”

“I read it,” Lavi said. This news astonished me. Perhaps he’d learned to read Greek in Tiberias.

“Yes, then, I’ll do what I can,” Apollonios said.

As the old man left, Lavi whispered to me, “Would you teach me to read Greek?”





xiv.


I was happy for Yaltha and for Lavi, as well—one had located a daughter and one had found possible employment—and the memory of being inside the library glowed inside me, but my mind went to Jesus, as it did almost every hour of every day. What are you doing now, Beloved? I could see no resolution to our separation.

Crossing the city on our way back to Haran’s, we came upon an artist painting a portrait of a woman’s face on a piece of limewood. The woman sat before him in a small public courtyard, adorned in her finery. A little crowd of bystanders had gathered to watch. As we joined them, I remembered with a sickening roll in my stomach the hours I’d spent posing for the mosaic in Antipas’s palace.

“She’s posing for a mummy portrait,” Yaltha explained. “When she dies, the image will be placed over her face inside the coffin. Until then, it will hang in her house. It’s meant to preserve the memory of her.”

I’d heard of Egyptians putting odd articles into their coffins—food, jewelry, clothes, weapons, a myriad of things that might be needed in the afterlife—but this was new to me. I watched as the artist painted her face life-size and perfect on the wood.

I sent Lavi to inquire what a mummy portrait costs. “The artist says it’s fifty drachmae,” Lavi reported.

“Go and ask if he will paint mine next.”

Yaltha gave me a surprised, half-amused look. “You wish to have a mummy portrait for your coffin?”

“Not for my coffin. For Jesus.”

Perhaps also for myself.



* * *



? ? ?

THAT NIGHT I PLACED the portrait on the table near my bed, propping it beside my incantation bowl. The artist had painted me as I was, ornament-less, wearing the worn tunic, a plain braid dangling over my shoulder and wisps of hair loose about my face. It was just me, Ana. But there was something about it.

I took the picture in my hands, holding it up to the lamp to study it more closely. The paint gleamed in the light and the face I saw seemed like that of a newfound woman. Her eyes looked out levelly. Her chin was raised in a bold tilt. There was strength in her jaw. The corners of her lips were lifted.

I told myself that when I returned to Nazareth and saw Jesus again, I would make him close his eyes, then place the portrait in his hands. He would look at it with awe, and I would tell him with feigned seriousness, “If there should be another threat of my arrest and I’m sent once more to Egypt, this will ensure you won’t forget my face.” Then I would laugh and he would laugh.





xv.


Standing at the door to the lotus garden, I listened to the evening sky creak and rumble. All day the heat had been like a viscous film coating the air, but now suddenly wind gusted and rain poured down, black needles rattling the date palms and pummeling the surface of the pond, and then dissipating almost as quickly as they came. I stepped out into the darkness, where a bird, a wagtail, sang.

For the past three weeks, I’d spent my mornings in the scriptorium teaching Lavi to read Greek instead of attending to my usual duties. Even Thaddeus had joined in the tutoring, insisting that our student begin by copying the alphabet over and over on the back of old, discarded parchments. I was careful to destroy the evidence of his lessons lest Haran discover it on his return. Pamphile burned so many alphas, betas, gammas, and deltas in the kitchen, I told her there’d never been a more scholarly oven in all of Egypt. By the second week, Lavi had memorized the inflections of the verbs and nouns. By the third he was locating verbs in the sentence. Very soon he would be reading Homer.