The Book of Longings: A Novel (27 page)

He was met with silent stares.

I asked, “When John immerses people in the river, does it mean the same as entering the mikvah?”

Jesus let his gaze rest on me. He smiled at my effort. “According to them, it represents a far more radical cleansing than the mikvah. John’s immersion is an act of repentance, a turning away from one’s sins.”

The hush returned, even more smothering. Jesus squatted before the fire. I watched the reflection of the embers flick in his eyes and felt how incendiary our lives seemed right then. He looked very alone, almost lonely. I tried again. “This John the Immerser—does he believe that the apocalypse is upon us?”

There wasn’t one of us who didn’t know what the apocalypse meant. It would be a great catastrophe and a great ecstasy. The men spoke of it at synagogue, parsing the prophecies of Isaiah, Daniel, and Malachi. When it came, God would establish his kingdom on earth. Governments would crumble. Rome would be overthrown. Herod removed. Corrupt religious leaders driven out. The two Messiahs would appear, the kingly one from the line of David and the priestly one from the line of Aaron, who together would oversee the coming of God’s kingdom.

It would be perfect.

I didn’t know what to think of such things or of the frenzy of longing
that surrounded them. Long ago, trying to explain it to me, Yaltha said our people were desolated by so much suffering, that it created in them a deep hope for an ideal future. She thought this alone lay behind the end-time prophecies. But was she right? Jesus seemed to believe fervently in them.

He answered me, “John preaches that the day of judgment is close when God will intervene to repair the world. Already people are saying John is the Messiah priest. If that’s so, the Messiah king will appear soon.”

A tremulous feeling swept over me. Whoever this Messiah king was, he was somewhere in Judea or Galilee, going about his life. I wondered if he knew who he was, or if God had yet to break the terrible news to him.

Mary rose and began to collect our bowls and spoons. When she spoke, her voice betrayed her fears. “Son, this man you describe could be a prophet or a madman—who’s to say?”

James hurried to join in his mother’s dissuasion. “We cannot know what manner of man he is or whether the things he says are truly from God.”

Jesus stood and placed his hand on his mother’s arm. “Mother, you are right to ask these questions. James, you are right, too. Sitting here, we cannot know.”

I sensed what he was about to say. My heart quickened.

“I’ve decided to travel to Judea and discover for myself,” he said. “I will leave tomorrow at dawn.”

F
OLLOWING HIM TO OU
R ROOM
,
I was shaking with anger, furious that he would leave—no, furious that he
could
leave, while I had no such glorious freedom. I would remain here forever tending to yarn, animal dung, and wheat kernels. I wanted to scream at the sky. Did he not see
how it wounded me to be left behind, to have no freedom to go and do, to always long for
one day
?

When I stomped through the doorway, he was already preparing his travel pouch. He said, “Fetch salt-fish, bread, dried figs, cheese, olives, whatever can be spared from the storeroom. Enough for both of us.”

Both?
“You wish to take me with you?”

“I want you to come, but if you’d rather stay here and milk the goat . . .”

I flung myself at him, covering his face with kisses.

“I would always take you with me if I could,” he said. “Besides, I wish to hear what you think of John the Immerser.”

I packed our pouches with food and waterskins, tying them with leather thongs. Remembering the ornamental brass comb I’d brought from Sepphoris more than ten years before, I pried one pouch back open and slid it inside. That and my copper mirror were the last possessions I had left of any value. The comb could be traded for food. Jesus liked to say we shouldn’t worry about what we’d eat or drink, that God fed the birds, would he not also feed us?

He would trust God. I would carry a comb.

Later, I lay awake listening to him sleep, the soft clouds of his breath filling the room. I couldn’t close my eyes for happiness. It sprouted in me like a bright green shoot. In those moments, I lost my fear that I would be left behind. If he should give up everything and follow John the Immerser—why, even if he went off to be a prophet himself—he would take me with him.

At daybreak, I sought out Yaltha to say goodbye. She slept on her mat in the storeroom, her wool cloak pulled to her chin, her head uncovered and her hair unfurled across the pillow.

On the wall behind her was a crude depiction of the Egyptian calendar she’d sketched with a piece of charred wood. Ever since I’d known her, she’d charted the twelve lunar months, marking births, deaths, and auspicious events. When we’d lived in Sepphoris, she’d drawn the calendar on papyrus using the inks I made. Here, she could only trace the wheel on a mud wall with soot. Stepping closer to examine it, I saw she’d recorded my mother’s death in the month of Ab without attaching it to a specific day. On the fourth of Tebet, the day of my birth, she’d written my name and beside it my age, twenty-four. Then I noticed something I’d not seen before. Today was the twelfth of Tishri and next to it she’d recorded the name of her lost daughter, Chaya. Today was the anniversary of Chaya’s birth. She, too, was twenty-four.

I gazed down at my aunt, watching her eyes move behind her closed lids—was she dreaming? At that moment a ray of light broke through a crack in the roof thatch, falling on her shoulder and spilling across the earthen floor to my feet.

My eyes beheld it with curiosity. A cord of light, connecting us. I saw it as a sign of the promise we’d made to each other when I was fourteen, that we would always be joined like Naomi and Ruth—where I would go, she would go; my people would be her people. But as I stood there watching, the beam of light faded, then vanished in the morning brightness.

I knelt down and kissed my aunt’s forehead. Her eyes opened.

“I’m going with Jesus.”

She lifted her hand in blessing. “May Sophia watch over you and keep you,” she said, her voice groggy with sleep.

“And you as well. Now return to your dream.” I left her quickly.

In the courtyard, Jesus was bidding Mary and Salome goodbye. “When will you return?” his mother asked.

“I cannot say for certain—two weeks, perhaps three.”

I looked back toward the storeroom and I was filled with dread. I told
myself Yaltha was well for her age and free of sickness. I told myself that if Jesus decided to follow John the Immerser and took me with him, he would take her, too; he would not separate us. I told myself the beam of light that connected us could not be broken.

It took several days to reach the village of Aenon, where we traded my brass comb for chickpeas, apricots, flatbread, and wine, restoring our empty pouches. There, we crossed into Peraea and traveled along the left bank of the Jordan. Each morning Jesus woke early and went off a short distance to pray alone, and I would lie in the green smells with day breaking over me and mutter praises to Sophia. Then I would rise, my legs snarled with cramps, my stomach panged with hunger, blisters on my heels—oh, but the world was large and mysterious and I was far from home, journeying with my beloved.

On the sixth day, we came upon John the Immerser on the pebbly banks of the river, not far from the Dead Sea. The multitude was so great, he had climbed onto a crop of stone and was shouting as he preached. Behind him, apart from the crowd, stood a band of men, twelve or fourteen of them, whom I guessed to be his disciples. Two of them seemed oddly familiar to me.

Though Jesus had prepared me for John’s appearance, I was nonetheless startled at the sight. He was barefoot and thin as thread, his black beard bouncing around on his chest and his hair swinging at his shoulders in matted coils. Strangest of all, he wore a camel-hair sackcloth, a thick, wooly garb tied at his waist that barely reached the middle of his thigh. The spectacle made me laugh, not with ridicule but with appreciation for the outlandishness of him, at the realization one could dress like this and still be adulated as one of God’s chosen.

We picked our way along the edge of the assembly, drawing as close
to him as we could. It was late in the day and clouds had piled up over the limestone hills, cooling the air. Little fires burned here and there along the shore and we drew near one of them, warming our hands as we listened.

John was urging the throng to turn away from money and greed. “What good will your coins do now? The ax of judgment is ready to strike the root of the tree. The kingdom of God is at hand.”

I watched Jesus. How he feasted on the prophet’s words—his eyes gleaming, furrows of concentration on his face, the quick breath in his chest.

I thought John’s talk about the apocalypse would never end—it unnerved me—but eventually he turned his fiery tongue to Herod Antipas, assailing him for his greed, for turning his back on God’s laws, for decorating his palace in Tiberias with a menagerie of graven images. Nor did he spare the Temple priests, accusing them of growing rich off the animal sacrifices they performed in the Temple.

I knew Jesus would ask me what I thought of this peculiar man. What would I say?
He’s eccentric and strange and I’m leery of all his talk about the end-time, but there’s something charismatic and powerful about him, and while he hasn’t captured my imagination, he has captured the people’s.

A man wearing the black-and-white robes of the Sadducees, the elite of Jerusalem, interrupted John’s scorching criticisms, shouting, “Who are you? Some say you are Elijah resurrected—who do
you
say you are? The priests have sent me here to find out.”

One of John’s disciples, one who seemed familiar to me, shouted back, “Are you a spy?”

I whirled toward Jesus. “That disciple—he’s one of the fishermen from Capernaum who sat with you in the courtyard, the one on whose boat you fished!”

Jesus had recognized him, too. “My friend, Simon.” He scanned the other disciples. “And his brother, Andrew.”

Simon continued to bellow at the Sadducee, demanding to know who he was. “Hypocrite! Leave us and go back to your lucre in Jerusalem!”

“Your friend is easily heated,” I said to Jesus.

He grinned. “I once saw him threaten to toss a man over the side of his boat for accusing his brother of miscounting the fish.”

John raised his hands to quiet the uproar. “You ask who I am—I will tell you who I am. I am a voice crying in the wilderness.”

These words, this proclamation, fairly stunned me. I thought of the words inscribed in my incantation bowl:
When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.
I closed my eyes and imagined the words rising from their ink beds and escaping over the side of the bowl. The figure I’d drawn of myself at the bottom leapt up and danced along the rim.

Turning, Jesus laid his hand on my shoulder. “What is it, Ana? Why are you crying?”

I reached up and felt the wetness on my lids. “John is a voice,” I managed to say. “What it must be to say such a thing of oneself! I’m trying to imagine it.”

W
HEN
J
OHN CALLED UPON
the multitude to repent and be cleansed of their sins, we streamed into the river with the rest of them. I didn’t go in hungry to turn back to God’s law—I went desiring to cleanse myself of fear and deadness of spirit. I went repenting of my silence and of the meagerness of my hope. I went thinking of the newborn self I’d dreamed of birthing.

I gulped the air as John pushed me gently beneath the water. Coldness closed over me. The silence of water, the weight of darkness, the belly of a whale. I opened my eyes and saw small striations of light on the river bottom and the faint glint of pebbles. A moment only, a heartbeat, and I came up splashing.

My tunic clung around me in heavy folds as I trudged to shore. Where was Jesus? He’d been near me when we entered the water—now he was lost in the morass of penitents. I began to shiver with cold. I moved along the bank, teeth chattering, calling his name. “Je-Je-Jesus.”

I spotted him out in the river, standing before John with his back to me, descending into the water. I watched the place where he disappeared, how the circles of water spread slowly outward and the surface grew quiet and still.

He bounded up, shaking his head, creating a swirling spray. He lifted his face to the sky. The sun was sinking toward the hills, pouring itself onto the river. A bird, a dove, flew out of the glare.

We bedded that night alongside the road to Jericho beneath a gnarled sycamore tree, our robes still damp with baptism. I lay beside him, drawing warmth from his body. We stared up at the branches, at clusters of yellow fruit, at the black sky smeared with stars. How awake we were, how alive. I pressed my ear to his chest and listened to the slow drumming. I thought us inseparable. A single timbre.

My mind turned to Tabitha, as it often had throughout our trip, but until now, I’d made no mention of her. I said, “We aren’t far from Bethany. Let’s go and see Tabitha and Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.”

I thought he’d be pleased at the notion, but he hesitated a long while before answering. “It’s a full day’s walk,” he said. “And in the opposite direction of Nazareth.”

“But we’re not in a hurry to return. It would be worth the detour.”

He said nothing.
Something troubles him.
He eased his arm from beneath me and sat up. “Will you wait here while I go and pray?”

“Pray? It’s the middle of the night.”

He stood and his tone grew sharp. “Don’t deter me, Ana. Please.”

“Where will you go?”

“A short distance where I can be alone.”

“You would leave me here?” I asked.

He walked away, stepping through some portal of darkness, and disappeared.

I sat there angered by my aloneness. For a moment I considered wandering off somewhere myself. I pictured his confusion and fear when he came back and discovered I was gone. He would search for me, thrashing through the mulberry brush. When he found me, I would say,
I, too, went into the night to pray. Did you think you were the only one whose spirit was restless?