“No, no,” she sputtered. “I was only inquiring if they knew who it belonged to.”
Haran was looking at Yaltha now, a burning, triumphant look. His gaze returned to Diodora. He took a step closer to her. He said, “Chaya, I see you’re back from the dead.”
We stood motionless, as if blinded by an inexplicable burst of light. Even Haran did not move. The room was silent. There was only the smell of the oil lamp, a cold tingling in my arms, heat shoving through the courtyard door. I looked out toward the garden and saw Lavi’s crouched shadow.
It was Yaltha who broke the thrall. “Did you really think I would not seek out my daughter?”
“I thought you smarter and more prudent than to try,” he answered. “Now I shall ask you: Did you think I wouldn’t fulfill my promise to go to the Romans and have you arrested?”
Yaltha gave him no answer. She glared at him, defiant.
I, too, had a question, but I didn’t voice it: Would you like it known, Uncle, that you declared your niece dead, then sold her into slavery? The disgrace of it would cost him. He would be thrust into scandal, public shame, and banishment, and I saw that this was his deepest fear. I decided I would remind him of what was at stake, but delicately. I said, “Won’t you have mercy on a mother who only wants to know her daughter? We don’t care how Chaya came to belong to the priest at Isis Medica. That was long ago. We’ll say nothing of it to anyone. We care only that she is reunited with her mother.”
“I’m not so great a fool as to trust three women to hold their tongues and certainly not the three of you.”
I tried again. “We don’t wish to reveal your sins. Indeed, we’ll return to Galilee and you will be rid of us.”
“Would you leave me behind again?” Diodora cried, turning to her mother.
“No,” said Yaltha. “You would come with us.”
“But I don’t wish to go to Galilee.”
Oh Diodora, you are not helping.
Haran smiled. “I’ll grant that you’re clever, Ana, but you won’t persuade me.”
He was, I realized, driven as much by revenge as by his fear of disgrace.
“Besides, I’m afraid you’ll be unable to go anywhere. It has been reliably reported to me that you’ve committed a theft.”
Theft? I tried to make sense of what he’d said. Observing my confusion, he added. “It’s a crime to steal papyrus.”
I lifted my eyes to the servant in the doorway. I could hear Yaltha breathing, a quick raspy sound. Diodora cowered against her.
“Charge me, if you must,” Yaltha said. “But not Ana.”
He ignored her and went on speaking to me. “The punishment for stealing in Alexandria can be as harsh as for murder. The Romans show little mercy, but I will do my best to have you spared the flogging and mutilation. I will plead for both of you to be exiled to western Nubia. There’s no return from there.”
I could hear nothing but the heartbeat in my head. It grew until the entire room pounded. My grip on the world loosened. I’d not been clever. I’d been reckless and full of hubris, thinking I could outwit my uncle . . . steal and deceive without consequence. I preferred to be flogged and mutilated seven times over rather than sent to this place of no return. I must be free to go back to Jesus.
I looked at my aunt, whose silence puzzled me—why didn’t she rail at him? But my voice, too, had disappeared into the dark of my throat. Fear sloshed in my belly. It seemed impossible that I’d fled Galilee to avoid arrest only to be charged in Egypt.
Haran was speaking to Diodora. “I will allow you to return to Isis Medica. But it’s on the condition that you never speak of this night, nor of your origins, nor of me and this house. And you will not attempt to seek out Yaltha and Ana. Give me your oath and you may go.” He waited.
Diodora’s eyes trailed to Yaltha, who nodded at her. “I give my oath,” she said.
“If you break it, I’ll learn of it and bring charges against you, as well,” he said. He believed her to be a fragile girl, one he could browbeat into obedience. Right then, I didn’t know if he’d appraised her rightly or wrongly. “Leave now,” he said. “My servant will see you out.”
“Go,” Yaltha told her. “I’ll come to you when I can.”
She hugged her mother, then stepped through the doorway without looking back.
Haran strode across the room and yanked the door to the courtyard closed. He slid the horizontal bolt into the post and locked it with a key tied to a cord around his tunic. When he turned to us, his face had mellowed some, not from lack of resolve, it seemed, but from weariness. He said, “You’ll be confined here tonight. In the morning, I’ll hand you over to the Romans. It’s regrettable it came to this.”
He left, closing the main door behind him. The outside bolt slid into place with a soft thud. The key turned.
* * *
• • •
I RAN TO THE COURTYARD DOOR and knocked, gently at first, then louder. “Lavi is in the garden,” I told Yaltha. “He’s been hiding there.” I called out through the thick, impenetrable door, “Lavi . . . Lavi?”
No sound returned. I went on beckoning him for several moments, slapping my palm against the wood, absorbing the sharp stings. Finally, I gave up. Maybe Haran had ensnared him, too. Crossing the room, I shook the handle on the main door, as if I could wrest it free of its hinges.
I paced. My mind was whirling. The windows in our sleeping rooms were too high and too narrow to climb through, and calling for help seemed useless. “We have to find a way out,” I said. “I will not go to Nubia.”
“Conserve your strength,” Yaltha said. “You will need it.”
I slid onto the floor beside her with my back against her knees. I looked from one locked door to the other, a sense of futility gathering in me. “Will the Romans really punish us merely on the word of Haran?” I asked.
Her hand came to rest on my shoulder. “It seems Haran means to swear his case to the Roman court instead of the Jewish one, so I’m unsure, but I suppose he’ll set forth witnesses,” she said. “Ruebel’s old friends from the militia will be eager to say I poisoned him. Tell me, who saw you take the papyri?”
“Haran’s obnoxious servant.”
“Him.” She made a grunt of disgust. “He will take pleasure in bearing witness against you.”
“But we will deny their accusations.”
“If we’re allowed to speak, yes. We won’t give up hope, Ana, but neither should we allow our hope to be false. Haran has Roman citizenship, as well as the ear of the Roman prefect of Alexandria. He commands an important business and is one of the highest-ranking members of the Jewish council. I, on the other hand, am a fugitive and you are a foreigner.”
My eyes began to burn.
“There’s also the possibility my brother could bribe the court authorities.”
I lowered my head to my knees. Fugitive. Foreigner.
Tap, tap.
We looked in unison at the courtyard door. Then came the clatter of a key.
The key pegs found the pins in the lock and Pamphile stepped inside, followed by Lavi, who held up an iron key tied with a piece of identifying parchment.
I threw my arms around each of them. “How did you come upon the key?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“Haran has two for each door,” Pamphile said. “The extra ones are kept in a pouch that hangs on a wall in his study. Lavi was able to read the labels.” She beamed at him.
“You heard Haran’s threats?” I asked him.
“Yes, every word.”
I turned to Yaltha. “Where will we go?”
“I know of only one place where Haran wouldn’t trespass,” she said. “We’ll go to the Therapeutae. Their precinct is sacred among the Jews. We’ll be safe there.”
“They’ll take us in?”
“I spent eight years
there. They’ll give us a haven.”
Since the moment Haran had locked us in, the world had pitched side to side like a ship, but I felt it settle now into an immense rightness.
“The community sits on the shore of Lake Mareotis,” Yaltha said. “It will take us nearly four hours to walk the distance. Perhaps longer in the darkness—we’ll have to carry a lamp.”
“I’ll see you there safely,” Lavi said.
Yaltha gazed at him—a frown, a twist to her mouth. “Lavi, you can’t continue to stay in Haran’s house either.”
Pamphile looked like the ground had opened beneath her. “He cannot leave here.”
“He’ll be in danger if he stays,” Yaltha said. “Haran will naturally assume Lavi helped us escape.”
“Then I will leave, too,” she said. “He’s my husband now.”
I touched her arm. “Please, Pamphile, we need you to remain here at least a while longer. I’m still awaiting the letter that will tell me it’s safe to return to Galilee. I can’t bear to think it would come and I wouldn’t know of it. I need you to watch for it and when it arrives, to see that it gets to us. It’s selfish of me to ask this of you, but I beg you. Please.”
Lavi said, “We have told no one of our marriage for fear Haran would dismiss Pamphile from his employ.” He looked at his wife of only a week. “He wouldn’t suspect you of being involved in their leaving.”
“But I don’t wish to be separated from you,” she said.
Lavi spoke gently to Pamphile. “You know as I do that I can’t remain here. The library has a domicile for the librarians who aren’t married. I will stay there and I wish you to remain here until Ana’s letter comes from Galilee. Then I will find us lodging together.”
I’d been away from Jesus for one year and six months. An eternity. He was traveling about Galilee without me, preaching that God’s kingdom was near, while I, his wife, was far away. I sympathized with Pamphile, but her severance from her husband would be an eye blink in comparison to mine.
“It seems I’m given no choice,” she said. Her words brimmed with resentment.
Lavi slit open the door to the garden and peered out. He handed the key to Pamphile. “Return the key before it’s discovered missing. Then unbolt the door in the servant quarters that leads outside. If anyone questions you about our whereabouts, tell them you have no knowledge of it. Behave as if I’ve betrayed you. Let your anger be known.” He kissed her cheeks and nudged her out the door.
I worked swiftly to squeeze my possessions into my two travel pouches. My scrolls filled one entirely, leaving me to stuff the other with clothing, the mummy portrait of my face, the little bag that contained my red thread, and what was left of our money. Once again, I would leave carrying the incantation bowl in my arms.
xix.
When Skepsis, the old woman who led the Therapeutae, looked at me, I felt swallowed by her stare. She reminded me of an owl, perched there on the edge of a bench with her piercing gold-brown eyes and white feathery hair ruffled from sleep. Her squat body was hunched and still, but her head swiveled from me to Yaltha as she listened to my aunt explain how we came to be standing in the vestibule of her small stone house in the middle of the night, begging for sanctuary.
* * *
• • •
THROUGHOUT OUR LONG, exhausting trek from Alexandria, Yaltha had schooled me in the community’s strange workings. “The members are divided into juniors and seniors,” she’d explained. “The juniors aren’t necessarily the youngest members, as you would think, but rather the newest. I wasn’t thought of as a senior until I’d been with them for seven years.”
“Are the juniors and seniors seen as equals?” I’d asked. If there were a hierarchy, I would most certainly be at the bottom of it.
“Everyone is seen as equal, but the labor is divided differently between them. The community has its patrons, including Haran, so I suppose they could hire servants, but they don’t believe in them. It’s the juniors who grow and prepare and serve the food, tend the animals, build the houses—whatever labor is required, the juniors do it, along with their spiritual work. I used to work in the garden in the mornings and return to my solitude in the afternoon.”
“The seniors have no work at all?”
“They’ve earned the privilege of devoting all of their time to spiritual work.”
We trudged past sleeping villages, vineyards, wine presses, villas, and farms, Lavi walking ahead of us holding the lamp and relying on Yaltha to call out directions. I marveled that we didn’t get lost.
She said, “Every forty-ninth day, there’s an all-night vigil filled with feasting, singing, and dancing. The members work themselves into a state of ecstasy. They call it a sober drunkenness.”
What manner of place was this?
Nearing the reedy shores of Lake Mareotis, we grew quiet. I wondered if Yaltha was remembering when she’d arrived here before, freshly torn from her daughter. It was no different this time. I watched the moon bob on the water, stars floating everywhere. I could smell the sea just over the limestone ridge. I felt the mix of fear and elation I used to get long ago waiting at the cave for Jesus to appear.
At the nadir of the night, we turned off the road onto an exceptionally steep hill. Up on the slope, I could make out clusters of flat-roofed houses.
“They’re small and simple,” Yaltha said, following my gaze. “Each one has a little courtyard, a room for sleeping, and what they call a holy room for spiritual work.”
It was the third time she’d used the odd phrase. “What is this spiritual work?” I asked. After ten years of daily toils in Nazareth, it was hard to envision sitting around in a holy room.
“Study, reading, writing, composing songs, prayer. You’ll see.”
Just before we reached the tiny gatehouse, we stopped and Lavi handed us the travel pouches he’d carried. I dug inside mine for a handful of drachmae. “Take these,” I said. “When the letter from Judas arrives, have Pamphile hire a wagon and make her way to us as quickly as she can.”
“Don’t worry—I will see to it.”
He lingered a moment, then turned to leave. I caught his arm. “Lavi, thank you. I think of you as my brother.”
The night obscured his face, but I felt his smile and reached out to embrace him.
“Sister,” he said, then bid Yaltha goodbye and turned to make the long journey back.
One of the juniors was keeping watch in the gatehouse. He was a skinny man, who balked at first to let us in. His job, as he said, was to keep out thieves, charlatans, and wayfarers, but when Yaltha told him she’d once been a senior member of the Therapeutae, he’d leapt to do her bidding.
* * *
• • •
NOW, STANDING IN SKEPSIS’S HOUSE, listening to Yaltha elaborate on why I stole the papyri, I wondered if I would have the chance to experience any of the things my aunt had described. She’d already explained that we’d fled Galilee to avoid my arrest. I tried to read Skepsis’s expression. I supposed she was considering the persistent way trouble seemed to follow me around.
“My niece is an exceptional scribe and scholar, more so than any man I’ve known,” Yaltha said, finally offsetting my shortcomings with praise.
Skepsis patted the bench beside her. “Come and sit beside me, Yaltha.” She’d implored her to do so earlier, but Yaltha had refused, pacing as she’d recounted her reunion with Diodora and Haran’s threats.
Yaltha sighed heavily now and sank onto the bench. She looked haggard in the lamplight.
Skepsis said, “You’ve come to us out of desperation, but that alone is not a reason to take you in. Those who dwell here do so out of love for a quiet, contemplative life. They come to study and to keep the memory of God alive. Can you say you’re here for those reasons as well?”
Yaltha said, “When I was sent here before, you took me in rathe
r than let me be punished. I’d left my daughter behind and I was grieving. I spent much of my time imploring you to help me find a way to leave. My happiest day was when you struck a deal with Haran that allowed me to go to Galilee . . . though it took you long enough—eight years!” Skepsis chuckled. “I feel now as I did then,” Yaltha continued. “I won’t lie and say I’ve come here for the noble reasons you mention.”
“I can say it, though,” I declared.
They turned to me with startled expressions. If I could’ve peered into my old copper mirror at that moment, I believe I would’ve witnessed the same surprise on my own face. “I’ve come with the same desperation as my aunt, but I’ve arrived with all the things you said are necessary to dwell here. I’ve come with a love for the quiet life. I wish nothing more than to write and study and keep the memory of Sophia alive.”
Skepsis scrutinized the pouch on my shoulder stuffed with scrolls, the ends of which protruded from the opening. I was still clutching my incantation bowl, holding it tightly to my abdomen. I’d not taken time during our escape to find a cloth to wrap it in and the white surface was grimy from where I’d set it down in the reeds in order to relieve myself.
“May I see the bowl?” Skepsis asked. It was the first time she’d addressed me.
I handed it to her, then watched her lift the lamp to the opening and read my inmost thoughts.
Skepsis handed back the bowl, but not before cleaning the sides and bottom of it with her hem. “I can see from your prayer that the words you spoke to us a moment ago are true.” Her eyes shifted to Yaltha. “Old friend, because you accounted for your and Ana’s sins, holding nothing back, I know you are honest in all else. As always, I know where you stand. I will give you both refuge. I require one thing from Ana in return.” She turned to me. “I require that you write a hymn to Sophia and sing it at our next vigil.”
It was as if she’d said, Ana, you shall climb to the top of the cliff, sprout wings, and fly.
“I know nothing about composing a song,” I blurted.
The Book of Longings Page 32