The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kidd

  I looked at him. I’d held the world too close and it had slipped from my arms.

  xxvi.

  Jesus returned me to Nazareth as he had said he would, and there, with unnecessary haste, he bid us farewell. Those first terrible weeks of his absence, I remained in my room. I didn’t care to witness his mother crying with bitterness or hear the exclamations and questions his brothers and their wives hurled at me. Was Jesus struck on the head? Is he possessed? Does he mean to follow a madman and leave us to ourselves?

  I imagined my husband alone in some dust pit in the Judean wilderness fending off wild boars and lions. Did he have food and water? Did he wrestle with angels like Jacob? Would he come back for me? Was he even alive?

  I had no strength for chores. What did it matter if the olives weren’t pressed or the lamp wicks went untrimmed? I took meals in my room, abetted by Yaltha.

  I came out of my seclusion only at night and prowled about the courtyard like one of the mice. Worried for me, Yaltha moved her sleeping mat to my room and brought me hot wine spiked with bits of myrrh and passionflower to help me sleep, the same brew she’d given Shipra long ago when Mother had locked me in my room. The draft had sent Shipra into an unshakable sleep, but it did little more than dull my senses.

  One morning I found I could not force myself from my pallet, nor swallow my fruit and cheese. Yaltha felt my brow for fever, and finding nothing, bent to my ear and whispered, “Enough, child. You’ve grieved enough. I understand he has abandoned you, but must you abandon yourself?”

  Soon after, Salome appeared in my doorway with news that she would be wed in the spring. James had signed a betrothal contract with a man in Cana, someone who was an utter stranger to her.

  “Oh, sister, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It isn’t a sorrow to me,” she replied. “The bride price will help keep our family fed, especially with Jesus . . .”

  “Gone,” I said for her.

  “James says my new husband will be kind to me. The man does not mind that I’m a widow. He’s a widower himself, having lost two wives to childbirth.” She made an effort to smile. “I must weave some bridal clothes. Will you help me?”

  It was the thinnest of ploys, obviously meant to lure me back to my duties and to life itself, for who in her right mind would ask me to help with spinning and weaving—even ten-year-old Sarah could do it better. Somehow, though, her tactic worked. I heard myself say, “I’ll help you, of course I will.”

  I went to my chest of cedar and dug out the copper mirror, the last possession of value I owned. “Here,” I said, placing the mirror in her hands. It caught the sun that slanted through the window, a flash of ginger light. “I’ve looked upon myself in this mirror since I was a child. I want you to have it as a betrothal gift.”

  She lifted the mirror to her face. “Why, I am . . .”

  “Lovely,” I said, realizing she may not have glimpsed her image this clearly before.

  “I cannot accept something so treasured.”

  “Please. Take it.” I didn’t tell her I wished to be rid of the self I saw reflected there.

  After that, I returned to life within the compound. Salome and I spun threads from flax and dyed them in a rare solution of alizarin red, which came from the roots of a tincture tree. Yaltha had procured it through means I wished not to know. It was possible she’d traded for it with Judith’s carved spindle, which mysteriously went missing around this time. We wove sitting in the courtyard, sending our shuttles back and forth, creating bright scarlet cloths that Judith and Berenice found immodest.

  “There’s not a woman in Nazareth who would wear such a color,” Judith said. “Certainly, Salome, you won’t get married wearing it.” She complained to Mary, who must’ve had misgivings of her own, but she ignored Judith’s grievances.

  I sewed a red head scarf and wore it every day as I went about my duties. The first time I paraded into the village in it, James said, “Jesus would not want you to go about in such a scarf.”

  “Well, he isn’t here, is he?” I said.

  xxvii.

  Winter came slowly. I marked the months of Jesus’s absence on Yaltha’s calendar. Two full moons. Three. Five.

  I wondered if by now he’d convinced John the Immerser to let me join the disciples. I kept thinking about the image that had come into my mind near the end of my confinement. Jesus and I had been on the rooftop trying to sleep when I’d envisioned him at the gate wearing his travel cloak and pouch, and I was there, too, crying. It had seemed such a gloomy omen then—Jesus leaving, while I wept—but my visions could be unpredictable and cunning. Wasn’t it entirely reasonable that I’d pictured myself at the gate because I was leaving with Jesus, not saying goodbye to him? Perhaps I was sorrowful over my separation from Yaltha. The explanation gave me hope that Jesus would sway John to accept me. Yes, I thought. He’ll appear soon, saying, “Ana, John bids you to come and join us.”

  I asked Yaltha to move her sleeping mat back to the storeroom and I laid Jesus’s mat beside my own. As the days passed, my eyes drifted to the gate. I jumped at slight sounds. Whenever I could slip away from my tasks, I climbed to the roof and scanned the horizon.

  Then, with winter nearly past, on a cold day full of windy light, I stood in the courtyard boiling soapwort root and olive oil to make soap, and looking up, I saw a hooded figure at the gate. I dropped the spoon, and oil splashed across the hearthstone. I was wearing the red head scarf, which had faded in the sun. I heard it snap at my ears as I ran.

  “Jesus,” I cried, though I could see how different the figure was from my husband. Shorter, thinner, darker.

  He drew back his hood. Lavi.

  * * *

  • • •

  MY DISAPPOINTMENT THAT Lavi was not who I’d thought left quickly after I recognized my loyal old friend. I led him to the storeroom, where Yaltha brought him a cup of cool water. He bowed his head, slow to accept it, for he was still a slave and unaccustomed to being waited upon. “Drink,” she ordered.

  Though it was midday, she lit a lamp to break apart the shadows, and we sat, the three of us, on the packed dirt and stared at one another in wordless wonder. We’d not seen him since the day of my wedding when he’d led the horse-drawn wagon through the gate.

  His face had ripened, his cheeks fleshier, his brow more jutting. He was clean-shaven in the Greek manner, his hair cut short. Hardship had tilled furrows at the corners of his eyes. He was no longer a boy.

  He waited for me to speak. I said, “You’re a welcome sight, Lavi. Are you well?”

  “Well enough. But I bring . . .” He stared into his empty cup.

  “You bring news of my father?”

  “He has been dead for almost two months.”

  I felt the cold from the doorway. I could see my father standing in the luxurious reception hall of our house in Sepphoris in his fine red coat and matching hat. He was gone. Mother, too. For a moment I felt strangely abandoned. I looked at Yaltha, remembering that my father was also her brother. She stared back at me, that look that said, Let life be life and death be death.

  I said to Lavi, my voice quivering a little, “When Judas came to report my mother was dead, he told me Father was ill, so I’m not surprised at this news, only that it’s you who delivers it. Did Judas send you?”

  “No one sent me. I’ve not seen Judas since last fall when he brought your message for the tetrarch’s wife.”

  I didn’t move or speak. Did Phasaelis receive my warning, then? Is she safe? Is she dead?

  Lavi went on with his story. It poured, unstoppered. “I was with my master when he died. Antipas had been back from Rome for only a few weeks and he was angry the plot to make him King of the Jews had yielded nothing. As your father lay dying, he muttered his sorrow that he’d failed Antipas. It was the last thing I heard him say.”

  Father. He’d groveled befor
e Antipas until the end.

  “When he was gone, I was sent to work in the kitchen, where I was beaten for spilling a vat of grape syrup,” Lavi said. “I determined then I would leave. I stole away from the palace six nights ago. I’ve come to be your servant.”

  He meant to live with us in this impoverished compound? There was no room to spare, the food stores were stretched as it was, and it was doubtful I would even be here much longer. No one kept servants in Nazareth—the thought was preposterous.

  I cut my eyes to Yaltha. What can we say to him?

  She was plainspoken, but kind. “You cannot stay here, Lavi. It would be better for you to serve Judas.”

  “Judas is never in one place. I would not know how to find him,” Lavi said. “When I last saw him, he spoke of joining the prophet who baptizes in the Jordan. He believed him to be a Messiah.”

  I pushed to my feet. Father was dead. Lavi had run away and proclaimed himself my servant. And apparently, Judas had become a follower of John the Immerser. Standing in the doorway, I saw the weather had turned, the clouds boiling and blackening, the spring rains arriving early. For months, we’d gone with no tidings at all, and suddenly news fell on us in the manner of a hailstorm.

  “You can remain here until you decide where to go,” I said. With Jesus away, perhaps James wouldn’t mind Lavi being here for a while; maybe he would welcome the help Lavi could provide. Lavi was a Gentile, though. James wouldn’t take well to that.

  “You have always been kind to me,” Lavi said, which caused me to wince. Mostly I’d paid little attention to him.

  I could be patient no longer. I returned to sit beside him. “You must tell me—did you give my message to Phasaelis?”

  He looked down, as was his habit, but it gave me the sense there was news he dreaded to impart. “I befriended the kitchen steward who carried food to her room and asked him to place the ivory sheet on her tray. He was reluctant to do so; there are spies even within the palace. But Antipas was away in Rome then, and with the help of a small bribe, the steward slid the ivory beneath a silver flagon.”

  “You’re sure she read it?”

  “I’m certain of it. Three days later, she left Tiberias for Machaerus, saying she wished to spend time there taking the waters at Antipas’s palace. Once there, she snuck away with two servants and slipped across the border into Nabataea.”

  I let out a breath. Phasaelis was safe with her father.

  “I should like to have seen Antipas when he returned from Rome with his new wife and found his old one gone,” Yaltha said.

  “They say he raged and tore his robe and overturned furniture in Phasaelis’s quarters.” I hadn’t known Lavi to talk so freely. I’d thought him quiet, cautious, diffident, but then we’d never sat and spoken as equals. How little I really knew him.

  “The soldiers who escorted Phasaelis to Machaerus have been imprisoned. Her servants were tortured, including the steward who delivered your message.”

  A huge cresting wave began in my chest—a rush of sorrow over the fate of the steward and the soldiers, followed by a stab of remorse for my part in their suffering, but mostly fear, crushing fear. “Did the steward tell his tormentors about my message?” I asked. “My name was signed to it.”

  “I cannot say what he confessed. I was unable to speak with him.”

  “Does he read Greek?” Yaltha asked. She was sitting very rigid, her face as grave as I’d ever seen it. When Lavi didn’t answer immediately, she snapped, “Does he or doesn’t he?”

  “He reads a little . . . perhaps more than a little. When I first asked him to deliver the message, he studied it, complaining it was too dangerous.”

  The room receded before rushing back at me. He would have been able to tell Antipas everything, and with the aid of torture, perhaps he did. “The poor man was right, wasn’t he?” I said. “It was too dangerous. I’m sorry for him.”

  “Some say it was Antipas’s new wife, Herodias, who demanded the punishments to the soldiers and servants,” Lavi said. “Now she constantly goads her husband to arrest John the Immerser.”

  “She wants John put in prison?” I said.

  “The Immerser continues to attack both Antipas and Herodias,” Lavi said. “He preaches that her marriage is incestuous because she’s Antipas’s niece and the wife of his brother. He goes about saying it’s not a marriage at all, because as a woman, she had no standing to divorce her husband, Philip.”

  Rain pattered, then crashed on the roof. This ruinous disaster had started with my father’s plot to make Herod Antipas king. He’d persuaded Antipas to divorce Phasaelis and marry Herodias, and in doing so, he’d set a perilous chain of events in motion: my warning message to Phasaelis, the prophet’s condemnations, and now Antipas and Herodias’s retribution. It was like a stone that strikes against another stone that causes the entire mountain to fall.

  * * *

  • • •

  JAMES GAVE PERMISSION for Lavi to sleep on the roof. By then, the sky had dried, but the rains started again before dawn with torrents that dissolved the moon into thin, pale streaks. Awakened by the din, I hurried to the doorway and glimpsed Lavi’s blurred figure skittering down the ladder and taking shelter beneath the workshop roof. It brought back the memory of him holding the canopy of thatched palm over my head on the day I’d met Jesus at the cave.

  When the downpour turned into a dribble, I warmed a cup of milk for Lavi on the oven fire. Approaching the workshop with it, I heard voices—Yaltha was there.

  “When Judas was last here,” she said, “he brought news that upon Matthias’s death, my brother in Alexandria would send an envoy to Sepphoris to sell his house and its possessions. What do you know about this?”

  I halted abruptly to listen and the milk spilled over the side of the cup. Why had she sought out Lavi privately to ask this? Worry welled in me, some old, augured feeling.

  Lavi said, “Before I fled Tiberias, I learned that a man named Apion had been dispatched from Alexandria to conclude the sale of the house. It is likely he is in Sepphoris already.”

  She is not being idly curious. She means to return to Alexandria with Haran’s envoy. She will go in search of Chaya.

  So. It was not I who would leave her, as I’d thought, but she who would leave me.

  When I stepped into view, she didn’t meet my gaze, but I’d read her face already. I handed Lavi the milk. The sky slunk low, grayness sticking to everything.

  I said, “When were you going to tell me about your plans to return to Egypt?”

  Her sigh floated through the wet cold. “I would’ve told you, but it was too soon to speak of it. It was not yet time.”

  “And now? Is it time now?” Sensing tension, Lavi skulked against the door of the workshop, his face retreating into the dark oval of his hood.

  “Time is passing, Ana. Chaya still calls to me in my dreams. She wants to be found—I feel it in my bones. If I don’t seize this chance to return, I won’t have another.”

  “You meant to leave, and yet you kept it from me.”

  “Why should I burden you with my desire to leave when I saw no way to act upon it? Early last fall, when you learned Haran would send an emissary, it came to me that I might travel back to Alexandria with him, but I didn’t know it might truly be possible until now.” Her eyes filled with anguish. “Child, aren’t you planning to leave Nazareth yourself? Each day you watch for Jesus, hoping he’ll come for you. I cannot remain here without you. I’ve lost one daughter; now it will be two.”

  Remorseful, I held her face with my hands. The soft, drooping wrinkles. The candlewax skin. “I don’t blame you for seeking your daughter. I’m upset we’ll be separated, that’s all. If Chaya calls to you, of course you must go.”

  Overhead, the sun was a tiny larva wriggling from the clouds. We watched it emerge, neither of us speaking. I turned to my aunt. �
��Lavi and I will go at once to Sepphoris and seek this emissary, Apion. I’ll announce myself as Haran’s niece and strike a bargain for your passage.”

  “And if Jesus returns while you’re gone?”

  “Tell him that he may wait. I have waited plenty for him.”

  She cackled.

  xxviii.

  James and Simon, thinking it was their duty to impose husbandly restrictions on me in their brother’s absence, forbade me to leave Nazareth and travel to Sepphoris. How mistaken they were. I packed my travel pouch and tied on my red scarf.

  While Lavi waited for me at the gate, I kissed Mary and Salome, trying to ignore their petrified looks. “I will be fine; Lavi will be with me.” Then, smiling at Salome, I added, “You yourself used to cross the valley with Jesus to sell your yarns in Sepphoris.”

  “James will be unhappy,” she said, and I realized it was not my safety they were concerned about, but my disobedience.

  I left without their blessing. But as I walked away, the wind lifted its arms and the olive tree sent a shimmer of leaves onto my head.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN LAVI POUNDED at the door of my old house in Sepphoris, no one answered. Moments later he shinnied over the back wall and unlatched the gate. Stepping into the courtyard, I came to a standstill. Weeds, hip high, grew between the stones. The ladder to the roof lay on the ground, the rungs like a row of broken teeth. I smelled a stew of fetidness coming from the stairs that led down to the mikvah and knew the conduit had clogged. Bird excrement and flaking mortar. The house had sat empty for little more than six months and already ruin had set in.

  Lavi motioned me inside the vaulted storeroom, where we found the door to the servant passage unlocked. Parting the cobwebs, we climbed the steps into the reception hall. The room was the same—the pillowed couches where we’d eaten, the four tripod tables with spiral legs.