The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kidd

Days passed and no one sent for him. Salome told me James and Simon argued against it. The day after the burial, the publicans had come to Nazareth and taken a half portion of our wheat, barley, oil, olives, and wine, along with two of the chickens, and Jesus’s brothers were deeply troubled over the loss. According to Salome, they had scoured the village for carpentry work, but in the wake of the tax collectors no one had the resources to pay for a repaired ceiling beam or new door lintel.

  I asked Salome to summon James. He appeared hours later, standing beyond the doorway so as not to become fouled. Seated on the bench across the room, I said, “I beg you, James, send for my husband. He must come and mourn his daughter.”

  He spoke not to me but to a scrim of sunlight on the window. “We all wish for him to be here, but it’s better he should remain in Capernaum for the entire month as he planned. We are desperate to resupply our food stores.”

  “We don’t live by bread alone,” I said, repeating words I’d heard Jesus speak.

  “But still, we must eat,” he said.

  “Jesus would want to be here to grieve his child.”

  He would not be moved. “You would have me force him to choose between feeding his family and grieving his child?” he said. “I would think he’d be glad to have the burden removed from him.”

  “But James, it’s his decision. His child has died, not yours. If you take the choice from him, he will be angered.”

  My words struck.

  He sighed. “I’ll send Simon to him. We’ll let Jesus decide.”

  Capernaum was a day and half walk. I couldn’t expect to see my husband for four days, three at best. I knew Simon would press him with news of the tax collectors and describe our food stores with direness. He would urge Jesus to delay his return.

  Surely, though, he would come.

  xv.

  The following day, Yaltha came to my room carrying the broken pieces of a large clay pot in the folds of her robe.

  “I broke it with a mallet,” she said.

  As she spread the fragments across the rug, I gaped at her in astonishment. “You did this on purpose? Why, Aunt?”

  “A broken pot is almost as good as a stack of papyrus. When I lived among the Therapeutae, we often wrote on the shards—inventories, letters, contracts, psalms, missals of all kinds.”

  “Pots are precious here. They’re not easily replaced.”

  “It’s only the pot for watering the animals. There are other pots that can replace it.”

  “All the rest are stone pots, and they are pure—you can’t use them for the animals. Oh, Aunt, you know this.” I gave her a stern, baffled look. “For you to shatter a pot just for me to write upon . . . they’ll think you’re possessed.”

  “Then let them take me to a healer and have the demon cast out. You just make certain I didn’t break the pot for no reason.”

  For the past two days, my chest had been bound with tight rags, but now I felt milk engorge my breasts, followed by a thick clot of pain. Dark, wet circles appeared on my robe.

  “Child,” Yaltha said, for even though I was a woman, she still sometimes called me by her pet name. “There’s no worse feeling than one’s breasts filled with milk and no one to suckle.”

  The words opened a raw, furious place in me. She wanted me to write? My daughter was dead. My writing was dead, too. One day had never come. I was the shattered pieces on the floor. Life had taken a mallet to me.

  I lashed out. “How would you know how I feel?”

  She reached for me, but I wrenched away and dropped onto my bed mat.

  Yaltha knelt down and cradled me with her body as I wept for the first time since Susanna had died. When I was spent, she re-bound my breasts with clean rags and wiped my face. She brought a wineskin and filled my cup and we sat awhile in silence.

  Out in the courtyard the women were in the heat and throes of work. Curls of smoke from the dung fire drifted in through the window. Berenice was shouting at Salome to return to the village well for more water, blaming her for the parched plot of vegetables. Salome yelled back that she was not a pack donkey. Mary complained that the pot used to water the animals had gone missing.

  Yaltha said, “I do know what it’s like to have full breasts and no baby.”

  I remembered then the story she’d told me many years ago of birthing two sons, neither of whom had lived, and of her husband, Ruebel, who’d punished her for it with his fists. Remorse scorched my cheeks. “Forgive me. I forgot your dead sons. My words were cruel.”

  “Your words were understandable. I remind you of my loss only because I wish to tell you something. Something I left out of my story.” She drew a deep breath. Outside the sun dipped and the room guttered. “There were two sons who died in infancy, yes. But there was also a daughter who lived.”

  “A daughter.”

  Her eyes brimmed—a rare sight. “When I was sent to the Therapeutae, she was two years old. Her name is Chaya.”

  All at once a memory unwound. “Back in Sepphoris when you contracted the fever sickness, there was one night when you were lost in delirium and you called me by her name. You called me Chaya.”

  “Did I? I can’t say I’m surprised. If Chaya is alive, she would be twenty-one years, almost as old as you. She had unruly hair like yours. I often think of her when I look at you. I’ve dreaded telling you about her. I feared what you would think of me. I left her behind.”

  “Why do you tell me about her now?” I didn’t mean it cruelly. I truly wished to know.

  “I should have told you long ago. I do so now because the death of your daughter has made my loss fresh again. I thought it might be a small solace for you to know I’ve suffered in a similar way, that I comprehend what it is to lose a daughter. Oh, child, I want no secrets between us.”

  I couldn’t be angered by her deceit—it didn’t come from treachery. We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

  “You may ask me the question,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  I knew which one she meant. I said, “Why did you leave her?”

  “I could tell you that I had no choice, and I think that’s mostly true; at least I believed it true at the time. It’s hard now to look back and know for certain. I told you once it was widely believed in Alexandria that I killed my husband with sorcery and poison, and for that I was sent away to the Therapeutae. They didn’t take in children, and I went to them anyway. Who can say now whether I might have found a way to keep my daughter? I did what I did.” Her face shone with pain as if her loss had only just happened.

  “What became of her? Where did she go?”

  She shook her head. “My brother Haran assured me he would care for her. I believed him. During all those years I was with the Therapeutae, I sent him many messages asking about her, without any response. After eight years, when Haran finally agreed I could leave the Therapeutae if I left Egypt, I begged to take her with me.”

  “And he refused? How could he keep her from you?”

  “He said he’d given her out for adoption. He would not tell me to whom or where she lived. For days I pleaded with him, until he threatened to revive the old charges against me. In the end I left. I left her behind.”

  I pictured the girl, Chaya, with hair like mine. It was impossible to imagine what I might have done had I been in my aunt’s place.

  “I made my peace with what happened,” she said. “I reasoned that Chaya was wanted and cared for. She had a family. Perhaps she didn’t even remember me. She was only two when I last saw her.”

  She stood abruptly, stepping around the arrangement of broken pottery. She rubbed her fingers as if trying to unpeel them.

  “You don’t look at peace,” I told her.

  “You’re right, the peace has left me. Since Susanna died, Chaya has come every night in my
dreams. She stands on a summit and begs me to come to her. Her voice is like the song of a flute. When I wake, it goes on singing in me.”

  I rose and walked past her toward the window, seized by a sudden foreboding that my aunt would leave and return to Alexandria in search of her daughter. I told myself it wasn’t a premonition like the others I’d had, but fear. Only fear. Anyway, by what means could Yaltha possibly leave Nazareth? She no longer had access to my father’s wealth and power, and even if she did, how could a woman travel alone? How could she set about locating a daughter who’d been lost for nineteen years? No matter how haunting the flute’s call, she could not leave.

  She tossed back her shoulders as if casting off a heavy cloak and looked down at the potsherds. “That’s enough of my story. Tell me that you will make use of these shards.”

  I knelt and picked up one of the larger pieces, hoping to mask my ambivalence. It had been more than seven years since I’d held a reed pen. Seven years since Jesus had wakened and assured me I would write again one day. Without realizing it, I’d given up on one day. I’d even given up on faraway day. I no longer opened the chest of cedar and read my scrolls. The last vial of ink had turned into a thick gum years ago. My incantation bowl was buried at the bottom of my chest.

  “I’ve watched you over the years since we arrived here,” Yaltha said. “I see you’re happy with your husband—but in every other way you seem lost to yourself.”

  “I have no ink,” I told her.

  “Then we shall make some,” she said.

  xvi.

  When Jesus returned, he found me sitting on the floor of our room, writing on a piece of potsherd. My breasts were dry now, but the ink Yaltha and I had made from red ocher and oven soot flowed each day from my reed pen. I looked up to see him standing in the doorway still clasping his staff. He was covered in dust from the road. I could smell the faint stench of fish on him from across the room.

  Ignoring the purity laws, he strode into the room and put his arms about me, burying his face at my shoulder. I felt his body quiver, then a small heaving in his chest. Smoothing my hand across the back of his head, I whispered, “She was beautiful. I named her Susanna.”

  When he lifted his face, his eyes were filled with tears. “I should’ve been with you,” he said.

  “You are here now.”

  “I would’ve arrived sooner, but I was out on the boat when Simon arrived in Capernaum. He waited two days for me to come ashore with our catch.”

  “I knew you would come as soon as you could. I had to beg your brothers to send for you. They seem to think your earnings are more important than your mourning.”

  I saw his jaw tighten and guessed they’d had words over it.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” I told him. “I’m still considered unclean.”

  He pulled me closer. “I’ll go to the mikvah later, and I’ll sleep on the roof, but right now I won’t be denied your nearness.”

  I filled a bowl with water and led him to the bench, where I removed his sandals and washed his feet. He leaned his head against the wall. “Oh, Ana.”

  I rubbed his hair with a damp towel and brought him a clean robe. As he donned it, his eyes drifted to the potsherds and the inkpot on the floor. One day I hoped to continue writing the lost stories, but the only words that I had now were for Susanna, bits and pieces of grief that fit onto the small jagged shards.

  “You’re writing,” Jesus said. “I’m glad.”

  “Then you, Yaltha, and I are alone in this particular gladness.”

  I tried to keep my resentment contained but found it flaring up uncontrollably. “It’s as if your family believes God has decided to destroy the world again, not by flood this time, but by Ana writing. Your mother and Salome have said nothing, but I think even they disapprove. According to Judith and Berenice, the only women who write are sinners and necromancers. I ask you, how do they know this? And James . . . he means to speak to you about me, I’m sure.”

  “He has done so already. He met me at the gate.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “That you broke a water pot in order to write on the shards and then stripped the oven of its kindling to make ink. I believe he fears you’ll smash all the pots and deprive us of cooked food.” He smiled.

  “Your brother stood right there in the doorway and said I should give up my perverse craving to write and give myself to prayer and grief for my daughter. Does he think my writing is not a prayer? Does he think because I hold a pen I don’t grieve?”

  I took a breath and continued, calmer. “I’m afraid I spoke sharply to James. I told him, ‘If by craving you mean I have a longing, a need, then yes, you’re right, but don’t call it perverse. I dare to call it godly.’ He left me then.”

  “Yes, he mentioned this, too.”

  “I’m confined here for sixty-eight more days. Salome brought me flax to spin and threads to sort and Mary gave me herbs to grind—but mostly I have a reprieve from daily tasks. At last there’s time for me to write. Don’t take it from me.”

  “I won’t take it from you, Ana. Whether you’ll be able to write in the same manner after your confinement—I don’t know, but for now write all you wish.”

  He looked so weary all of a sudden. Because of me, he’d returned to find a small war had broken out. I laid my cheek against his and felt his breath skim my ear. I said, “I’m sorry. I tried for so long to belong, to be as they needed me to be. Now I wish to be myself.”

  “I’m sorry, Little Thunder. I, too, have kept you from being yourself.”

  “No—” He placed his finger at my lips, and I let my protest fall silent.

  He picked up the shard on which I’d been writing. There in Greek, in tiny brokenhearted letters: I loved her with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my might.

  “You write of our daughter,” he said, and his voice broke.

  xvii.

  After Jesus observed his seven days of mourning, he found work in Magdala hewing stone for an elaborate synagogue. The city wasn’t as far away as Capernaum, only a day’s walk, and every week he came home for Sabbath with tales of a resplendent building that would hold two hundred people. He told me of a small stone altar on which he’d carved a chariot of fire and a seven-branched menorah.

  “Those are the same images on the altar in the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem,” I said, a little aghast.

  “Yes,” he said. “So they are.” He didn’t have to elaborate—I knew what he was doing, and it struck me as more radical than anything he’d done before. He was declaring in the most prominent and irrevocable way that God could not be confined any longer to the Temple alone, that his Holy of Holies, his presence had broken out and lodged everywhere.

  When I look back on it, I see that act as a kind of turning point, a heralding of what was to come. It was around this time he became more outspoken, openly critical of the Romans and Temple priests. Neighbors began to show up at our house to complain to Mary and James that Jesus had been at the well or the olive press or the synagogue deriding the false piety of the Nazareth elders.

  One day a rich Pharisee named Menachem came while Jesus was away. Mary and I met him at the gate and listened as he fulminated. “Your son goes about condemning rich men, saying they build their wealth off the backs of the poor. It’s slanderous! You must appeal to him to cease or there will be little work for your family in Nazareth.”

  “We would rather be hungry than silent,” I told him.

  When he’d gone, Mary turned to me. “Would we?”

  Every week, Jesus came home from Magdala telling me about the blind and sick he saw on the road with no one to help them, stories of widows turned out of their homes, of families so heavily taxed they were forced to sell their lands and beg in the streets. “Why does God not act to bring his kingdom?” he would say.

  A fire had
been lit in him and I blessed it, but I questioned, too, where the spark had come from. Had Susanna’s death caused him to step from the periphery? Had it stunned him with the brevity of life and the need to seize what we had of it? Or was it all just the fullness of time, the coming of something that was coming anyway? Sometimes when I looked at him I saw an eagle on its branch and the world beckoning. I feared what would happen. I had no branch of my own.

  Daily, I penned words behind the walls of my room on potsherds no one would ever read.

  I stacked the used pieces of clay into wobbly towers along the walls of the room. Little pillars of grief. They didn’t take away my sorrow, but they gave me a way to make what meaning I could from it. To write again felt like a return to myself.

  On the day I inscribed the last of the potsherds, Yaltha was sitting with me, rattling her sistrum. The writing would end now; even my aunt understood this. She’d endured a chastisement from Mary for shattering the pot and couldn’t risk breaking another. She watched me set down my pen and cover the inkpot. She did not cease playing, the percussion of her sistrum darting like a dragonfly about the room.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT WEEK, Jesus didn’t arrive home from Magdala before sunset as he always did. Dusk came, then dark, and he didn’t appear. I stood in the doorway and watched the gate, glad for the fullness of the moon. Mary and Salome delayed the Sabbath meal and sat with James and Simon in a little clump beneath the olive tree.

  When he appeared, I disregarded my confinement and ran to him. He bore a heavy sack on his back. “I’m sorry to be delayed,” he said. “I detoured to Einot Amitai to the vessel workshop at the chalkstone cave.”

  The road there was known to be populated with lepers and brigands, but when his mother admonished him about the danger, he lifted his hand to stop her, and without further comment he strode toward our room, where he poured the contents of his sack into a magical heap outside the door.

  Potsherds! Stone potsherds.