The Book of Longings: A Novel (40 page)

Lavi said, “We have told no one of our marriage for fear Haran would dismiss Pamphile from his employ.” He looked at his wife of only a week. “He wouldn’t suspect you of being involved in their leaving.”

“But I don’t wish to be separated from you,” she said.

Lavi spoke gently to Pamphile. “You know as I do that I can’t remain here. The library has a domicile for the librarians who aren’t married. I will stay there and I wish you to remain here until Ana’s letter comes from Galilee. Then I will find us lodging together.”

I’d been away from Jesus for one year and six months. An eternity. He was traveling about Galilee without me, preaching that God’s kingdom was near, while I, his wife, was far away. I sympathized with Pamphile, but her severance from her husband would be an eye blink in comparison to mine.

“It seems I’m given no choice,” she said. Her words brimmed with resentment.

Lavi slit open the door to the garden and peered out. He handed the key to Pamphile. “Return the key before it’s discovered missing. Then unbolt the door in the servant quarters that leads outside. If anyone questions you about our whereabouts, tell them you have no knowledge of it. Behave as if I’ve betrayed you. Let your anger be known.” He kissed her cheeks and nudged her out the door.

I worked swiftly to squeeze my possessions into my two travel pouches. My scrolls filled one entirely, leaving me to stuff the other with clothing, the mummy portrait of my face, the little bag that contained my red thread, and what was left of our money. Once again, I would leave carrying the incantation bowl in my arms.

When Skepsis, the old woman who led the Therapeutae, looked at me, I felt swallowed by her stare. She reminded me of an owl, perched there on the edge of a bench with her piercing gold-brown eyes and white feathery hair ruffled from sleep. Her squat body was hunched and still, but her head swiveled from me to Yaltha as she listened to my aunt explain how we came to be standing in the vestibule of her small stone house in the middle of the night, begging for sanctuary.

T
HROUGHOUT OUR LONG
,
exhausting trek from Alexandria, Yaltha had schooled me in the community’s strange workings. “The members are divided into juniors and seniors,” she’d explained. “The juniors aren’t necessarily the youngest members, as you would think, but rather the newest. I wasn’t thought of as a senior until I’d been with them for seven years.”

“Are the juniors and seniors seen as equals?” I’d asked. If there were a hierarchy, I would most certainly be at the bottom of it.

“Everyone is seen as equal, but the labor is divided differently
between them. The community has its patrons, including Haran, so I suppose they could hire servants, but they don’t believe in them. It’s the juniors who grow and prepare and serve the food, tend the animals, build the houses—whatever labor is required, the juniors do it, along with their spiritual work. I used to work in the garden in the mornings and return to my solitude in the afternoon.”

“The seniors have no work at all?”

“They’ve earned the privilege of devoting all of their time to spiritual work.”

We trudged past sleeping villages, vineyards, wine presses, villas, and farms, Lavi walking ahead of us holding the lamp and relying on Yaltha to call out directions. I marveled that we didn’t get lost.

She said, “Every forty-ninth day, there’s an all-night vigil filled with feasting, singing, and dancing. The members work themselves into a state of ecstasy. They call it a sober drunkenness.”

What manner of place
was
this?

Nearing the reedy shores of Lake Mareotis, we grew quiet. I wondered if Yaltha was remembering when she’d arrived here before, freshly torn from her daughter. It was no different this time. I watched the moon bob on the water, stars floating everywhere. I could smell the sea just over the limestone ridge. I felt the mix of fear and elation I used to get long ago waiting at the cave for Jesus to appear.

At the nadir of the night, we turned off the road onto an exceptionally steep hill. Up on the slope, I could make out clusters of flat-roofed houses.

“They’re small and simple,” Yaltha said, following my gaze. “Each one has a little courtyard, a room for sleeping, and what they call a holy room for spiritual work.”

It was the third time she’d used the odd phrase. “What is this spiritual work?” I asked. After ten years of daily toils in Nazareth, it was hard to envision sitting around in a holy room.

“Study, reading, writing, composing songs, prayer. You’ll see.”

Just before we reached the tiny gatehouse, we stopped and Lavi handed us the travel pouches he’d carried. I dug inside mine for a handful of drachmae. “Take these,” I said. “When the letter from Judas arrives, have Pamphile hire a wagon and make her way to us as quickly as she can.”

“Don’t worry—I will see to it.”

He lingered a moment, then turned to leave. I caught his arm. “Lavi, thank you. I think of you as my brother.”

The night obscured his face, but I felt his smile and reached out to embrace him.

“Sister,” he said, then bid Yaltha goodbye and turned to make the long journey back.

One of the juniors was keeping watch in the gatehouse. He was a skinny man, who balked at first to let us in. His job, as he said, was to keep out thieves, charlatans, and wayfarers, but when Yaltha told him she’d once been a senior member of the Therapeutae, he’d leapt to do her bidding.

N
OW
,
STANDING IN
S
KEP
SIS
’
S HOUSE
,
listening to Yaltha elaborate on why I stole the papyri, I wondered if I would have the chance to experience any of the things my aunt had described. She’d already explained that we’d fled Galilee to avoid my arrest. I tried to read Skepsis’s expression. I supposed she was considering the persistent way trouble seemed to follow me around.

“My niece is an exceptional scribe and scholar, more so than any man I’ve known,” Yaltha said, finally offsetting my shortcomings with praise.

Skepsis patted the bench beside her. “Come and sit beside me, Yaltha.” She’d implored her to do so earlier, but Yaltha had refused, pacing as she’d recounted her reunion with Diodora and Haran’s threats.

Yaltha sighed heavily now and sank onto the bench. She looked haggard in the lamplight.

Skepsis said, “You’ve come to us out of desperation, but that alone is not a reason to take you in. Those who dwell here do so out of love for a quiet, contemplative life. They come to study and to keep the memory of God alive. Can you say you’re here for those reasons as well?”

Yaltha said, “When I was sent here before, you took me in rather than let me be punished. I’d left my daughter behind and I was grieving. I spent much of my time imploring you to help me find a way to leave. My happiest day was when you struck a deal with Haran that allowed me to go to Galilee . . . though it took you long enough—eight years!” Skepsis chuckled. “I feel now as I did then,” Yaltha continued. “I won’t lie and say I’ve come here for the noble reasons you mention.”

“I can say it, though,” I declared.

They turned to me with startled expressions. If I could’ve peered into my old copper mirror at that moment, I believe I would’ve witnessed the same surprise on my own face. “I’ve come with the same desperation as my aunt, but I’ve arrived with all the things you said are necessary to dwell here. I’ve come with a love for the quiet life. I wish nothing more than to write and study and keep the memory of Sophia alive.”

Skepsis scrutinized the pouch on my shoulder stuffed with scrolls, the ends of which protruded from the opening. I was still clutching my incantation bowl, holding it tightly to my abdomen. I’d not taken time during our escape to find a cloth to wrap it in and the white surface was grimy from where I’d set it down in the reeds in order to relieve myself.

“May I see the bowl?” Skepsis asked. It was the first time she’d addressed me.

I handed it to her, then watched her lift the lamp to the opening and read my inmost thoughts.

Skepsis handed back the bowl, but not before cleaning the sides and bottom of it with her hem. “I can see from your prayer that the words you spoke to us a moment ago are true.” Her eyes shifted to Yaltha. “Old friend, because you accounted for your and Ana’s sins, holding nothing
back, I know you are honest in all else. As always, I know where you stand. I will give you both refuge. I require one thing from Ana in return.” She turned to me. “I require that you write a hymn to Sophia and sing it at our next vigil.”

It was as if she’d said,
Ana, you shall climb to the top of the cliff, sprout wings, and fly
.

“I know nothing about composing a song,” I blurted.

“Then how fine it is that you’ll have this chance to learn. Someone is required to write a new composition for every vigil and the songs have become sadly alike and unadventurous. The community will be glad to have a fresh hymn.”

A hymn. To Sophia. And she wished me to perform it. I felt both petrified and captivated. “Who will teach me?”

“You will teach yourself,” she said. “There won’t be another vigil for forty-six days—you have ample time.”

Forty-six days. Surely I would not still be here.

The first two weeks I moved through my days as if wandering about in some languorous trance. Hours of solitude, prayers, reading, writing, antiphonal singing, philosophy lessons—I’d dreamed of such pursuits, but the sudden flood of them conjured the sensation of walking around without my feet touching the ground. I had dreams of floating, of ladders stretching into the clouds. I would sit in the holy room of the house and stare half-seeing, digging my nails into the pads of my thumbs to feel the flesh of myself. Yaltha said my untethered feeling derived from the simple shock of being here.

Soon thereafter, Skepsis assigned me to the animal shed, which quickly cured me. Chickens, sheep, and donkeys. Manure and urine. Grunting and mating. The insect blizzard at the water trough. Hoof-churned dirt.
It even came to me that these things might be holy, too, a sacrilege I kept to myself.

O
N T
HE FIRST COLD DAY
after our arrival, I lugged the water vessel down the hillside to gather water for the animals from the spring near the gatehouse. The summer inundation, when the Nile floods, was over and cool winds were sweeping in from the sea on one side of the ridge and up from the lake on the other, creating a little maelstrom. I wore a shaggy goatskin cloak supplied by one of the juniors, which was so impossibly large it dragged on the ground. By my count we’d been here five and a half weeks. I tried to determine what month it would be in Galilee—Marcheshvan, I thought. Jesus would not yet be in his woolen cloak.

He hovered constantly in my thoughts. When I woke, I would lie there and picture him rising from his sleeping mat. When I ate the first meal of the morning, I imagined him breaking his bread in that unhurried way of his. And on those days, as I listened to Skepsis teach the symbolic way of reading our Scriptures, I saw him on the hillside Lavi had told us about, preaching to the multitudes.

As I descended the path, I came upon the hall where the forty-ninth-day vigils took place. The vigil was in eight days, and though I’d spent hours trying to write a song, I’d made no progress. I made up my mind I would inform Skepsis she should abandon all expectations of me either composing or performing one. She wouldn’t be pleased, but I couldn’t believe she’d send me away.

There were thirty-nine stone huts scattered across the hillside, each designed for one person, though most of them held two. Yaltha and I shared a house, sleeping side by side on reed mats. Skepsis offered to restore Yaltha to her senior status, but my aunt had refused in order to work in the garden. She spent her afternoons in our minuscule courtyard, sitting under the lone tamarisk tree.

Now that I’d found my equilibrium again, I liked having the holy room to myself. It had a wooden writing board and a stand on which to unfurl a scroll, and Skepsis had sent papyrus and inks.

Reaching the spring, I squatted on the ground to fill my vessel. When I heard men’s voices in the gatehouse, I paid little attention—peddlers often came and went, the woman selling flour, the boy bearing sacks of salt—but then I caught certain words: “The fugitives are here. . . . Yes, I’m certain of it.”

I set down the vessel. Pulling the shaggy cloak to the top of my head, I crept on all fours toward the voices until I dared edge no closer. The junior who kept the gatehouse was nowhere in sight, but one of the seniors was there speaking with two men who wore short tunics, leather sandals laced to their knees, and short knives at their belts. It was the garb of the Jewish militia. “My men will keep vigil along the road in case they attempt to leave,” the taller one said. “I’ll send word to Haran. If you have intelligence for us, you may leave your missives at the gatehouse.”

It wasn’t a surprise Haran had found us, only that it’d taken him so long. Yaltha and Skepsis devoutly believed he wouldn’t defy the sanctity of the Therapeutae by sending someone inside to apprehend us. “The Jews of Alexandria would most assuredly turn against him,” Skepsis had said. I didn’t feel as confident.

When the soldiers departed, I hugged the ground and waited for our betrayer to pass by on his way back up the hill. He was a thin, bent man with eyes like dried grapes, the one called Lucian, who was second in seniority to Skepsis. When he was out of sight, I recovered the water vessel and rushed to the garden to inform Yaltha.

“That snake Lucian was Haran’s spy when I was here before,” she said. “It seems he hasn’t improved with age. The man has fasted too much and been celibate too long.”

T
WO DAYS LATER
,
I glimpsed Skepsis and Yaltha hurrying toward me in the animal shed.

I’d been gathering green grasses to feed the donkeys. I set down the rake.