The Book of Longings: A Novel (21 page)

I heard the slap of sandals in the courtyard, then women’s voices, high-pitched and eager. “Coming . . . We’re coming.”

Tabitha groaned. I said, “You’re safe now.”

Throughout the long, torturous day, Tabitha had appeared inert, as if sleeping, rousing a little only when the men transferred her from one to the other, and each time I’d patted her face and offered her water. The Samaritan had parted with us a short while before we’d reached Bethany, pressing a copper coin into my hands, a sesterce. “See that she has lodging and food,” he’d said.

I began to protest, but Jesus spoke up. “Let him give his coin.” I dropped it into my pouch.

Now the creak of a latch and two women appeared, short, thick-waisted with round, plump faces that were nearly identical. Their exuberance faded as they glimpsed Tabitha, but they asked no questions and hurried us to a room, where we laid her on a pillowed bed mat.

“I’ll tend her,” the one called Mary said to us. “Go, take the evening meal with Martha and Lazarus. You must be hungry and tired.”

When I tarried, reluctant to leave Tabitha, Jesus gave me a little tug.

Lazarus was not as I’d expected. He was slight of build with a sallow face and weak, watery eyes. So unlike his sisters. He and Jesus greeted each other like brothers, kissing cheeks and embracing. We gathered about a round slat table that rested on the floor, an arrangement new to me. In Sepphoris we’d reclined on plush couches around a long table. In Nazareth we had no table at all, but held bowls in our lap and sat on the ground.

“Who’s the injured girl?” Lazarus asked.

“Her name is Tabitha,” I answered. “I knew her as a girl in Sepphoris. She was my friend, my only friend. She was sent away to live with relatives, who sold her to a man in Jericho. I don’t know how she came to be beaten and left on the side of the road.”

Lazarus replied, “She may stay with us as long as she wishes.”

T
HE HOUSE WAS
clay-baked with tiled floors, dyed woolen mats, and its own mikvah, an abode far better than our house in Nazareth, but there was only one room for guests and that night Jesus slept on the roof, while I made my bed beside Tabitha.

While she slept, I lay in the dark and listened to her breath, a croaking sound that erupted at times into puffs and moans. Her small, lissome body, the one that had danced with such grace and abandon, was bony and clenched as if in a perpetual state of recoil. I could see the protuberances of her cheekbones like sharp little hills on her face. Mary had bathed her and dressed her in a clean tunic and covered her wound with a plaster of olive oil and onion to draw the pus. The sour smell of it hung over the room. I longed to speak to her. She’d wakened earlier, but only long enough to drink a full cup of lemon water.

I thought of Lazarus’s words. Until he’d spoken them, I’d not considered where Tabitha would go. What would become of her? If I had my way, I’d take her to live with us in Nazareth, but even if the entire family welcomed her, which was unlikely given that Judith was Judith and James was James, there was little room left in our cramped compound. Already Yaltha slept in the storeroom. Simon was betrothed to a girl named Berenice, who would soon join the household, and it seemed likely Salome might return any day as a widow.

When Tabitha stirred on the mat, I lit the lamp and stroked her cheek. “I’m here. It’s Ana.”

“I ’ough I ’ream you.”

What is she saying?
What was left of her tongue could provide only the bare rudiments of a word—I would have to guess at the rest. As she repeated herself, I concentrated. “You thought you dreamed me?”

She nodded, smiling a little, not taking her eyes from me.
How long
, I thought,
has it been since she was listened to, much less understood?

“My husband and I found you on the Jericho road.”

She touched her bandage, then gazed about the room.

“You’re in Bethany, in the house of my husband’s closest friends,” I told her, and realized suddenly she would think my husband was Nathaniel. “I was wed two years ago, not to Nathaniel, but to a stonemason and carpenter from Nazareth.” Her eyes brightened with curiosity—the twitch of her old self still inside there—but her lids were weighted with fatigue and the chamomile Mary had put in her lemon water. “Sleep now,” I told her. “I’ll tell you more later.”

I dipped my finger in the bowl of olive oil Mary had left and touched it to her forehead. “I anoint you, Tabitha, friend of Ana,” I whispered, and watched the memory float into her face.

In the days leading up to Passover, the wound on Tabitha’s head formed a healing scab. Strength seeped into her limbs. She left her bed and ventured into the courtyard to take meals with the rest of us, eating ravenously, at times laboring to swallow. Her face started to lose its hills and valleys.

I scarcely left my friend’s side. When we were alone, I filled the silence with stories of what had transpired since we’d parted . . . burying my scrolls, meeting Jesus at the cave, Nathaniel’s death, befriending Phasaelis, Herod Antipas and the mosaic. She listened with parted lips, offering up little grunts, and when I described the scheme to make me
Antipas’s concubine and how close I came to being stoned, she let out a cry, took my hand, and kissed each knuckle in turn. “I’m scorned in Sepphoris and Nazareth both,” I said. I wanted her to know she was not alone—I was a mamzer, too.

She prodded me to speak of Jesus, and I related the strange way I had come to marry him and the sort of man he was. I told her about the compound in Nazareth, about Yaltha, Judith, my mother-in-law. I talked and talked, but always pausing to say, “Now, tell me, what has your life been like these last years?” and each time she waved away my query.

Then one afternoon, as Tabitha, Mary, and I stood together in the courtyard gazing out at the olive trees in the Kidron Valley, she abruptly began to speak. We’d just finished preparing the bitter herbs for the Passover meal—horseradish, tansy, and horehound, symbols of the bitterness our people experienced during their slavery in Egypt—and I couldn’t help but think that was what provoked her to blurt out her own tribulation.

She spoke a garbled sentence I couldn’t interpret.

“You ran away?” Mary responded. The two of them had grown close during the hours Mary had spoon-fed her stew.

Tabitha’s head bobbed furiously. Through broken words and gesticulation, she told us she’d run away from the man in Jericho who’d purchased her. She mimicked slaps to her face and arms that had been delivered by the man’s wife.

“But where were you running to?” I asked.

She labored to pronounce Jerusalem. Then she cupped her hands into a bowl and lifted them up as if begging.

“You meant to become a beggar in Jerusalem? Oh, Tabitha.”

Mary said, “You will not have to beg on the streets. We’ll make certain of that.”

Tabitha smiled at us. She never spoke of it again.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I heard a high-pitched pinging inside the house. I was in the courtyard helping Martha bake the unleavened bread for Passover, while Jesus had gone off with Lazarus to purchase a lamb from a Pharisee merchant on the outskirts of Bethany. Tomorrow Jesus and I would take the poor creature to Jerusalem to be sacrificed on the Temple altar as required, then bring it home for Martha to roast.

Ping-ping.
I set down the dough bowl and followed the sound to Tabitha’s room. My friend sat on the floor, holding a lyre, plucking each string one by one. Mary took her hand and brushed it across all the strings at once, setting loose a rippling sound—wind and water and bells. Tabitha laughed, eyes shining, wonder moving through her face.

Looking up at me, she lifted the lyre and pointed to Mary.

“Mary gave you the lyre?”

“I haven’t played it since I was a girl,” Mary said. “I thought Tabitha would like to have it.”

I stood there a long while and watched her experiment with the strings.
Mary, you have given her a voice.

We crossed the valley with the little lamb on Jesus’s shoulders and entered Jerusalem through the Fountain Gate near the Pool of Siloam. We planned to cleanse ourselves there before entering the Temple, but we found the pool glutted with people. A score of cripples lay on the terraces waiting for some sympathetic soul to lower them into the water.

“We can purify ourselves at one of the mikvahs near the Temple,” I said, feeling repulsed by all the infirmities and foul bodies.

Ignoring me, Jesus thrust the lamb into my arms. He lifted a paralytic boy from his litter; his legs were twisted like tree roots.

“What are you
doing
?” I said, trailing after him.

“Only what I’d want if I were the boy,” he replied, carrying him down into the water. I clutched the squirming lamb and watched as Jesus kept the child afloat while he splashed and bathed.

Naturally, his deed set off shouts and pleas from the other cripples, and I knew we would be here awhile. My husband bore every one of them into the pool.

Afterward, dripping, invigorated, Jesus delighted in chasing after me, shaking his head, imparting a spray of water that made me squeal.

W
E WOUND THROUGH
the tight alleys of the lower city with peddlers, beggars, and fortune-tellers tugging at our robes, finally moving into the upper echelons, where the wealthy citizens and priests lived in houses grander than the finest ones in Sepphoris. When we neared the Temple, the crowds swelled, along with the smell of blood and animal flesh. I wrapped my scarf over my nose, but it didn’t help much. Roman soldiers were everywhere; revolts and riots were a danger at Passover. It seemed each year some messiah or revolutionist was crucified.

I’d not laid eyes on the Temple in years, and the sight of it sprawled across the mount ahead brought me to a halt. I’d forgotten the vastness of it, the sheer splendor. Its white stones and gold filigree blazed in the sun, a spectacle of such grandiosity, it was easy to believe God dwelled there.
Does he?
I thought.
Perhaps like Sophia, he prefers a quiet stream somewhere in the valley.

As if our thoughts were conjoined, Jesus said, “The first time we met in the cave, we spoke of the Temple. Do you remember? You asked me if God lived there or if he lived inside people.”

“You answered, ‘Can he not live in both?’”

“And you said, ‘Can he not live
everywhere
? Let us set him free.’ That’s when I knew I would love you, Ana. That’s when I knew.”

A
S WE CLIMBED
the grand staircase into the Temple, the cacophony of bleating lambs in the Court of Gentiles was deafening. Hundreds of them were crowded into a makeshift enclosure, waiting to be purchased. The stench of dung burned my nostrils. The crowds pushed and shoved and I felt Jesus’s hand tighten on mine.

Approaching the tables where the merchants and money changers sat, Jesus paused a moment to stare. “There is the den of thieves,” he said to me.

We pushed our way through the Gate Beautiful into the Court of Women, then wound through the masses to the circular steps where my mother had once restrained me from going any farther.
Only men . . . only men.

“Wait for me here,” Jesus said. I watched him climb the steps and meld into the crush of men beyond the gate. The lamb was a white blur bouncing above the fray.

Jesus returned with the animal hanging lifeless about his shoulders, dribbles of blood on his tunic. I tried not to look at the animal’s eyes, two round black stones.

Passing back by the money changers’ tables, we saw an old woman weeping. She wore a widow’s robe and blew her nose on the folds of it. “I have only two sesterce,” she cried, and hearing this, Jesus stopped abruptly and turned around.

“Three are required!” the money changer snapped. “Two to purchase the lamb, one to change your money into Temple coins.”

“But I have only two,” she said, holding the coins out to him. “Please. How am I to observe Passover?”

The money changer pushed her hand away. “Go, leave me!”

Jesus’s jaw tightened, his face dark red, the color of ocher. I thought for a moment he would seize the man and give him a shake, or perhaps
give the widow our own lamb, but surely he wouldn’t deprive
us
of Passover. “Do you have the sesterce from the Samaritan?” he asked.

I pulled it from my pouch and watched as he strode over and slammed the coin onto the table before the money changer. The din was too frenetic for me to hear what Jesus was saying, but I could tell he was expounding on the shortcomings of the Temple, gesturing indignantly, the slaughtered lamb on his back, jostling about.

Can God not live everywhere? Let us set him free. That’s when I knew I would love you, Ana.

Those words welled up in me, and I remembered the story he’d told me just before we found Tabitha on the road, the one in which he’d freed the doves from their cages. I didn’t pause to think. I walked to the crowded paddock that held the lambs, undid the latch, and yanked open the gate. Out they poured, a white flood.

Frantic merchants rushed to herd them back into the pen. A man pointed at me. “There. She’s the one who opened the gate. Stop her!”

“You rob poor widows,” I shouted back and fled into the small pandemonium—lambs and people merging like two rivers, bleating and shouting.

“Stop her!”

“We must go,” I said, finding Jesus at the money changer’s table. “
Now!
”

Scooping up a passing lamb, he placed it into the widow’s arms. We hurried from the court, down the staircase, and into the street.

“Was it you who set them loose?” he asked.

“It was.”

“What possessed you?”

“
You
did,” I said.

The day we departed Bethany, I found Tabitha in her room strumming her lyre. Already she could make it sing. I paused unnoticed in the doorway as she sang a new song she seemed in the midst of composing. The best I could tell, it was about a lost pearl. When she looked up and saw me, her eyes were glittering.