“The times are bad enough, but they are the times in which we are compelled to live.”
“But you are right not to bend to them.”
“But I would not be right to involve you in this.”
Noah looked about him, as if trying to memorize every detail of this moment, and then his eyes settled on Deborah’s face.
“I think it wisest that we do not see each other again. The dangers are too great.”
“Women are braver than men,” she said, smiling almost defiantly. “If you can face this trouble, so can I.”
“Deborah, you don’t understand. This man—”
“Be quiet, Noah. You will not move me.”
She offered her hands to him again and he took them eagerly. They stood there like that, saying nothing, wishing only to behold each other and to be possessed of this moment.
“Won’t you sit down?” she asked, as if they had just then encountered each other and no word of this trouble had been spoken. He released her hands and they took their places on the bench, not touching, their bodies at least a span apart.
Good, she thought. They were back at the start. They still had a courtship to go through, and many things to learn about each other, but a beginning had been made.
They talked through a good share of the afternoon, although neither of them was conscious of the passage of time. In an offhand way, as if he were merely making idle conversation, Noah told her about Sepphoris, which, to a village girl who had never journeyed ten miles from her birthplace, seemed a city of wonders. He told her about his grandfather in Nazareth and his sister, Sarah. She listened, and watched the gestures he made with his hands, which were at once strong, thick with muscle, and wonderfully clever. She noticed for the first time the tiny, star-shaped scars that must have been made by sparks from the forge. She remembered how gently those hands had held her own.
Eventually, when the sun was halfway through its descent, it seemed to occur to both of them that it was time to part.
“I had best take my leave,” Noah said, seemingly unsure, all at once, whether he had overstayed his welcome.
“Come again this evening.” She could see the question in his eyes: What will your neighbors think? She wanted him to know that she did not care what they thought. “By then, I assume, you will be hungry again.”
They both laughed. It seemed strange and wonderful to her that she could share a joke with this man.
She led him through the house to the front door and, under the eyes of Hannah, they said their good-byes, just as if no understanding existed between them. But Hannah was not deceived.
Deborah turned to her as soon as the door was closed.
“He is coming again for dinner,” she said, not even trying to conceal her excitement. “We must have something special.”
“I told you he liked you,” Hannah said.
What could Deborah do except laugh?
“Well, it seems you were right.”
* * *
Dinner went well, unconstrained by the presence of Hannah, who, like a good servant, seemed to hear and see nothing. Rather than reclining on couches, they sat at a table, which allowed them to face one another.
“On my way here, I called upon Simon,” Noah announced casually, as if it were of no particular concern. “He says he expects Joshua’s return within the next few months, so I suppose I shall see him. I hope to persuade him to return to Nazareth, at least for a visit. His father is ill.”
“What is wrong with him?”
“His lungs—my grandfather thinks he won’t last the winter. This turn of Joshua’s is a great grief to him.”
“Why? Joshua is a man of God.”
“Joseph doesn’t want him to be a man of God. He wants him to be a carpenter. He wants him to remarry and father little carpenters. He thinks Joshua has lost his wits. What his son is doing makes no sense to him.”
“Does it make sense to you?”
“I can see why it would make sense to Joshua, and that is much the same thing. But I am enough like his father that it causes me to worry. For one thing, the fate of John shows what the world does to ‘men of God.’”
“Will Joshua go to see his father, do you think?”
Noah appeared to consider the question.
“Yes,” he said finally, “and I may accompany him, for I think we are both safe enough in the villages.”
“Will you stay here long?”
“Only a day or two—lest my presence become irksome to you.”
It was spoken jestingly, but Deborah sensed that behind the jest was a real anxiety.
“If I were to consult only my own wishes, you would stay even longer.” Her own boldness made her blush. “Oh, what must you think of me.”
Noah reached out to cover her hand with his own.
“I think you are everything I could wish you to be,” he said.
“I feel so awkward.”
“It is an awkward situation.” He lifted his hand away from hers at what struck her as precisely the right moment. “Neither of us is a child, and you have no family to make everything run smooth. We must fend for ourselves, and find our way to each other as best we can.”
“Will you really leave so soon?”
“Yes. Caleb knows about Capernaum. I doubt if I am important enough to him to mount a search, but he might inquire here. No one knows of my presence except you, Simon, and the innkeeper, but it is dangerous.”
“Where will you go?”
“To the gentile cities—probably Canatha and Hippos. Caleb’s reach does not extend that far.”
“When will you come back?”
“Soon.” He touched the back of her hand with his middle finger. “It is not in my power to stay away.”
14
Noah lingered in Capernaum through the next day, although hardly anyone there would have been aware of his presence. The walls of Deborah’s garden concealed him, and only she and Hannah knew he was there and not off trading, as he had told his landlord.
“My head apprentice believes I am on my way to Ptolemais,” he told her. “I seem to be developing a talent for duplicity.”
“Do you really believe they might attempt to hunt you down?”
“It seems possible.” Noah shrugged, implying that the mind of a man like Caleb was unknowable. “It strikes me as a reasonable precaution to sow as much confusion as I can.”
He took Deborah’s hand. It did not seem too dreadful a liberty.
“In any case, I would rather not have anyone know that I spent this day courting you.”
It would be several months before the first buds began to appear, but the arbor, as if it retained the memory of every past season, was fragrant. The air was deliciously cool.
All the time they sat together on the bench, he held her hand. A few times, when he began to imagine that she might find it irksome to be thus imprisoned in his grasp, he would relinquish it, but after a minute or two she would slip her hand back inside his.
Intimacy can grow in the spaces between words, in the silences. It can be discovered in the things that are not said, in what is not revealed or even implied. Thus Noah came to understand that for a long time Deborah had not known happiness. From their first meeting, he had been struck by her stillness, her apparent tranquility, but that was not the same as happiness. She might never bring herself to tell him of her sorrows, but he felt their presence in her life.
When the sun was down but there was still enough light to see, he slipped his box from underneath the bench.
“I had best be getting back to my friend Ezra,” he said. “I will have dinner at the inn and bore him with stories of my adventures. I’ll leave for the north at first light tomorrow, and I think it best we not see each other again until I return.”
And then he was gone.
* * *
As usual, when there were no guests, Deborah and Hannah ate their dinner together at a small table in the kitchen. For half the meal neither of them spoke.
The same subject was in both their minds, but perhaps each hoped that the other would break the silence.
Finally Hannah, who was younger, could restrain herself no longer.
“I had thought you would have a guest for dinner,” she said at last. “You haven’t quarreled, have you?”
“Is that what you thought?” Deborah asked, as if the idea amused her. “No, we haven’t quarreled. In fact, I think that today has been the happiest day of my life.”
So it had progressed as far as that. Hannah was surprised but not amazed. That her mistress might wish to remarry had of course occurred to her, and that she might be prepared to settle for this man Noah from faraway Sepphoris had not seemed unlikely. After all, Hannah, who was all of sixteen, could understand the desperation that must inevitably seize upon a childless woman of twenty-four. But in her heart of hearts, she found her mistress’s enthusiasm remarkable. Noah from Sepphoris was not her ideal. For one thing, he wasn’t tall.
“So you like him, then?” she said, merely to keep the conversation from lapsing into silence. “Is he agreeable?”
“Yes. He is agreeable.” Deborah actually laughed. “He is the most agreeable man in the world.”
Hannah must have look unconvinced.
“What? You don’t like him?” Deborah reached out and patted her hand, as if reassuring a child. “Tell me.”
“I like him…”
“But…”
“Well, he is not as handsome as some. The Master, for instance.”
“The Master?” Deborah could but shake her head. “We all love the Master. He is a great and good man, a prophet. But the Master loves only God. It is not in him, I think, to love a woman the way a wife wishes to be loved by her husband.
“Besides, I think Noah is handsome—handsome enough. I will never tire of his face. And he knows how to talk to a woman. He makes me feel that he sees me. Not just as flesh but as a person. When I am with him I feel human. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you are in love with him,” Hannah answered, letting her eyes grow wide in mock astonishment. “Obviously I have missed something.”
Then they both laughed.
* * *
The next day Deborah was in a trance of happiness. Noah was gone, on the road to places she had never been, and all she wanted was to be alone with her thoughts of him. In the morning, when, as was her custom, she went to the warehouse, she gave no orders, only smiled and was agreeable to everyone. She spent the rest of the day on the bench beneath her grape arbor, where she had sat with Noah, thinking over every word that he had said, remembering every gesture of his beautiful, expressive hands.
How could anyone think he was not handsome? He was the most perfect man in the world.
This dreamlike state was brutally interrupted just after noon of the next day, when Hannah returned from the market.
“Lady, there is a stranger in the village. He is asking questions about Noah.”
“Do you really believe they might attempt to hunt you down?”
“It seems possible.”
She had not so much forgotten as put aside what he had said of his danger. In memory, the bruises on his face had faded, only to be recalled with conscious effort.
She had been a little fool, besotted with blind happiness, and now his enemies had come for him.
Hannah, to whom the arrival of an unknown man asking about Noah was merely an item of news, was startled by her mistress’s reaction.
After a moment Deborah remembered herself and smiled.
“Did you see him?” she asked, as if the matter were of no importance.
“No. I only heard about him. Simon’s wife told me.”
“Did she see him?”
“Yes. He came to her house. Lady, is something wrong?”
“No, I don’t think so.” By sheer force of will, Deborah assumed a calm she did not feel. “It is probably some friend of his from Sepphoris.”
“He came by boat, Lady. From Tiberias.”
“Did he?”
She had no right to involve Hannah in this. Hannah must know nothing. Deborah waited through the longest quarter hour of her life and then put on her shawl.
“I am going to the warehouse,” she announced.
“He came by boat. From Tiberias.”
The Tetrarch ruled in Tiberias. He had built the city on the Sea of Kinneret, purely for his own pleasure. Whoever this stranger might be, he was no friend.
At that hour the streets were nearly empty. The men were fishing and the women were in their homes—or at one of the village’s three wells, where they could fill their jugs and gossip.
Deborah had grown up poor in Capernaum, so she knew everyone. When she married Bukkiah and became wealthy, she had not forgotten her birth, had made no attempt to transform herself into a great lady, and so she had remained, to most people, Deborah the clerk’s daughter and still one of them.
As a result, she was not an unusual sight on the village squares and no one would feel any reluctance about sharing the news with her.
Of course, everyone knew about the stranger.
“Very much the aristocrat, though he tried to hide it,” said Orpah the net maker’s wife, who had been a friend of Deborah’s mother. “He dressed like a farmer, but his clothes were so new I doubt he’d ever worn them before. And his sandals … Very grand, very grand indeed. Those sandals would have cost my Remiel two months’ earnings.”
Orpah had put on weight since her sixth child, so there was something truly imposing about her indignation over the sandals.
“What do you suppose he wants?” Deborah asked, with an almost childlike innocence of manner.
“Some other foreigner,” Orpah answered, with contempt. “No one I ever heard of. They should stay away—all of them. They have no business here.”
* * *
Since many people drew their water from the lake, there were only three wells in Capernaum, and village life revolved around the wells. If you wanted the news—who had died in the night or had a new baby or had come into a little money—you visited the wells. Thus, it was not very long before Deborah had learned everything the village knew about the stranger from Tiberias, even to where he was at that precise moment.
“He is in there,” said Jahleel, an old man, good for no work, who lived with his grandson. He spent his days hanging about the western well, watching the women and drinking weak beer. He was pointing across the square to a door beneath a green awning, a few tables scattered about in front of it. The entrance to Ezra’s tavern.
“He has been in there…” Jahleel glanced up at the sun and then down at the shadow cast by the well’s stone rim, “oh, half an hour. Though what he finds to talk about with Ezra is beyond me. Ezra’s conversation is as bland as his beer.”
This observation was followed by a series of high-pitched squeaks, only just identifiable as laughter.
Deborah had but to linger, to mingle with the village women as they waited to fill their water jugs, until the door to Ezra’s tavern opened and the stranger came outside.
Orpah had been right—the man was in disguise. His tunic was simple homespun, but it was too new. His beard was longer than the village average, and carefully cut. As he walked away, Deborah noted the glint of a ring on his left hand. Orpah had even been right about the sandals. He was a rich man from the city, trying to seem like someone else.
Deborah followed him, keeping in the shadows of buildings and out of sight. He went straight down to the water, climbed into a boat that was too sleek to have been built for fishing, and was rowed away. The boat was heading south, toward Tiberias.
And the last person this stranger from Herod’s city had spoken to was Ezra.
Was that significant? Deborah wasn’t sure. She decided it was time to go home.
* * *
“Hannah, did you mention to anyone that Noah was here? You wouldn’t have been doing anything wrong, so I won’t be angry. However, I need to know.”
/> Hannah shook her head, suddenly on the verge of tears. “No, Mistress. I would never…”
Deborah embraced her, the way one would a frightened child.
“I didn’t think you would, but I had to be sure. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mistress—no.”
There was no escaping it. An explanation had to be made.
“Noah has been protecting the Master, and now evil men want to hurt him. The stranger today was one of those.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t want you to do anything,” Deborah told her, kissing her on the forehead. “If someone asks you a question about Noah, or the Master, tell them the truth. I don’t think anyone will ask, but you know nothing that can hurt either of them. For the rest, put this thing from your mind.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
Deborah retired to her balcony. The afternoon was more than half over. In a few hours the fishermen would be returning and Capernaum would come back to life. At sundown the Sabbath would begin, during which nothing could be done.
Her mind kept returning to Ezra.
Why? If a stranger comes to a village, seeking information, where would he go if not to the tavern keepers? It was an obvious choice.
How long had the man been among them? Perhaps three hours. He had gone to Simon’s house first and talked to his wife. Why? Because he knew that Simon was a follower of the Master and that Noah was the Master’s cousin.
No, no. She was starting at the wrong end. The real question was, what had brought this man to Capernaum? Why did he appear just two days after Noah had left?
Answer: because someone had sent a message to Tiberias that Noah was here.
There could have been nothing easier. Boats went between Capernaum and Tiberias every day. By water, the trip was only a few hours.
So who had sent the message? Who knew that Noah was in Capernaum?
Herself and Hannah. Simon. Ezra. Anyone else, even if they saw him in the street, would probably not know his name.
Would Simon betray the Master’s cousin and friend? No. Simon had his faults, but treachery was not among them.
That left Ezra. And his tavern had been the last place the stranger visited.
The Ironsmith Page 14