Secret Magdalene (15 page)

I am put off balance. Not only is it clear that Addai has no interest in Eio, but this is the first I have seen of Seth since he left many weeks ago for Jerusalem on some business of Queen Helen’s. I smile at Seth; I stare at Yehoshua, at Jude. So alike outside, yet the man inside each is not the same and it shows in the eyes and the mouth. Addai comes forward, touches my shoulder. I am startled. So intent on the brothers, I have lost myself. He bids me sit. There are no benches, no chairs, in this room. There are only shelves of drying clay: pots of all shapes and sizes, cups and bowls and jugs. So we sit on the dirt of the floor, which makes no difference to me, as I am already dirty. It makes no difference to the brothers who seem as baked as the pots. Why am I here?

Now that we are all seated in a circle, Seth says an odd thing, “You know who I am, John?”

“Of course. You are my uncle, Seth of Damascus, the last of the Maccabees.”

“And you know who Addai is? And Tata?”

“I do.”

“Do you love us?”

“With the whole of my heart.”

“Then you will not question what we ask of you.” This last is not a question. I keep my eyes on his eyes. I keep my back straight and my hands folded. “I would have you tell us of your illness. I would have you tell us what you heard and what you saw, even if it sounds as the Book of Enoch.”

I look from face to face. My illness? Sounding as the Book of Enoch? Enoch is full of fantastic visions and terrible secrets. It is full of a Jew’s Seven Heavens and of a Jew’s hell. Enoch teaches of fallen angels and an avenging messiah. For a moment I do not understand, and then I do. My eyes come to rest on Tata and I see why I am called here. She has told them how it was with me at Father’s in the month before Ananias came to supper that night.

She has told them that eight years ago I died.

And that I rose from the dead.

In all this time I have told no one what I experienced, not even Salome. I do not know why I have not shared it with the friend with whom I share everything, but I do know—and have known all along—that the Loud Voice was born of my dying. Only Tata, who never left my side in those days and nights, could have even the smallest idea of what it might have been like, and Tata has no idea at all. And yet she
does
know, for it was she who saw the skin of my face shine with a light like unto Moses on the mountain, and she who told me this is what she saw.

I sit in silence. Seth asks me a terrible thing. I do not want to tell them. And if I did, I would share with only Addai and Tata and Seth. Why would I tell these brothers something I have not told Salome? And there is this: I do not have the courage. Having told no one, I have no oft-told tale to tell. From that time to this, I have thought of it seldom, and when I have, it seems more a fabulous dream than a doing. But I know it was not a dream. It was not a dream and it was not delirium, though delirium was the door through which I walked. But to explain where I went? To describe what I saw? To offer what I brought back into this world? Would they understand my answers? I went nowhere for there is nowhere to go. I saw nothing but what is always here. I brought nothing back but what I took with me. But I think of Addai and Tata and how I love them. I think of Seth and all we have been to each other and all he has taught me. Suddenly I feel ashamed. Seth has given me freely of his life and his skill and his mind, vast as the green Egyptian Sea, and I keep such as this to myself?

I will tell them. Or I will try.

But from the very first word, my telling is confused, disjointed. In the space of no more than a moment or two, I think it futile. My words hold no color, no scent, no music, they are pale things, as pale and as eyeless as worms. But even as I stumble in the telling, awe sings in my veins, for nothing else in the whole of my life has compared to my journey out of the body of self and into the body of Glory. Not even the Passion of Osiris, which is a journey like no other.

I have read Enoch. I have read Jubilees and Ezekiel and Daniel. I have read of Jacob’s ladder that reached to heaven. I know whoever wrote these things stood in the first Great Hall of the House of Glory. Just as John the Baptizer did, which is something I think I shall never say aloud, and why I know he is not the One. I know though their visions were terrifying and though they were beautiful and though they yearned for God with a torment of longing, all these stood apart; they did not go
in.
They did not learn they are as much
in
Glory and
of
Glory as Glory
is.
They did not see that they themselves
are
Glory. They did not learn they were not “caught up” by something apart and distinct from themselves, but rather they flew up on the wings of their own splendid Being. If they had learned such a wonderful thing, I know they would have said so. It would be in the books they wrote or that were written in their names. But it is not so written. To a Jew, the Invisible God is always above and apart. But I have seen with my own eyes that God is not above and apart. God is within and without. There is nothing that is not God.

As Seth once said, “It is not that there is one God. It is that God is One.”

At this, I feel a sudden heat, like sheet lightning in the veins. In this instant, I know why I have not spoken of it—
this
is why. I have thought no one would hear me. Or if they were to hear me, they should scorn the listening. But more, I did not want to know I
knew
and that I have known all along. I have tasted gnosis.

I tell them that the Kingdom of God is a book, they might go there by the unrolling of a scroll. I tell them that the Kingdom of God is a mirror, they might go there by the refocusing of the eye. Even now, they stand in the Garden of Eden, and the only leaving they have ever done is a forgetting. I tell them that I have walked in the true home of the inner Nazorean and that it is more a home than any home they have ever known, full of such tenderness as to melt an obsidian heart. I prowl through my mind, seeking more ways to tell them the simple thing I know, but it is hopeless. Unless a man jumps in the sea, how shall he know to swim? And I suddenly see that of them all, even Seth who knows with the mind and yearns with the heart, it is the brother called Yehoshua who hears me. I see it by his skin, by the bones in his hands, the way his head fits on his neck, by the radiance that escapes his eyes. This is why I think of nothing but him. He too has looked upon Glory. I cannot express my relief. But I can cry. Even now that I am John the Less and am learned beyond most men, I am still a wonder at crying.

I weep aloud to know I have not gone alone.

Without a word, Yehoshua leans forward.

He touches my forehead with the tip of one finger, and it is as if a mother has come to sing me to sleep. He traces the tear that rolls down my cheek, and it is as if a father has encircled me with his protective arm. I look into the brown of his eye. I smell the sun and the dust in his hair. I feel his touch though he has taken his hand away. I am helpless with the need to ask. So I
do
ask. “Are you the One?”

His face is a wash of surprise. Then comes a flood of bewilderment, and then fear. He shuts his eyes, and with no movement other than this, he leaves me. But I have asked and I must know, I must know; and I do as I do with Eio, I follow him. I slip under his skin, curl like smoke through his nostrils, move through his blood, and the first thing I feel is pain. I am infused with such pain as I have never known, more than black Helena knows. It lies behind the ball of his eye and in the bone of his skull. It is unbearable. It is unutterable. I open my mouth to cry out, and all the while the Loud Voice rolls down on us as a great stone would roll from the top of a mountain. “
AS I AM THE ANGEL SPEAKING TRUTH
—
THE ONE HAS COME AMONG YOU
.”

The room has gone still as stone. Yehoshua opens his eyes wide. There is nothing in his face, there seems no breath in his body, yet he looks at me as if it were I who had spoken, as if these words were mine. They are not mine! It is not me! I am not an angel! I do not speak as an angel! I know nothing! Are the others as surprised as I that the Voice comes now? Do they wonder it comes to the brothers, or are they stunned that I, Mariamne, would ask this Yehoshua of Galilee if he were the One? I look at Seth, but his mind is closed to me. Seth looks at Yehoshua. Jude does not smile nor does he move. In this moment I understand that Jude would do nothing other than his twin would wish him to do. In this moment if Yehoshua were to want me solaced or silenced, so it should be.

It is now that all begin to hold me apart. The change is as delicate as the brush of a pale shadow on a pale wall, but Salome misses nothing. Already grown distant, from this time on, I rarely see her from day to day.

I
t is as if I were missing a hand; I do not know what to do with myself. It is as if I were missing an eye; nothing looks as it did. I do not know what to feel. I have lost the friend of my youth. No one knows me. I no longer know myself. I am alone in the wilderness.

Eio grunts when I come near, nudges my hand to see if I have brought her anything. Today I have brought her only me, but that is enough if I scratch her hide hard enough. Not knowing what to do, I wander off, and Eio follows, and by and by we find ourselves hidden among the date palms far up our
nahal
west of the settlement. For a time, how much time it is hard to say, I lie flat out on the sand in the shade of the largest tree, a smooth stone for a pillow, and stare up at the cliffs and the sky. I lie so still, a baby hyrax tests my sandals for taste. Another, negotiating a rock, falls off with a soft plop onto the sand and then waddles away. Eio stands over me, flapping her lips and nodding her head. I would laugh if there were laughter in me. Instead, I rise only to seat myself in my curved bowl of a rock. I get up. I wander from date palm to date palm, absently picking at bark. I unwrap Salome’s copy of the Book of Issa and look at it. I look at our game of green stone. I unwrap the three small figures we long ago found, Salome and I, and I smile to see what had once shocked me so. After so long in Alexandria, such natural things as breasts and delicate triangles of flesh no longer move me to embarrassed horror. I set them aside and pick up an unripened date fallen from a tree. I absently consider its design. If I were a god, would I have thought to create a date? I think to practice my tricks of magic. As it has been some while since I have done so, I am sure to fumble, so I begin with what I do best. In the purse at my side, Tata’s gift of long ago, I have, besides my word stones, a handful of olives. I will change an olive into a date and the date into a large stone and the large stone into whatever occurs to me when I get that far.

But first, the olive.

It goes well. The olive has become a date and the date become a stone and the stone become a clay pot! Two clay pots! Three! I would defy anyone to know how I do this—even I am impressed. I juggle the three pots. I am sure that Eio cannot believe her eyes. “You, donkey,” say I, “tell me, are you not confounded!”

“Prophets always confound me, even more than magicians,” says a voice behind my back.

One of my pots remains a pot in my hand, one falls like a pot onto the soft yellow sand, but the third smashes like a pot on a rock. Too late, a hyrax barks warning. I whirl in place. Standing beside Eio, who unlike the hyraxes has not uttered a single warning bray, is one of the redheaded brothers. Even without his words, I know immediately which this is. Yehoshua is alone. I am alone. We are both alone with Eio. I am disquieted, if for no other reason than some find such magic as I have displayed an offense against Yahweh. But there is more reason than this. In all my life I have seldom been alone with a strange male, and it helps but little that he knows me as John the Less.

Yehoshua speaks again. “I have seen Addai do something like this. I think you do it better.”

I would thank him if I had use of my tongue. As it is I scramble to remember myself. I am a Maccabee, and I am a scholar. I have lived in the palace at Alexandria. I have been taught by the famous philosopher, Philo Judaeus, and the famous astronomer and magician, Joor, son of Sipa of Thebes. Also by the famous Apion. I can read and I can write, which is without doubt something this one cannot do since virtually no one in the entirety of Palestine can do either. I can speak a dozen languages well and this one speaks Aramaic with a Galilean accent. I wear white linen. He wears rough cloth, mended and patched. He has no sandals, no wallet, no cloak. Against Jewish Law, his dark red hair is long. His dark red beard is tangled. I have asked him if he is the One, and he has answered by a startled silence.

Here, in my own hidden world with Eio, it suddenly seems a great foolishness to think I ever thought him anything of the sort.

I do not reach into him for I have not forgotten what it felt to do so. Could a perfected man feel as dark as this? I think not. But one thing that helps me now is that I sense he has a small fear of me. I am used to the fear of others. But this one’s fear is unlike any I have ever felt. It seems not so much a fear of my being unlike, as it is fear of my being too like.