The Book of Longings: A Novel (46 page)

As the procession began again, I noticed that the strap on one of my sandals had broken when I fell. I stooped and removed both shoes. I would go to my husband’s execution as he did. Barefoot.

I called out in Aramaic, “I’m here, Beloved. I’m walking behind you.” The centurion twisted in his saddle and looked at me, but said nothing.

Most of the spectators had hastened ahead of us toward the Gennath Gate that led to Golgotha, too impatient to wait on the man who was taking one slow, agonizing step after another. Glancing behind me, I saw that the few who’d remained to walk with him were women. Where were these disciples of his? The fishermen? The men? Were we women the only ones with hearts large enough to hold such anguish?

All at once a cluster of women joined me, two on my right, two on my left. One took my hand, squeezing it. I was startled to see she was my mother-in-law. Her face was wet and shattered. She said, “Ana, oh, Ana.” Next to her, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, tilted her head at me and sent me a steadying look.

At my other side, a woman slid her arm about my waist and gave me a wordless embrace.
Salome.
I grasped her hand and pulled it to my chest. Beside her was a woman I’d never seen before, with copper hair and flashing eyes, whom I guessed to be the age of my mother when I last saw her.

We walked pressed together, shoulder to shoulder. As we left the city gate and the hill of Golgotha came into view, Jesus halted, staring up at the little summit. “Beloved, I’m still here,” I said.

He lurched forward, moving against the swell of wind.

“My son, I am here also,” cried Mary, her voice shaking, the words shredding apart as they left her lips.

“And your sister walks with you as well,” Salome said.

“It is Mary of Bethany. I, too, am here.”

Then the unknown woman called, “Jesus, it’s Mary of Magdala.”

As he climbed the slope, toiling to lift his feet, I quickened my pace and drew closer behind him. “The day we gathered our daughter’s bones, the valley was full of wild lilies. Do you remember?” I called out the words loudly enough for him to hear, hoping not to draw the soldiers’ attention. “You told me to consider the lilies, that God takes care of them and will surely, then, care for us. Consider them now, my love. Consider the lilies.” I wished for something beautiful to fill his mind. I wished for him to think of our daughter, our Susanna. He would be with her soon. I wished for him to think of God. Of me. Of lilies.

When we reached the top of Golgotha, the man who’d carried the crossbeam laid it down beside one of the uprights and Jesus stood gazing down at it, swaying a little. We women were allowed no farther than a small knoll twenty or so paces from him. A putrid smell pervaded the air, and I wondered if it was the accumulation of all the atrocities that had ever transpired here. I pulled my scarf across my nose. My breaths came in small gulps.

Don’t look away. Terrible things will happen now. Unbearable things. Bear it anyway.

Beside me the others moaned and wept, but I didn’t join them. Later, alone, I would wail and fall to the ground and beat the emptiness with my fists. Now, though, I choked back my anguish and fastened my eyes on my husband.

I will think only of him. I will give him more than my presence; I will give him the full attention of my heart.

That would be my parting gift to him. I would go with him to the end of his longings.

I watched the soldiers strip Jesus of his tunic and shove him to the ground, pinning his forearms to the crossbeam with their knees. The executioner probed the underside of Jesus’s wrist, searching for the hollow space between the bones, though I could not understand then why the soldier pushed his fingers into that soft place like a woman who rummages in her bread dough for some small, dropped object. He raised his hammer and drove a nail through that small opening into the wood. The cry that left Jesus sent his mother to her knees, but somehow I went on standing there, muttering “
Sophia. Sophia. Sophia
,” as the other wrist was probed and the nail driven.

The crossbeam was lifted up and its notch fitted onto the upright. Jesus writhed a moment and kicked the air as the crossbeam fell into place with a jolt. The soldiers gathered his knees together, bending them slightly, and then with studied precision, arranged his right foot over his left. A single nail was pounded through them both. I don’t remember that he made any sound. I remember the vicious, hollow thud of the hammer and the wail it set off in my head. I closed my eyes, feeling I was abandoning him by retreating into the dark behind my lids. The wail slapped like waves against the inside of my skull. Then came the sound of laughter, far away and strange. I forced my eyes open, allowing in a painful slat of light. A soldier was nailing a pinewood placard above Jesus’s head and finding merriment in it.

“What does it say?” Mary of Magdala asked.

“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” I read. It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin lest anyone miss their mockery.

From behind us, someone shouted, “If you’re the King of the Jews, save yourself.”

“He helped others—can’t he help himself?” cried another.

Salome slid her arm around Mary’s waist and drew her mother to her side. “May God take him quickly,” she said.

And where
is
God
, I wanted to scream. Wasn’t he supposed to establish
his kingdom now? And the people—why didn’t they revolt as Judas had expected? Instead, they jeered at Jesus.

“If you’re the Messiah, come down from the cross and save yourself,” a man yelled.

Indignant, I whirled about to rebuke the rabble and glimpsed my brother standing alone on the edge of the hill. Seeing that I’d caught sight of him, he stretched out his hands to me, pleading, it seemed, for mercy.
Ana, forgive me.
I stared, astonished by the sight of him, by how misguided he’d been, by how callous his zeal and sense of righteousness had become.

I searched myself for the fury I’d felt toward him earlier, but it had left me. I tried to summon it, but it had retreated at the sight of him standing there so lost and bereft. A premonition swept through me that I would not see Judas again. I crossed my hands over my chest and nodded at him. It was not forgiveness I sent. It was pity.

As I drew my eyes back to Jesus, he struggled to lift himself up in order to take a breath. The sight nearly broke me. After that all sense of time left me. I didn’t know whether minutes passed or hours. Jesus went on heaving himself up and gasping for air.

Thunder rumbled on and off over the Mount of Olives. Salome and the three Marys knelt on the dirt and intoned the psalms, while I watched Jesus from the dark, sorrowful doorway of my heart, and uttered not a word. From time to time, Jesus muttered something, but I couldn’t hear what he said. He seemed far away and alone. Twice I tried to go to him and both times the soldiers forced me back. A man also attempted to approach Jesus, calling, “Jesus, master,” and he, too, was turned away. I looked back once for Judas. He was gone.

At midafternoon the soldiers, bored with the slowness of his dying, left their posts and squatted some distance from the cross, where they began to throw dice. I did not hesitate. I broke into a run. As I stood beneath the cross, the closeness of him shocked me. His breath rasped
and raked through his chest. His legs rippled with spasms
.
Heat and sweat were streaming from his body. I reached for the timber, then drew back my hand, repulsed by it.

I took a deep breath and gazed up at him. “Jesus.” His head slumped toward his shoulder and I saw he was looking at me. He didn’t speak, nor did I, but I told myself later that everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering.

Mary rushed to him, followed by the others. She wrapped her hands about her son’s feet like she was holding a tiny bird that had fallen from its nest. I wrapped my hands about hers and then the other three women did the same, our hands like the petals of a lotus. Not one of us wept. We stood there mute and full and held up that flower for him.

The soldiers did not tear themselves from their game of knucklebones to chase us away.

They no longer seemed to care we were there. We watched Jesus’s eyes grow glassy and distant. I felt the moment come, the severing. It was gentle, like a touch on the shoulder.

“It is finished,” Jesus said.

There was a sound like a rush of wings in the blackish clouds, and I knew his spirit had left him. I imagined it like a great flock of birds, soaring, scattering, coming to rest everywhere.

We prepared Jesus for burial by the flicker of two oil lamps. Kneeling on the cave floor beside his body, I felt oddly numb. How could this be my husband?

I looked at the other women in the tomb as if observing them from a corner of the sky. Mary, his mother, was cleansing his feet and legs while the others sang the songs of lament. Their faces were smeared and wet,
their voices bounding and rebounding off the cave walls. A towel and a ewer of water sat beside me, waiting for me to join them in readying him for burial.
Pick up the towel
.
Pick it up.
But gazing at it, I was seized with panic. I understood that if I took hold of the towel, if I touched Jesus, I would fall from my niche in the sky. His dying would become real. Grief would swallow me.

My eyes wandered to the stacks of bones at the back of the cave neatly separated into skulls, ribs, long bones, short bones, fingers, toes—countless dead people mingled together in a morbid communion. No one who’d been buried here, it seemed, had the means to purchase an ossuary to hold their bones.
This
was a pauper’s tomb.

We were fortunate to have any tomb at all. Rome’s custom was to leave a crucified man hanging on the cross for weeks, then toss his body into a pit to finish decaying. Jesus would’ve suffered that abomination except for the goodness of a stranger.

He’d been no older than Jesus and adorned in an expensive robe and finely dyed blue hat. He’d approached us moments after a soldier thrust a spear into Jesus’s side to ensure his death. The act had sickened and appalled me, and I swung away, turning my back on the gruesome scene, almost careening into the man. His eyes were red and weighted.

He said, “I’ve located a tomb not far from here. If I can convince the centurion to turn over Jesus’s body, my servants will take him there.”

I eyed him. “Who are you, sir?”

“I’m one of Jesus’s followers. My name is Joseph. I come from Arimathea. You women must be his family.”

Mary stepped forward. “I’m his mother.”

“And I’m his wife,” I told him. “Your kindness is welcome.”

He bowed slightly and strode off, tugging a money bag from his sash. He placed a denarius in the centurion’s palm. I watched it grow into a column of silver.

When he returned to us, he held out more denarii. “Go into the city
and purchase what you need to prepare the body. But you must hurry. The centurion wishes to hand over the body quickly.” He glanced up into the half-light. “And he has to be buried before sunset. The Sabbath will be upon us soon.”

Salome scooped the coins from his hand, and grabbing Mary of Bethany by the hand, she pulled her down the hillside. “We’ll wait for you here. Be quick!” he called after them.

Now, in the cave, the lamp flames darted. Light spattered across Jesus’s skin.
His skin. His.
I reached out and touched it. I let my fingers brush the inside of his elbow. Then I dampened the towel and wiped the dirt and blood from his hands, arms, chest, and face, from the coils of his ears and the creases in his neck, all the while falling and falling, slamming into myself, into the boundless pain.

We rubbed his skin with olive oil, then anointed him with nothing but myrrh. It had been the only sweet spice Salome had been able to obtain in the city at the late hour, and this had dismayed Mary. “When the Sabbath ends,” she said, “we’ll return to the tomb and anoint him more properly with cloves and aloe and mint.”

I watched Salome draw a broken wooden comb through his hair. I’d witnessed his slaughter and not a tear had crossed my cheeks, but I cried in silence now at the comb passing through his locks.

Mary of Magdala grasped the edges of the shroud and drew it slowly down the length of him, but in that last instant before his face was gone from me, I bent and kissed both his cheeks.

“I will meet you in the place called Deathless,” I whispered.

That evening Martha turned the Sabbath meal into the funeral feast, but no one cared to eat. We were sitting on the damp courtyard tiles, huddled beneath a canopy. All around us were the coming dark and the plop of rain
drizzle . . . and silence, a great stunned silence. No one had spoken of Jesus since we’d left the tomb. We had squeezed through the cave opening, where Lavi waited for us, heaved the stone across it, and left our voices inside. Then we’d walked slowly to Bethany, shocked, weary, mute with horror—I, still barefoot, and Lavi, carrying my sandals.

I looked at them now—Mary and Salome; Lazarus, Mary, and Martha; Mary of Magdala, Tabitha, and Lavi. They stared back with solemn, devastated faces.

Jesus is dead.

I wished for Yaltha. For Diodora and Skepsis. I forced myself to picture them beneath the tamarisk tree beside the little stone hut. I tried to see the bright, white cliffs at the top of the hill, and Lake Mareotis shining at the foot of it like a piece of fallen sky. I managed to hold all of this in my mind for several moments before the ghastly memories pushed their way back in. I didn’t know how the rubble inside me could ever be put back together.

As the night drew around us, Martha lit three lamps and set them in our midst. All of their faces shone suddenly, cheeks and chins the color of honey. The rain finally stopped. Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.

I broke the silence. I told them about the letter Judas had sent summoning me home. “He wrote to me that Jesus was in danger from the authorities, but I know now that most of that danger came from Judas himself.” I hesitated, feeling a mix of disgust and shame. “It was my brother who led the Temple guard to arrest Jesus.”