by Ann Swinfen
They are gone. How much easier it is to breathe out here under the stars. I could almost imagine myself a child again, the night of Melkha’s wedding, when Yeshûa came to keep me company.
I open my precious box. It is not usually this stiff, but my fingers are growing weak. I slip the bracelet on to my arm, Yehûdâ’s hair and mine, twined together forever. I think of it touching his skin for all those years, and it is as if his hand is laid tenderly on my arm. I take out his pearls and twine them clumsily in my hair. A small vanity. I would have worn them at our wedding. But what would he think of me now? A foolish, dying old woman? Then I remember. He is dead. They are all dead.
There is nothing now in the box but the scrap of parchment with his writing on it, and the little carved lamb that Daniel made for me. I lie down again, clasping Yeshûa’s box to my heart. Yehûdâ. Daniel. Yeshûa.
This evening, I was thinking about the early days of Yeshûa’s mission. What I remember best about that time was the laughter, the freedom. New villages, new people, new landscapes. And at the same time, the companionship, men and women together, all of us happy, full of hope. I remember long days of walking, but we talked and laughed as we went, and at the end of the day, another village, a friendly family serving an evening meal, where we would go on talking eagerly far into the night.
We were young. We were going to change the world.
They have laid out grapes up here on the roof. We do this every year with some of the grapes, so that in the winter we will have dried raisins of the sun. I can smell them as I lie here. Above me, the dome of the heavens is deep blue and crusted with stars. No moon tonight, so even the smallest humblest star can be seen.
Everyone has their own star, Mariam.
I look for the pulsing blue star until I find it, and smile. My own star, forever.
It’s strange. I cannot smell the drying grapes any longer. Instead, there is something else.
Cinnamon and honey.
There is the sound of breathing. Is it only my breathing, or is someone else here?
For the first time for many years, I can see Yeshûa’s face clearly, every beloved line of it. There is a glow around him, like the time in the midbar, when he found my lost kid.
‘Yeshûa?’ I say, reaching out my hands.
Then there is silence on the rooftop, and no more breathing.
The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public. Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. The Testament of Mariam, marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her latest novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators. She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a cocker spaniel, and two Maine coon cats.
More by This Author
The Anniversary
The Travellers
A Running Tide
Flood
The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez
The Enterprise of England
The Portuguese Affair
Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels:
‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’
Victoria Glendinning
‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’
Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph
‘The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.’
Publishing News
‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’
Helen Brown, Courier and Advertiser
‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’
Peter Rhodes, Express and Star