Song of the Magdalene

by Donna Jo Napoli

  I was the one to bathe Abraham and feed him now. He seemed to grow smaller before my eyes. His body curled. His eyes, that cool blue, now burned from deep hollows. Yet he smiled at me often. At night we slept side by side and he whispered the canticles in my ear. And, yes, his cheeks were as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers. And, yes, his mouth was most sweet, yea, he was altogether lovely.

  I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.

  And even on the nights when fever ruled him, we were lovers in the dark. Those nights were like precious jewels, each one glittering with a perfect brilliance.

  Two weeks passed and Abraham faded day by day. I knew he was dying. We all knew, though we didn’t speak of it. Our lovemaking now was kisses on palms, breath on cheeks.

  One night before Abraham slept, he insisted I dance for him. Father and Judith and Hannah slept. The moon was rich and moonlight flooded in from the window, lighting more brightly than our oil lamp alone ever could. I held my arms out to both sides and swirled around Abraham again and again.

  “You are like a magdal,” he said. “You are tall like the tower our town Magdala was named after. My beautiful Miriam.”

  I smiled and lay down beside the man I cherished.

  “With your arms out like that, it was as though you flew. As though you were an angel.” Abraham took my hand. “Miriam, can I choose the name?”

  I pressed his hand to my cheek. I kissed the pulse of his wrist. Of course he would have realized my blood had not come that month, even though it was only a few days late. Of course he knew my rhythms. Abraham’s body might fail him, but his mind never would. His heart never would.

  “Tell me,” I whispered. Would our child be named Elon, after the oak, or Tamar, after the palm tree? Or would we have Rachel, a ewe, or Akbor, a mouse? I thought of the doves in the terebinth that shaded Mother’s grave. Would we have Yona, a dove? Or maybe Zeitan, an olive, for Father and his generous olive grove? I tensed with anticipation.

  “Isaac.”

  A biblical name. Of course. It was the name the Abraham of the scriptures had given to his son, the Abraham whose obedience to the Creator had been so tested. Isaac meant “laughter.” Yes, my Abraham had chosen well. We would have a son, of course. A child Abraham would never see. My son and my husband were losing each other. They would never share laughter. The pain was savage.

  I kissed Abraham on the mouth and his breath filled me. It was his final breath.

  • • •

  In the morning Hannah and I prepared his body for burial. Those who touch the dead are unclean, yet that uncleanliness is good, for they say it comes from charity. I knew this was true now. I anointed Abraham’s head and feet. I washed his body tenderly. But I did not do these duties out of love. I did them out of charity. The body that we buried was not Abraham. It was meaningless flesh and blood. Abraham was the spirit that had given my life direction and form since I was ten years old. Abraham was the father of the child within me. Abraham had given me his last breath and I would carry it inside for the rest of my life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Though I was tall, I was not, in fact, a magdal — a tower. I was thin. And my thinness meant that my rounded belly showed early, even at the start of summer. I wore loose black shifts, but eyes settled on my belly when I went to the well. Those eyes knew.

  Father knew, too. At first he looked at me with incredulity, then a sadness settled on him. He spoke to me of Abraham only once, the day the letter returned. Hannah blanched the instant she saw it. Father explained that he had sent word to Daniel of Abraham’s death. But the letter returned unopened. Hannah put her face in her hands and sobbed. I fed the letter to the fire and hugged Hannah from behind, resting my cheek between her shoulders blades, crooning, crooning.

  The silence that had swallowed Abraham now swallowed Daniel, as well. And Father would have it swallow Isaac, for he never spoke to me of the baby within me. I knew he thought about the blessing of a public marriage. I knew he wished that Abraham had placed the ring on my finger and spoken the words, “I take you as my wife according to the Laws of Moses and Israel.” Father would have served as witness, and surely some neighbor man would have served as well. We could have been married before the eyes of the village. That’s what Father regretted — that the village hadn’t been forced to recognize the legitimacy of our union. I heard him say those very words to Judith. Perhaps he knew that lack would be dangerous. Perhaps he had forebodings.

  We would have had a public marriage, Abraham and I, for Isaac’s sake, so that our son would be called the son of Abraham, instead of the son of Miriam, like some bastard. But Abraham had died before I’d even had the confidence to truly believe Isaac lived within me.

  But, really, I didn’t care how Isaac would be called. He’d be Father’s heir. He’d have a secure place in Magdala, no matter what. And I didn’t care what the villagers would think of me. I fully believed that their opinions didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Abraham and I had the Creator’s blessing on our union. Of that I was sure. For no baby was conceived out of greater love than Isaac.

  I think Father eventually came round to this position, as well. He gradually lost his edginess. He almost smiled as he watched me engrossed in some homekeeping task, for I helped in most of the chores these days. Once my thirty days of mourning were past, I shed the sackcloth and donned black, and even before that I went to work energetically.

  For without Abraham to tend to, my hands felt empty. Brutally empty. At first I reached for the shadows as though for my beloved. Every whisper of the wind seemed his voice. Every waft of flower perfume seemed his breath. My senses were assailed with memories of Abraham. But I knew a sad mother makes a lost child. So for Isaac’s sake, I calmed my heart. I was steadfastly dry-eyed. And I didn’t allow my hands to clutch at the shadows. I wouldn’t allow them to be empty. Oh, no. I filled them with tasks. I worked hard in the house. But I also took every opportunity to go outdoors. I insisted on fetching the water several times a day.

  Judith often went with me to the well. And sometimes we took walks together in the valley. She asked me to show her where I used to go with Abraham and she looked at everything with wide, absorbing eyes. She held my arm as we walked and she’d tell me over and over again those tales her mother had told her about our people’s past tribulations. I knew the stories by heart now and yet I never tired of hearing Judith tell them in her mellow voice that paused at just the right moments.

  She joined me now in tending the kitchen garden and she spent hours hunting one day for a wild cumin plant that she carried home carefully and transplanted into the center of our garden. I knew that she already planned how she would assemble the oil, wine, and cumin for the plaster that would go upon the wound left by circumcision. I listened to her hum as we worked the earth. Then we sat in the summer sun side by side.

  Toward the end of my fifth month of pregnancy, as Judith and I were sitting in the grasses, she put her hand on my belly. She’d done that a lot lately. “Have you felt him yet?”

  I smiled, happy to yield my secret, my surprise. “It started like a fish. A swirly, ripply fish.”

  Judith laughed. “How long ago?”

  “More than a moon.”

  She moved her face close to my belly and called out, dulcet and cooing, “Little one, little one, swim hard. Grow strong. The Sea of Galilee is yours. Only swim. Swim for your mother. Swim for your grandmother.”

  I couldn’t hold in the news any longer. “Wait!” I got up and I was running and running around Judith. Around and around.

  “Miriam!” She reached for me with both hands. “Miriam, stop!”

  “Just wait!” I ran till I could no more. Then I flopped down beside her and pulled up my shift. I took her hand.

  “Miriam, you mustn’t . . .”

  “Hush!” At first all I felt was my blood rushing, rushing. Then he stirred. “Here!” I pressed her hand to my right side. “See? He’s awake.” />
  “Oh! Oh, Miriam! I felt him.”

  “Push!”

  Judith looked at me with large eyes.

  “Go on, Judith, push as hard as you can.”

  “Little one,” she called, “here I am.” Judith pushed. She laughed. “Oh, Miriam. He kicked me!”

  “Yes. You pushed him and he pushed right back.”

  Judith’s eyes fixed on my face as the significance of Isaac’s actions sank in. “He can kick! He can move his legs!”

  “Yes, Judith.”

  “Oh, Miriam, he can move however he wants.”

  I laughed Abraham’s laugh. “Yes, Judith.”

  And we hugged and cried and hugged.

  Those were warm days, together days. I was hardly ever alone, except when I visited Abraham’s grave, which I did daily. It was near a sycamore, the closest sycamore to the terebinth where Mother was buried. I dropped little things in Abraham’s cart, which was parked in the shade of the sycamore. The tip of a jasmine branch weighted with blooms. A sparrow feather. A harp-shaped piece of wood. Things we would have passed together if we were still bumping our way through the valley. Things we would have remarked on together.

  I talked to the two of them, Mother and Abraham, daily, but briefly. For the life within me spurred me to want living contact. I never failed to ask Father about his day and to listen closely to the details of his business. If Hannah paused in chopping vegetables, I took up the knife and worked with her, shoulder to shoulder. And I relished, especially, every moment with Judith.

  It was in the valley that Judith surprised me — she asked me to sing. So there I sat, dressed in mourning, singing the canticles as though the world were nothing but beautiful. I couldn’t get Judith to sing with me, but she liked to hear me sing, that much I knew. She couldn’t hide her pleasure. She even said once that my son would be born singing. I thought of Abraham and how tone-deaf he was and I laughed. I wanted my son to sing, but, oh, how lovely it would be if he sang off-tune.

  Hannah watched me carefully. She fed me more than usual. She combed out my long hair and touched my back every time she passed by. But she rarely smiled. And every day she went to the house of prayer, just as she had done when Abraham was alive. She didn’t say it, but I thought she prayed for Isaac. She seemed to step more lightly after Isaac starting kicking within me. Perhaps her fears lessened.

  I had no fears. My future was more wonderful than I had dared to hope it could be for the past six years. My past dimmed. My present was a time of preparation among women. We wove baby sleep gowns. We talked of calling in the mohel on the eighth day after birth to perform the circumcision with his flint knife. I dreamed of rubbing my son with salt to harden his skin. He would be a bekor, a first child who is a male, the greatest pleasure. I would nurse him well and when I weaned him, we would have the most elaborate feast, in memory of the biblical Abraham’s celebration of the time Sarah stopped suckling her Isaac. We talked of the sacrifice of the lamb and the turtle dove that I would offer forty days after his birth as a burnt sacrifice. We never stopped talking.

  I could have had that child, poor sweet boy. He was healthy and would have grown strong and smart. Isaac would have been a fitting name for him. He would have been raised with a ready laugh.

  But it didn’t turn out like that.

  My downfall was an innocent idiot boy. I don’t know where he came from. One day I learned that a group of traveling beggars had come to town and among them was the idiot boy. I heard it at the well, where I had come alone, for Hannah and Judith had gotten an early start on milling the barley. Sarah, my friend from early childhood days, spoke of him to her younger sister Susanna, who had recently married. Sarah shifted her baby from her right hip to her left. Her two-year-old sat on the ground and played with pebbles.

  “Did you see the boy?” I asked.

  Sarah turned her head toward me. A hint of fear flickered in her eyes. She quickly covered it with a smile. “Miriam, oh, I didn’t notice you.”

  They had all noticed me, of course. I knew I would be the target of their talk once I left the well. But I didn’t waste time acknowledging Sarah’s lie. “The idiot boy, did you see him?”

  “Of course not. He stays in the marketplace.”

  I wanted to ask if he was crippled. I wanted to hold Sarah by the arm and steady myself as I received her answer. I moved closer. She backed away. For an instant I wanted to beseech — for we had once been close. Instead I said, “How do you know he’s an idiot?”

  Sarah shrugged. “He must be.” She bent over and took her toddler by the hand. “I have to hurry now. Susanna, come along. I need you. Good-bye, Miriam.” The four of them left.

  I didn’t hesitate. Sarah, Susanna, the children — it would not matter if I never saw them again, but I had to see the idiot boy. I knew nothing about him; he was a total stranger. But the very fact that he was called an idiot made him important to me. I took shortcuts through alleys, using our town tower as my guide. I had not walked these routes for three years — the years in which I had lived within the beneficence of Judith’s watch. But my feet knew them well. Within a half hour, I arrived. I worked my way though the crowds of the marketplace with determination.

  I must have looked very strange, I must have. Later when I struggled to make sense of what happened that day, I tried to see myself through others’ eyes. My hair streamed out from under my headcloth in wild ringlets. I wore no veil, since I had intended to go only to the well, to be only among women. My shift was loose and shapeless; it gave no sign that I was a woman of means. Perhaps those who saw me and knew Father thought that he had disowned me, given my dress and behavior. Perhaps some didn’t even recognize me as Father’s daughter, for I had grown since the last time Abraham and I had wandered the market. Perhaps I looked like a stranger to Israel herself. But I was unaware of how I looked to others. It was the last thing on my mind.

  I searched the places where the familiar beggars stayed, the beggars of Magdala. In vain. Then I heard them, the new beggars. One of them tapped a drumskin. The very unfamiliarity of the sound identified them. I followed the irregular beat.

  There were five of them, three women, a man, and one little boy.

  They stayed near the wall outside the hall of prostitutes, with bowls for donations set on the ground.

  The man sat in the dust and ate from a bunch of grapes that he must have picked from a vineyard on his way to the market — for while it was theft to take grapes off a vendor’s pile at the market, beggars had the right to pick fruits from orchards so long as they ate them themselves and carried neither basket nor sickle. No one would die of hunger on farming land.

  One of the women sat beside him and gnawed at a crust of bread distractedly, as though her hunger was past but her teeth wouldn’t listen.

  But I didn’t look long at the man or the women. It was the boy I’d come for.

  At first I thought the boy was blind. His face was vague, his mouth hung open, drool dangled from his bottom lip. I walked up to him. “Boy? What’s your name, boy?”

  His face didn’t change expression. Perhaps he hadn’t realized I was talking to him. I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned over him. “Little boy. Dear little boy, can you tell me your name?”

  My words seemed to register now, but they registered very little. If there was an intelligent mind in this child, I saw no evidence of it. He was not a trapped mind yearning for contact. He was not another Abraham. Perhaps that was better, for this child might never know loneliness. He might even be too dull to know yearning. There was nothing I could do for him.

  I touched his cheek lightly. He stared through me. One of the women came over and pulled the boy to her. Her breasts swung above a half-starved torso. Her eyes showed no fear, but neither did they show friendliness. Her face was an animated version of his. The boy threw his arms around her hips and clung.

  I straightened up and took a step backward. A hissing laugh came from the side. Two men leered at me from across
a table piled high with pelts. I quickly lowered my head, my cheeks burning. But I raised it again, just as quickly. A scourge on those men. I would walk home with my head high. This was my town, too. This was my home. How dare the thickskulls of society force these beggars to this wall here? How dare they take away every chance of happiness of the idiot boy? How dare they limit the paths my feet could travel in life? I turned to leave.

  A hand grabbed me by the arm and twirled me around, managing to pull me in one swift painful move through the doorway into the hall of prostitutes.

  “It’s Miriam. I thought so. What has it been, four years now? And still, I’d know you anywhere.” Jacob, the carpenter I’d watched with Abraham so many times, the man who had threatened us with a raised arm, pushed his fleshy face up near mine. Wine made his breath heavy; it slurred his speech. “I heard you slept with the idiot man.” His eyes moved down to my belly. “I see I heard right.”

  I pulled free and walked past him to the doorway.

  His arm was around my expanding waist in a flash. “Now you came after the new little idiot boy. Is that it?” He pulled me farther into the hall, farther from the doorway. “A seduction?”

  I pushed him in the chest and tried to free myself. But his grip grew stronger than I’d have expected for a man going to fat like him, a man so obviously drunk. His face came up to my neck and he kissed me there now, as his free hand moved across my shift and stopped at my breast. “I knew there was something wrong with you. You came seeking to my shop years ago,” he said loudly. “Today you came seeking again. And I am a man of charity.”

  I shouted, “Let me go.” I kicked and ripped at his hair. I looked around frantically. But the crowds were outside the hall and if there were people in this hall, they were behind hung curtains.