The Book of Longings: A Novel (37 page)

The old man glanced at Lavi. “He would start as a low-paying apprentice and the training is rigorous. He must be able to read Greek. Can he do that?”

“I read it,” Lavi said. This news astonished me. Perhaps he’d learned to read Greek in Tiberias.

“Yes, then, I’ll do what I can,” Apollonios said.

As the old man left, Lavi whispered to me, “Would you teach me to read Greek?”

I was happy for Yaltha and for Lavi, as well—one had located a daughter and one had found possible employment—and the memory of being inside the library glowed inside me, but my mind went to Jesus, as it did almost every hour of every day.
What are you doing now, Beloved?
I could see no resolution to our separation.

Crossing the city on our way back to Haran’s, we came upon an artist painting a portrait of a woman’s face on a piece of limewood. The woman sat before him in a small public courtyard, adorned in her finery. A little crowd of bystanders had gathered to watch. As we joined them, I remembered with a sickening roll in my stomach the hours I’d spent posing for the mosaic in Antipas’s palace.

“She’s posing for a mummy portrait,” Yaltha explained. “When she dies, the image will be placed over her face inside the coffin. Until then, it will hang in her house. It’s meant to preserve the memory of her.”

I’d heard of Egyptians putting odd articles into their coffins—food, jewelry, clothes, weapons, a myriad of things that might be needed in the afterlife—but this was new to me. I watched as the artist painted her face life-size and perfect on the wood.

I sent Lavi to inquire what a mummy portrait costs. “The artist says it’s fifty drachmae,” Lavi reported.

“Go and ask if he will paint mine next.”

Yaltha gave me a surprised, half-amused look. “You wish to have a mummy portrait for your coffin?”

“Not for my coffin. For Jesus.”

Perhaps also for myself.

T
HAT NIGHT I PLACED
the portrait on the table near my bed, propping it beside my incantation bowl. The artist had painted me as I was,
ornament-less, wearing the worn tunic, a plain braid dangling over my shoulder and wisps of hair loose about my face. It was just me, Ana. But there was something about it.

I took the picture in my hands, holding it up to the lamp to study it more closely. The paint gleamed in the light and the face I saw seemed like that of a newfound woman. Her eyes looked out levelly. Her chin was raised in a bold tilt. There was strength in her jaw. The corners of her lips were lifted.

I told myself that when I returned to Nazareth and saw Jesus again, I would make him close his eyes, then place the portrait in his hands. He would look at it with awe, and I would tell him with feigned seriousness, “If there should be another threat of my arrest and I’m sent once more to Egypt, this will ensure you won’t forget my face.” Then I would laugh and he would laugh.

Standing at the door to the lotus garden, I listened to the evening sky creak and rumble. All day the heat had been like a viscous film coating the air, but now suddenly wind gusted and rain poured down, black needles rattling the date palms and pummeling the surface of the pond, and then dissipating almost as quickly as they came. I stepped out into the darkness, where a bird, a wagtail, sang.

For the past three weeks, I’d spent my mornings in the scriptorium teaching Lavi to read Greek instead of attending to my usual duties. Even Thaddeus had joined in the tutoring, insisting that our student begin by copying the alphabet over and over on the back of old, discarded parchments. I was careful to destroy the evidence of his lessons lest Haran discover it on his return. Pamphile burned so many alphas, betas, gammas, and deltas in the kitchen, I told her there’d never been a more scholarly oven in all of Egypt. By the second week, Lavi had
memorized the inflections of the verbs and nouns. By the third he was locating verbs in the sentence. Very soon he would be reading Homer.

Most afternoons, Yaltha and I had scampered about Alexandria, roaming the markets, gaping at the Caesareum, the gymnasium, and the splendors along the harbor, and returning twice to the library. We’d visited every Isis temple in the city but one, Chaya’s. Again and again I’d asked my aunt why she avoided it and each time she’d answered the same:
I’m not yet ready.
The last time I’d pestered her about it, she’d bitten off the answer and spit it at me. I’d not asked again. Ever since, I’d carried remnants of hurt, confusion, and exasperation.

The wagtail flew. The garden stilled. Hearing footsteps, I turned to find Apion approaching through the palms.

“I’ve come to forewarn you,” he said. “A message arrived this day from Haran. He returns early. I expect him in two days.”

I looked up at the sky, the moonless, starless night. “Thank you for informing me,” I said without expression.

When he departed, I raced to Yaltha’s bedchamber with my anger spilling over. I burst upon her without a knock. “Chaya is just across the city, yet all this time has passed and you’ve not gone to her. Now Apion has informed me Haran will be back in two days. I thought Chaya was the reason you came to Egypt! Why do you avoid her?”

She gathered her night shawl about her neck. “Come here, Ana. Sit down. I know you’ve struggled to understand my delay. I’m sorry. I can only tell you that on the day we spoke to Apollonios . . . even before we departed the library courtyard, I became possessed by the fear that Chaya may not want to be found. Why would an Egyptian woman who serves Isis want to be claimed by the Jewish mother who abandoned her? I became afraid she’d reject me. Or worse, reject herself.”

I’d thought of my aunt as invincible, impervious—someone assailed by life, but somehow unmaimed by it—but I saw her suddenly as a person of flaws and bruises like myself. There was an odd relief in it.

“I didn’t realize,” I said. “I shouldn’t have judged you.”

“It’s all right, Ana. I’ve judged me, too. It isn’t as if this worry hadn’t crossed my mind earlier, but I’ve never let it fully settle on me until now. I suppose my own need to find Chaya and make right what I’d done by leaving her didn’t allow me to consider that she might turn me away. I fear losing her all over again.” She paused. The candlelight wavered in an unknown breath of wind, and when she spoke again, I caught the same wavering in her voice. “I didn’t consider the need she might have . . . to remain as she is.”

I started to speak, but stopped myself.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Speak your mind.”

“I was going to repeat what you said to me, that resisting a fear only emboldens it.”

She smiled. “Yes, I resisted my fear, too.”

“What will you do? There’s little time left.”

Outside the rain had started again. We listened to it for a while. Finally she said, “I can’t know if Chaya wants to be found or how finding her might change either of us, but it’s the truth that matters, isn’t it?” She leaned over and blew out the candle. “Tomorrow we’ll go to Isis Medica.”

I stood naked on the limestone slab in the bathing room, shivering as Pamphile poured unheated water over my torso, arms, and legs. “Do you delight in torturing me?” I said, my skin rising up in tiny bumps of protest. I did truly appreciate the Egyptians’ conveniences, their bathing rooms and miraculous stone-seat privies with water running beneath to flush the waste—but how hard was it to heat the bathwater?

Setting down the pitcher, Pamphile handed me a drying towel. “You Galileans have little forbearance,” she said, grinning.

“Forbearance is all we
do
have,” I retorted.

Back in my chamber, freshly scrubbed and flesh tingling, I donned the new black tunic I’d bought in the market, tying it snugly under my breasts with a green ribbon, then draped a red linen mantle about my shoulders. I would wear it despite the heat outside, which was atrocious. At Pamphile’s insistence, I allowed her to line my eyes with a green pigment, then wrap my braid into a little tower on top of my head.

“You could pass for an Alexandrian woman,” she said, leaning back to take me in. The notion seemed to please her enormously.

Alexandrian.
After Pamphile left, I turned the word over and over in my head.

Stepping into the sitting room, I heard Yaltha in her chamber, singing as she dressed.

When she finally stepped into the sitting room, my breath caught. She wore her new tunic, as well, cerulean like the sea, and I saw that Pamphile had tended my aunt, too, for she had streaks of black paint beneath her eyes, and her graying hair was freshly plaited and fastened in intricate coils. She looked like one of the lion-headed Goddesses painted on the wall in the library.

“Shall we go and find my daughter?” she said.

I
SIS
M
EDICA APPEARED
in the Royal Quarter near the harbor like an island unto itself. Catching my first glimpse of it from a distance, I slowed my steps to take in a complex array of walls, tall pylons, and rooftops. It was more expansive than I’d imagined.

Yaltha pointed. “See the pediment of that large building over there? That’s the main temple to Isis. The smaller ones are minor temples to other divinities.” She squinted, trying to make sense of the maze. “Over there—that’s the healing sanctuary where Chaya attends, and behind it,
not visible, is the medical school. People come from as far as Rome and Macedonia to find cures here.”

“Have you ever sought a cure there?” I asked.

“No. I’ve been inside the walls only once and then merely out of curiosity. The Jewish citizenry doesn’t go there. It’s a transgression of the first commandment.”

Last night I’d learned to love her weakness; today it was her daring that excited me. “Did you go inside Isis’s temple?”

“Of course. I remember there was an altar there where people left little statuettes of Isis as offerings.”

“And the healing sanctuary? Did you go there, too?”

She shook her head. “To enter, one must present an illness and be prepared to remain through the night. Those seeking cures are put into an opium sleep in which they dream their cure. It’s said that sometimes Isis herself comes in their dreams and presents cures.”

So strange was all of this, it left me speechless, but inside me, there was a kind of humming.

T
HE OUTER COURTYARD
swarmed with people making music. Sistrums rattled and flutes piped out soft curling sounds that spiraled like ribbons through the air. We watched a line of women wind through the scarlet pillars of the colonnade, their dance like a bright flowing centipede.

Yaltha, who understood the Egyptian tongue, cocked her head and listened to their song. “They’re marking the birth of Isis’s son, Horus,” she said. “We seem to have come on a day of celebration.”

She tugged me past the courtyard and dancers, small unnamed temples, and wall reliefs painted with blue flowers, yellow moons, and white ibises, until we arrived at the main temple, a marble structure that looked more Greek than Egyptian. We stepped inside into a foggy cloud of
incense. Kyphi billowed out of the censers—the smell of wine-soaked raisins, mint, honey, and cardamom. Around us, a sea of people strained their necks for a glimpse of something at the far end. “What have they come to see?” I whispered.

Shaking her head, Yaltha led me to a low niche in the rear wall and we climbed up to stand inside it. I swept my eyes over the top of the crowd, and it was not some
thing
the throng craned to see, but some
one
. She stood erect in a robe of yellow and red with a black sash from her left shoulder to her right hip. It was covered in silver stars and red-gold moons. On her head, a crown of golden cow horns.

I’d never seen anyone so mesmerizing. “Who is she?”

“She would be a priestess of Isis, perhaps the highest of them. She wears Isis’s crown.”

The doll-like statuettes Yaltha had mentioned were heaped on the floor around the altar like mounds of washed-up shells.

The priestess’s voice came suddenly like a cymbal clap. I leaned toward Yaltha. “What is she saying?”

Yaltha translated. “O lady Isis, Goddess of all things, you bring the sun from rising to setting and light the moon and the stars. You bring the Nile over the land. You are the lady of light and flames, the mistress of water . . .”

I began to sway with her monotonic chant. When it ended, I said, “Aunt, I’m glad you allowed your fears about finding Chaya to thwart you for so long. If we’d come any sooner, we would’ve missed this great spectacle.”

She looked at me. “Just take care not to fall off the niche and break your skull.”

An attendant in a white tunic made her way to the altar, holding a bowl of water, taking feather steps as she labored to keep the liquid from spilling over the sides. The priestess took the bowl and poured the libation over a colorfully painted statue of Isis that stood on the altar. The waterfall splashed over the Goddess, spilling onto the floor. “Lady Isis, bring forth your divine son. Bring forth the rising of the Nile . . .”

When the ceremony ended, the priestess left the chamber through a narrow door at the back of the temple, and the multitude moved toward the entrance. Yaltha, however, made no effort to climb down from the wall niche. She stared straight ahead with rapt concentration. I called her name. She didn’t answer.

Gazing in the direction she stared, I saw nothing unusual. Only the altar, the statue, the bowl, the attendant drying the wet floor with a cloth.

Yaltha stepped down and strode against the crowd, as I scurried behind. “Aunt? Where are you going?”

She stopped a few paces from the altar. I had no understanding of what was happening. Then I looked at the attendant, who was lifting herself from the dried floor, her dark hair like brambles.

In a voice so muffled I almost didn’t hear it, Yaltha said, “Diodora?”

And her daughter turned and looked at her.

D
IODORA
LAID HER CLOTH
on the altar. “Do you have some need of me, lady?” she asked in Greek. She bore a startling resemblance to me, not only in the kinks and whorls of her hair, but in the black eyes too large for her face, the small pursed mouth, the tall thin body like a gathering of willow boughs. We looked more like sisters than cousins.