According to Mary Magdalene (5 page)

Leonidas slept uncomfortably and spasmodically, but he was used to that, so it did not trouble him. When they woke toward dawn, he winked at her and said, “Now we'll have something to eat, just you and me. Then we'll go out into the garden and talk about Miriam.”

She was frightened and at the same time pleased, and she whispered that they must also talk about God.

They crept down to the kitchen, where Leonidas took out bread and yogurt, cheese and salted mutton. Mary watched with wonder as this handsome officer arranged the food.

After they had eaten, they went down to the shore where the great red sun was just appearing behind the hills in the east, its slanting rays coloring the lake and the morning mist slowly rising from the water up toward the town and the mountains.

“Why did she kill herself?”

The brutal question worked just as he had hoped. The words came pouring out of Mary. “Because she had committed so many sins that God would never forgive her, for she had lived among heathens who worshipped terrible idols and because I came to love Demeter.”

“Demeter?”

Mary told him how she had read the story and how captivated she had been, and how frightened she had been when Miriam had said that the girl who made the spring flowers open and close on the slopes was a heathen goddess, like Isis or Venus, who wallowed in sin among the stars in the heavens.

Leonidas was surprised. “But Demeter is an image or a saga of the miracle of spring.”

Mary shook her head without understanding. “Why do you believe it's a woman who makes the earth green? When it's God who does that?”

“It's women who carry life on. If the women weren't fertile and didn't bear children, we would disappear from the face of the earth.”

“Do you believe in many gods?”

“I don't think we should have definite perceptions of what is invisible and immeasurable. But the unknown power in nature and within ourselves may need many images, many expressions. The story of Demeter describes what is incomprehensible in the return of spring and the renewal of life.”

Mary thought hard about what Erigones had said which she had not understood. “A symbol?”

“Yes.”

“But it says in the scriptures…”

“Mary, have you read the scriptures?”

The girl closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they were hard with anger. “You know nothing about the laws of the Jews,” she said, thinking about the school in Magdala, where her brothers had been allowed to go to once they were five, while she had no right even to ask them what they had learned.

“I don't know whether I've read the laws,” Leonidas said. “But I've read your Holy Writ.”

“You've read…?”

She was so surprised, she was at a loss for words. She kept shaking her head, but after a while asked him a question. “You know Hebrew?”

“There's a translation into Greek.”

Leonidas told her about Septuagint, the book seventy wise men had worked on for centuries. But Mary was not interested in the labors of old Jews in distant Alexandria. She wanted to know what Leonidas thought of the Holy Writ.

“It's full of beauty and ancient wisdom,” he said. “What I liked best was the idea that you serve God by being merciful to your fellow men.”

The child drew a deep sigh of relief.

“Just as in the ancient Greek scripts, there are lots of heroic sagas and amazing adventures. I remember a man who blew a horn so that the walls of Jericho fell. Another hero whose strength was in his hair and who lost it all when a treacherous woman cut it off…Do you know these tales?”

Mary nodded. She wanted to say that they were not tales, but what happened when God's strength came into the possession of man. But she said nothing.

Finally, he said: “I don't think you can put the whole of your destiny into the hands of God. I think everyone bears the responsibility for his or her own decisions. Miriam decided to die. It's difficult to understand, and very sad.”

Mary wept.

Life returned to normal in the house of pleasure. With the help of wine, the girls forgot the terrible thing that had happened. Mary had a pain in her stomach and had to stay in bed. That meant she had time to think, to make comparisons between then and now, between people in the village—the orthodox, and people here—the unclean.

But as she did so, things only grew worse.

M
ary Magdalene let the scroll lie. She could not find the energy that evening to go through what she had written. Her back was aching and her fingers stiff from writing.

She was cold.

Slowly, she got up and went to close the shutters.

Dusk was creeping into the treetops and it would soon be dark. Leonidas had not yet come home. Perhaps this was one of the nights he would spend with his boy. What had he said that morning?

She could not remember.

She lit the lamps in the kitchen and made a meal for two. Then she ate hers, washed, and crawled into her warm bed. She stretched, the warmth and relaxation slowly lessening the pain in her back.

Early next morning, she read through what she had written. One question worried her. How old had she been when Leonidas disappeared? Ten? Twelve? She shook her head. She could not remember. Children are so free in their relations to time, she thought.

Toward afternoon, she heard Leonidas coming home, his firm steps up the garden path, the door opening, and his call: “Mary, Mary, I'm here.”

She went to meet him and at once saw that he was in low spirits. Disappointed? Burdened with guilt? She smiled a little wider than usual and that helped. His bearing softened and he said, “I'm rather tired.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “I've been writing about you. Perhaps you'd like to read it while I get the meal?”

“Yes, indeed.”

He went into the library and she gave him the long scroll before returning to the kitchen. While she boiled beans and cooked the fish with freshly picked buds from the caper bushes, she thought about Leonidas' lover, a handsome but heartless boy. He was not good for Leonidas, but there was nothing she could do about that.

Leonidas came back into the kitchen as Mary was laying the table.

“You exaggerate,” he said. “It just isn't possible for that simple, scarcely thirty-year-old warrior to have had so much wisdom.”

Mary flushed.

“Writing has taught me to respect a child's memories,” she said with some heat. “Every word of it is probably not true, but it's a child's interpretation of everything that happened and was said.”

“I give in,” said Leonidas, holding up his hand and laughing.

Mary had to smile.

“How old was I when you had to leave?”

His face darkened.

“That was the same year the tribune Titus finally broke our agreement,” he said. “Then you'd been with Euphrosyne for five years.”

“Oh, Leonidas, I understood so little.”

“Perhaps we should try to remember together. I'll stay at home tomorrow and tell you, while you make notes.”

S
omething very strange happened to me that night I found you in the mountains. I've never understood it and sometimes I'm prepared to believe, as religious people do, that God intervened in my life.”

Why should he? It had been a dreadful evening.

He fell silent, then smiled.

“I'm sure you think I'm exaggerating,” he said. “But there was something divine about that child, a light…. So I wasn't at all surprised when I found you again many years later with that young man of God in Galilee.”

He stopped abruptly. “Why are you so occupied with your own childhood?” he asked.

“Because I must know who I am. I've had the peculiar idea that if you're to testify to the truth, then you must be true yourself.”

“I'm sure you're right, but you set your sights very high. I've gotten no further than trying to get used to myself.”

Mary laughed. “Perhaps that's the same thing. But go on telling me about the evening you found me.”

“I lifted you up and you fainted with terror. I wrapped you in the cloak. Then I rode to Euphrosyne's, the only woman I knew in Tiberias that I had any confidence in. When I left you there, I made plans, foolish and lovely plans. My contract with the Romans would run out in a few years and I would be free to return to Antioch with a small daughter. My whole family would be delighted that I had had a child.”

“You wanted children?”

“That would rehabilitate me, wouldn't it?”

Mary's eyes narrowed and her voice hardened. “That was why you went to the expense of educating me,” she said. “Finding a teacher for me and all that?”

He looked at her in surprise, for this was unlike her.

“No,” he said. “I simply wanted to give you everything I could. And it was already clear when you learned Greek that you had a great gift of understanding. And you were eager to learn, and inquisitive.”

“I'm sorry.”

“There were some worries. A house of pleasure was not a suitable place for a small girl. But I had no choice, and there were few prejudices at Euphrosyne's. I didn't think about there being any religious difficulties at first. It wasn't until Miriam took her own life that I realized what it meant for a Jewish child to live in a ‘house of sin.’”

Another long silence.

“Then I was uneasy about you not wanting to play, that you were such a serious child. I gave you a doll. Do you remember?”

She shook her head. No, she did not.

They sat in silence before Leonidas went on. “Someone once said that if you want to see eternal life manifesting itself, you should suffer little children and forbid them not, to come unto me.”

Mary's eyes darkened with grief and she heard a voice running through her head…“for such is the kingdom of God.”

They broke off for a simple meal in the kitchen. He was uneasy. Had he hurt her? She smiled and said self-knowledge was the whole purpose of her striving. Then she tried to explain that there had never been time for play in her childhood, that even small children had to work.

“At least, girls did,” she said. “My brothers played at warfare and practiced killing Romans from the ambush in the mountains.”

“You could hardly call that playing,” said Leonidas bitterly.

They went back to the library.

“At the same time that you began lessons with Erigones, my father died,” he went on. “I had a long letter from my mother, probably dictated by Livia. In heartrending terms, they appealed to me to come home. I did not grieve for my father. We had never been close. You know, the only son is to take over and be responsible for everything and everyone. From childhood on.

“As a boy, I escaped, disappearing into a world of daydreams of heroes and exploits. And playing at adventures and great deeds. I was an easy victim for the Roman officers looking for people among the Greeks in Antioch to join the legions. So I signed on. I was eighteen and of age. My father never forgave me.”

He sighed.

“I've never regretted it. I saw the world and it was much larger and crueler and more complicated and difficult to make out than I had imagined.”

“You had a letter from your mother?”

“Yes, it came at an opportune moment. I went to Titus, the tribune, who read it and said he understood. And that I had actually fulfilled my contract with the Roman army. So I started completing my reports and began negotiations for your adoption. That was more complicated than I had thought. After all, even a foundling has parents, as the lawyer said. At that stage, I had already found out your father's name, but it was on the lists of the Jewish rebels. So I couldn't use that.”

He fell silent, his eyes straying out over Mary's garden.

“Then that damned expedition against the Parthians put an end to all my plans. The cohort from Tiberias was taken out, the soldiers jubilant, as they were all tired of the Jews and their treacherous ambushes. The tribune began by flattering me. I was one of his best officers. He couldn't manage without me. My knowledge of the caravan routes through Syria was invaluable. When all the grand talk failed to have any effect, he took to power language, tore up my resignation application, and snapped that the expedition would begin within a week.

“I went to Euphrosyne. But you must remember that moment yourself.”

Yes, she remembered the invulnerable Leonidas sitting on a stool, crying like a child.

“I won't tell you about being captured by those damned Bedouins who ambushed and killed my soldiers in the desert. I presume they were useful years. I had to learn what it meant to be a slave, despised and mocked, whipped when the gentlemen wanted some fun. I was no hero. I was feeble, wept, and begged for mercy, which only increased their pleasure. And I was a poor slave, unused to manual work. They kept me alive because one of them had recognized me as the son of a rich silk merchant in Antioch. The negotiations over the ransom went on for years, but at that time my miserly brother-in-law was head of the merchant house. Then fortunately he died and Livia took over. She almost ruined the firm, paid up, and got me released.”

“Blessed Livia.”

“Yes. But I've done my bit.”

He laughed. “No one escapes his destiny. I became a silk merchant, just as Father had decided. As far as you're concerned…”

The words hung in the air.

“Not until I was going to tell Livia about my daughter in Galilee did it dawn on me that you were now adult. I had to change my words and tell her about a young woman I loved. But that was also true.”

“But not as she believed.”

“No. She wanted nephews and nieces, heirs descended down the family.”

“We share the blame,” said Mary, but Leonidas groaned. She thought about how entangled in lies they were.

“You know the rest,” said Leonidas in a thin voice. “I went to Rome and signed a very advantageous agreement. My years as a centurion came in useful, as well as my connections and my reputation as a hero. It was said that I had managed to escape from the Parthians, an enemy I had never even seen.

“Yes, by all the gods. Shortly after the trip to Rome, I went back to Palestine, found Euphrosyne, who was on the point of leaving and going back to Corinth. And she told me the incredible story of Jesus of Nazareth.”

The next day, Mary was working alone in the library. As she made a clean copy of her notes, she kept feeling something essential had been said. She looked through the notes and her memories, then stopped at the doll she did not remember, and found words she did not understand.

The children who belonged in the kingdom of heaven, that spontaneous manifestation of life, the joy. Lilies of the field, flowers that praise God by growing and not worrying about the future. Something else Jesus had said the first time she had met him, that spring when the swallows were flying north over their heads, something about the complete trust birds had in the winds.

He never said nature was beautiful.

God is creating now, she thought, at this moment.

That night she dreamt about Quintus, the Roman boy who had taught her at least one game.