The Book of Longings: A Novel (20 page)

“Don’t people in Nazareth need plows and yokes and roof beams?”

“Jobs here will go more readily to James and Simon than to me. I’ll try not to remain away too long. I’ll go first to Japha and if I find no work there, I’ll go on to Exaloth and Dabira.”

Japha.
It was the village Tabitha had been banished to. A year and a half had passed since I’d seen her, but she was not gone from my thoughts. I’d told Jesus about her, holding nothing back. I’d even sung some of her songs for him.

“When you’re in Japha, would you seek word of Tabitha for me?” I asked.

He hesitated only slightly. “I’ll inquire about her, Ana, but the news, if there is any, may not be what you hope to hear.”

I scarcely heard him. Her song about the blind girls was playing unbidden in my head.

I
N THE AFTERNOO
N
I found Jesus mixing mud-brick mortar to repair the crumbling stone in the compound wall, mud to his elbows, and I couldn’t bear to keep my secret from him any longer. I handed him a cup of water. I said, “Do you remember when you told me some men possessed an inner knowledge that caused them to leave their families and go out as prophets and preachers?”

He looked at me bemused, squinting through the sunlight.

“You thought that you yourself might even be among them,” I continued. “Well, I, too, have my own knowing inside . . . that I’m not meant for motherhood, but for something else.”

Such an impossible thing to explain.

“You’re talking about the prayer in your bowl. The stories you’ve written.”

“Yes.” I took his hands in mine, even though they were caked. “What if my words could, like men’s, prophesy or preach? Would that not be worth the sacrifice?”

I was so young, sixteen then, and exorbitantly hopeful. I still believed I would not have long to wait. Some miracle would intervene. The sky would part. God would rain down papyri.

I studied his face. I saw regret, uncertainty. Not to have children was considered a great misfortune, a thing worse than death. I thought suddenly of the law that permitted a man to divorce his childless wife after ten years, but unlike my mother, I didn’t fear that possibility. Jesus would never countenance such a law. My fear lay in disappointing him.

“But do you need to make this sacrifice now?” he said. “There’s time. Your writing will be there for you one day.”

I understood more clearly—when he said one day, he meant one faraway day.

“I do not want children,” I whispered.

This was my deeper secret, but I’d never spoken it aloud. Good women had babies. Good women
wanted
babies. It was pressed upon every girl precisely what good women did and did not do. We lugged those dictates around like temple stones. A good woman was modest. She was quiet. She covered her head when she went out. She didn’t speak with men. She tended her domestic tasks. She obeyed and served her husband. She was faithful to him. Above all, she gave him children. Better yet, sons.

I waited for Jesus to respond, but he dipped his trowel in the mortar and smoothed it over the stones. Had he ever prodded me to be a
good
woman? Not once.

I waited several moments and when he didn’t speak, I turned to leave.

“Do you wish, then, to bed apart?” he asked.

“No, oh no. But I do wish to use the midwife’s herbs. I . . . already take them.”

His eyes held mine for so long, I fought not to look away. They were
tinged with disappointment that slowly softened, then ebbed. He said, “Little Thunder, I won’t judge the knowing in your heart or what choice you make.”

It was the first time he spoke the pet name he would call me until the end. I accepted it as an endearment. He heard the quake that lived at my center, and he didn’t seek to silence it.

The days he was away crept on tiny, unhurried feet. Sometimes in the evening my feeling of aloneness was so great, I snuck Delilah into our room and fed her citrus peels. Other times I carried my mat to the storeroom and slept beside Yaltha. I marked Jesus’s absence with pebbles, adding one each day atop his sleeping mat, watching the little pile grow. Nine . . . ten . . . eleven.

On the twelfth day I woke knowing Jesus would return before dark, bearing some sort of propitious news. I couldn’t concentrate on my tasks. In the afternoon, Mary came upon me staring idly at a spider that dangled from the lip of a water jug. “Are you well?” she asked.

“Jesus will come today. I know it.”

She didn’t question my certainty. She said, “I’ll ready his meal.”

I bathed myself and dabbed clove oil behind my ears. I let my hair loose and dressed in the dark blue tunic he loved. I poured wine and set out bread. Over and over I went to the doorway and looked toward the gate. A blaze of yellow on the hill . . . the first grains of darkness floating in the air . . . dusk skulking across the compound.

He arrived with the last trace of light, bearing his tools and enough wages to replenish our wheat stores and add a lamb to the stable. In the privacy of our room, he gathered me into an embrace. I could smell the weariness on him.

Filling his cup, I said, “What tidings do you bring?”

He described his days, the work he’d been hired to do.

“And Tabitha? Do have any word of her?”

He touched the bench beside him. “Sit.”

Was the news so grave I must sit to receive it? I sank down close to him.

“I was hired by a man in Japha to fashion a new door for his house. Everyone in the village knew of Tabitha, including the man’s wife, who said that few had ever seen her and most feared her. When I asked why this was, she said Tabitha was possessed by demons and kept locked inside.”

This was not the favorable news I’d expected. “Would you take me to her?”

“She’s no longer there, Ana. The woman said she was sold to a man from Jericho, a landowner.”

“Sold? She’s a slave in his house?”

“It seems so. I asked others in Japha about her and they told me the same story.”

I laid my head in his lap and felt his hand stroke my back.

Throughout the year that followed, I grew accustomed to Jesus’s absences. The temporary loss of him became less like a spear in my side and more of a splinter in my foot. I went about my chores, relieved when I’d completed them and could sit with Mary or Yaltha and beg for stories of Jesus’s boyhood or tales of Alexandria. I thought sometimes of my parents, an hour’s walk away, and of Judas, who was I knew not where, and a gnawing forlornness would rise in me. There’d been no word from any of them. I tried not to think of Tabitha, enslaved to a stranger.

Whenever Jesus was away, I wore the red thread on my wrist, as was my custom, but early in the spring, on a day when my mind could settle
on nothing, I noticed how frayed the thread had become over the past year, so wizened I feared it would soon wear apart. Touching it with my fingertip, I assured myself that if such a thing happened, it would signify nothing ominous, but then I thought of the ink splotch in my incantation bowl, the gray cloud over my head. It was hard to imagine
that
meant nothing. No, I would not risk a broken thread. I undid the knot and slid my tattered bracelet into its goatskin pouch.

I was tightening the cord when I heard Mary shout from the courtyard, “Come quickly, Jesus has returned.”

For the past two weeks he’d been in Besara making cabinets for a winemaker and staying with his sister, Salome. I knew Mary was anxious for news of her daughter.

“Salome is well,” he reported when the flurry of greetings had subsided. “But I have bitter news. Her husband has a weakness in his leg and arm and a slur in his voice. He no longer leaves the house.”

I looked at Mary, how she gathered herself, her arms wrapping about her sides, her body saying what her mouth did not:
Salome will be a widow soon.

That night all of us except Judith and the children huddled about the cook fire speculating about Salome’s husband and sharing stories. When the heat had nearly gone from the embers, James turned to Jesus. “Will you make the Passover pilgrimage for us this year?”

James, Simon, and Mary had traveled to the Temple in Jerusalem the year before while the rest of us stayed home to work and tend the animals. It was Jesus’s turn to go, but he vacillated.

“I don’t yet know,” he said.

“But
someone
must go from our family,” James responded, sounding annoyed. “Why do you hesitate? Can’t you leave work behind for those few days?”

“It isn’t that. I’m struggling to understand if God wishes me to go at all. The Temple has become a den of thieves, James.”

James rolled his eyes skyward. “Must you always concern yourself with such things? We have a duty to sacrifice an animal at Passover.”

“Yes, and the poor bring their animals and the priests refuse to accept them, claiming they’re blemished, and then they charge exorbitant prices for another one.”

“What he says is true,” Simon offered.

“Shall we speak of something else?” Mary said.

But Jesus pressed on. “The priests insist on having their own currency and when the poor try to exchange their coins, the money changers charge them excessive rates!”

James stood. “Would you force me to make the trip again this year? Do you care more for the poor than your brother?”

Jesus answered, “Aren’t the poor also my brothers and sisters?”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
as the sun stirred awake, Jesus trekked into the hills to pray. It was his daily habit. At other times I would find him sitting cross-legged on the floor with his prayer shawl drawn over his head, unmoving, eyes closed. It had been so since we married, this devotion, this feasting on God, and I’d never minded it, but today, seeing him walk away in the half-light, I understood what until now I’d only glimpsed. God was the ground beneath him, the sky over him, the air he breathed, the water he drank. It made me uneasy.

I prepared his breakfast, trimming corn from the husk and parching it over the fire, the sweet aroma drifting over the compound. I glanced repeatedly toward the gate, as if God lurked out there, ready to pluck my husband from me.

When he returned, we sat together beneath the olive tree. I watched him wrap bread around a hunk of goat cheese and eat hungrily, saving the corn, his favorite, for last. He was quiet.

Finally, he said, “When I saw my brother-in-law’s infirmity, I was moved with pity. Everywhere I look, there’s suffering, Ana, and I spend my days making cabinets for a rich man.”

“You spend your days caring for your family,” I said, perhaps too sharply.

He smiled. “Don’t worry, Little Thunder. I’ll do what I must.” He wrapped an arm about me. “Passover is soon. Let us go to Jerusalem.”

We took the pilgrim road, leaving the green hills of Galilee and descending into the dense thickets of the Jordan River valley, traveling through stretches of wilderness filled with jackals. At night we put out the fire early and, clutching our staffs, slept beneath little lean-tos we fashioned from brush. We were on our way to Bethany, just outside Jerusalem, where we would lodge with Jesus’s friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary.

The Jericho road was the last, most treacherous part of our journey, not because of jackals, but because of the robbers who hid in the barren cliffs that lined the valley. At least the road was well traveled; for miles now we’d trodden behind a man with two sons and a priest wearing an elaborate robe, but I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. Sensing my nervousness, Jesus began telling me stories of his family’s Passover visits with his friends in Bethany when he was a boy.

“When I was eight,” Jesus said, “Lazarus and I came upon a dove merchant who was treating his birds cruelly, poking them with sticks and feeding them pebbles. We waited until he left his stall, opened the cages, and set them free before he returned. He accused us of stealing and our fathers were compelled to pay him a full price. My family was forced to remain in Bethany two extra weeks while Father and I worked to pay the debt. At the time I thought it was worth it. The sight of the birds flying away . . .”

Imagining them flapping off to freedom, I didn’t notice the way his steps slowed and his story ceased midsentence. “
Ana.
” He pointed toward a bend in the distance, at a heap of white robe spattered with red lying on the side of the road. I thought,
Someone has cast off his garment.
Then I saw the shape of a person beneath it.

Ahead of us, the father and his sons and then the priest came to a halt, judging, it seemed, whether the person was dead or alive.

“He’s been set upon by robbers,” Jesus said, scanning the rocky terrain as if they might still be nearby. “Come.” He walked quickly, while I scampered to keep up. Already the others had passed by the wounded man, giving him a wide berth.

Jesus knelt beside the figure as I stood behind him dredging up the courage to look. A soft moan drifted up. “It’s a woman,” Jesus said.

I gazed down then, seeing her but not seeing her, my mind unwilling to yield to what was before me. “My Lord and my God, it’s
Tabitha
!”

Her face was smeared with blood, but I saw no wound. “The gash is on her scalp,” Jesus said, pointing to a mass of sticky, dark blood in her hair.

I stooped and wiped her face with my robe. Her eyes fluttered. She stared at me, blinking, and I was certain she knew me. The stub of her tongue thrashed about in her mouth, looking for a way to speak my name.

“Is she dead?” a voice called. A tall young man approached. I could tell from his dialect and dress he was a Samaritan and I tensed reflexively. Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans, regarding them as worse than Gentiles.

“She’s wounded,” Jesus said.

The man pulled out his waterskin, bent, and tipped it to Tabitha’s lips. Her mouth opened, her neck arched upward. She looked like a featherless baby bird craning for food. Jesus dropped his hand onto the man’s shoulder. “You’re Samaritan, yet you give a Galilean your water.”

The man made no reply and Jesus unwound his girdle and set about binding Tabitha’s wound. The Samaritan hoisted her onto Jesus’s back, and we walked the rest of the way with excruciating slowness.