The Book of Longings, Page 3

  I slid the band from my wrist, and watched as Judas placed it in the injured man’s hand.

  It was later that same night that Judas and Father had clashed while Mother, Yaltha, and I listened from the balcony above the reception hall, pressed into the shadows.

  “I regret that a follower of Simon ben Gioras spit on you, Father,” Judas said. “But you cannot condemn him. These men alone fight for the poor and dispossessed.”

  “I do condemn them!” Father shouted. “I condemn them for their banditry and rabble-rousing. As for the poor and dispossessed, they have reaped what they sowed.”

  His pronouncement on the poor, rendered with such ease, such malice, incensed Judas, who bellowed back, “The poor have reaped only the brutality of Antipas! How are they to pay his taxes on top of Rome’s tributes, and their mandatory tithes to the Temple? They are being broken, and you and Antipas are the pestle.”

  For moments there was not a sound. Then Father’s voice, barely a hiss: “Get out. Leave my house.”

  Mother sucked in her breath. As uncaring as Father had been to Judas over the years, he’d never gone so far as this. Would Judas have lashed out if I hadn’t provoked his disgust earlier that day with my own words of malice? I felt sickened.

  My brother’s footsteps echoed in the flickering light below, then died away.

  I turned to look at Mother. Her eyes were shining with abhorrence. For as long as I’d had memory, she’d despised my father. He’d refused to allow Judas into the narrow precincts of his heart, and Mother’s revenge had been methodical and spectacular—she pretended to be barren. Meanwhile, she swallowed wormwood, wild rue, even chasteberries, known to be rare and of great price. I’d found the preventatives in the herb box Shipra kept hidden in the storeroom below the courtyard. With my own ears I’d heard the two of them discuss the wool Mother soaked in linseed oil and placed inside herself before Father visited her and of the resins with which she swabbed herself afterward.

  It was said women were made for two things: beauty and procreation. Having granted Father beauty, Mother saw to it he was denied procreation, refusing him children besides me. All these years, and he’d never caught on to her deception.

  At times it had crossed my thoughts that my mother might not be driven solely by vengeance, but also by her own female peculiarity—not an unbounded ambition like mine, but an aversion to children. Perhaps she feared the pain and risk of death that came with birthing them, or she abhorred the way they ravaged a woman’s body, or she resented the exhausting efforts required to care for them. Perhaps she simply didn’t like them. I couldn’t blame her for any of that. But if she feigned an inability to give birth for such reasons, why, then, did she birth me? Why was I here at all? Had her chasteberries failed to work?

  The question vexed me until I reached thirteen and heard the rabbi speak of a rule that allowed a man to divorce his wife if she had not given birth in ten years, and it was as if the heavens parted and the reason for my existence toppled from God’s throne and landed at my feet. I was my mother’s safeguard. I was born to protect her from being cast out.

  * * *

  • • •

  NOW MOTHER WALKED behind my father holding herself erect, her chin high, looking neither right nor left. In the sunlight, her golden coat seemed lit with a hundred flames. The air shone brighter around her than the rest of us, filled with haughtiness and beauty and the scent of sandalwood. Searching the crowded streets once more for Yaltha, then Judas, I began to repeat my secret prayer, moving my lips but making no sound. Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it . . .

  The words calmed me as the city flowed past, magnificent structures that awed me each time I ventured out. Antipas had filled Sepphoris with imposing public buildings, a royal treasury, frescoed basilicas, a bathhouse, sewers, roofed sidewalks, and paved streets laid out in perfect Roman grids. Large villas like Father’s were common throughout the city, and Antipas’s palace was as rich as any kingly residence. He’d been reconstructing the city since Rome razed it all those years ago when Judas lost his parents, and what had risen from the ashes was a wealthy metropolis that rivaled any but Jerusalem.

  Lately, Antipas had begun construction on a Roman amphitheater on the northern slope of the city that would seat four thousand people. Father himself had come up with the idea as a way for Antipas to impress the emperor Tiberius. Judas said it was just another way to shove Rome down our throats. Father, however, wasn’t finished with his scheming. He advised Antipas to mint his own coins, but break from Roman custom by leaving off his image and replacing it with a menorah. The ingenious gesture gave Antipas the appearance of reverencing the same Mosaic law I’d broken earlier that morning. The people called Herod Antipas the Fox, but my father was the slyer one.

  Was I like him, as Judas had implied?

  As the market came into sight, the crowd thickened. We plowed past clusters of men—members of court, scribes, government officials, and priests. Children hauled sheaves of herbs, barley, and wheat, armloads of onions, doves in stick cages. Women bore wares on their heads with bewildering steadiness—jars of oil, baskets of late-harvest olives, bolts of cloth, stone pitchers, even three-legged tables, whatever they could sell, all the while greeting one another, “Shelama, shelama.” I never saw these women without envy for how they came and went freely without the bondage of a chaperone. Surely peasantry was not all bad.

  Inside the basilica, the commotion intensified along with the airless heat. I began to sweat inside my elaborate coat. I swept my eyes over the cavernous room, over row after row of stalls and market carts. There was an odor of sweat, charcoal, skewered meat, and the putrid salted fish from Magdala. I pushed the back of my hand to my nostrils to lessen the stench and felt the soldier who’d tromped behind us nudge me forward.

  Up ahead, my mother stopped midway along a row of stalls that sold goods from the silk route—Chinese paper, silks, and spices. She idly inspected an azure cloth while my father continued on to the row’s end, where he lingered, his eyes roaming the multitudes.

  From the moment we’d set out, I’d feared we were walking toward something calamitous, sensing it not only in the oddness of our expedition, but in the minute movements of my parents’ faces, and yet here was my mother serenely shopping for silk and my father patiently watching the crowd. Had she come to trade after all? My breath left me in a rush of relief.

  I didn’t notice the small man who approached my father, not until the crowd parted a bit and I saw him stride forward and greet Father with a bow. He was clothed in an expensive coat of deep purple and a towering cone-shaped hat, perhaps the tallest hat my eyes had ever beheld, which drew attention to his exceptionally short stature.

  My mother laid down the sheath of azure. Looking back, she waved me forward.

  “Who is Father’s companion?” I asked, reaching her side.

  “He is Nathaniel ben Hananiah, your father’s acquaintance.”

  He could have been a boy of twelve except for the voluminous beard that plunged to his chest like twisted hanks of flax fiber. He plucked at it, his ferret eyes darting toward me, then away.

  “He owns not one, but two estates,” she informed me. “One grows dates, the other olives.”

  Then one of those small, nameless moments occurred that would loom large only later—a sweep of color at the edge of my eye. Turning toward it, I spotted a young man, a peasant, with uplifted hands and long strands of spun thread looped about his outspread fingers—red, green, lilac, yellow, blue. The threads streamed to his knees like bright falls of water. In time, they would remind me of rainbows, and I would wonder if God had sent them as a sign of hope as he’d done for Noah, something for me to cling to amid the drowned ruins that awaited, but right then the sight was nothing more than a lovely distraction.

  A girl not much older than I was
attempting to coil the lengths of thread into neat whorls in order to sell them. I could tell they were tinted with cheap vegetable dyes. The young man laughed, a deep, booming laugh, and I noticed he was wiggling his fingers, making the threads flutter, rendering them impossible to capture. The girl laughed, too, though she was trying very hard not to.

  There was so much unexpectedness in the scene, so much gladness, that I fixed on it. I’d seen women offering their fingers as sorting pegs, never men. What manner of man assists a woman with the balling of her yarn?

  He appeared older than I by several years, as old as twenty. He had a short, dark beard and thick hair that fell to his chin, as was the custom. I watched him push a lock behind one ear, where it refused to stay, tumbling back onto his face. His nose was long, his cheekbones broad, and his skin the color of almonds. He wore a coarse, rough-weave tunic and an outer garment sewn with tzitzit—the blue tassels marking him as a follower of God’s laws. I wondered if he could be a Pharisee of the fanatical sort, one of those unyielding followers of Shammai who were known to travel ten fathoms out of the way to avoid encountering one unrighteous soul.

  I glanced back at Mother, worried she would observe me staring, but she was absorbed in her own enthrallment with Father’s acquaintance. The haggling in the market faded and I heard Father’s raised voice cut through the commotion: “One thousand denarii and a portion of your date groves.” Their meeting, it seemed, had progressed to an impassioned exchange of business.

  The girl in the yarn stall finished winding her threads and placed the last orb on a wooden plank that served as a shelf. I’d thought at first she was the young man’s wife, but seeing now how closely she resembled him, I decided they must be siblings.

  As if feeling the intensity of my stare, the man suddenly looked around, his gaze falling on me like a veil I could almost feel, the heat of it touching my shoulders, my neck, my cheeks. I should’ve looked away, but I could not. His eyes were the most remarkable thing about him, not for their beauty, though they were beautiful in their way—widely spaced and black as my blackest ink—but it wasn’t that. There was a tiny fire in them, an expressiveness I could see even from where I stood. It was as if his thoughts floated in the wet, dark light of them, wanting to be read. I perceived amusement in them. Curiosity. An unguarded interest. There was no trace of disdain for my wealth. No judgment. No pious smugness. I saw generosity and kindness. And something else less accessible, a hurt of some kind.

  While it’s true I thought myself skilled at reading the language of the face, I didn’t know whether I really saw all of these things or I wanted to see them. The moment stretched beyond propriety. He smiled slightly, a faint lifting of his lips, then turned back to the woman I thought to be his sister.

  “Ana!” I heard Mother say, her eyes trailing from me to the peasants. “Your father has summoned you.”

  “What does he want of me?” I asked. But already it was breaking over me—the truth of why we were here, the diminutive man in purple, the business matter.

  “Your Father wishes to present you to Nathaniel ben Hananiah,” Mother was saying, “who wishes to see you more closely.”

  I looked at the man and felt something tear beneath the flat bone in my chest.

  They mean to betroth me.

  Panic started again, this time like a wave in my belly. My hands began to tremble, then my jaw. I whirled toward her. “You cannot betroth me,” I cried. “I haven’t yet come of age!”

  She took my arm and whisked me farther away so Nathaniel ben Hananiah could not hear my objections or see the horror on my face. “You can stop perpetuating your lie. Shipra found your bleeding rags. Did you think you could keep it from me? I am not witless. I am only angered that you’ve carried out such a contemptible deceit.”

  I wanted to scream at her, to hurl words like stones: Where do you think I learned such deceit? From you, Mother, who hides chasteberries and wild rue in the storage room.

  I scrutinized the man they’d chosen for me. His beard more gray than black. Curved ruts beneath his eyes. A weariness about his countenance, a kind of bitterness. They meant to give me to him. God slay me. I would be expected to obey his entreaties, oversee his household, suffer his stubby body upon mine, and bear his children, all the while stripped of my pens and scrolls. The thought sent a spasm of rage through me so fierce I clutched my waist to keep from clawing at her.

  “He is old!” I finally managed to say, offering the most feeble recrimination of all.

  “He’s a widower, yes, with two daughters. He—”

  “He wants a son,” I said, finishing her sentence.

  Standing in the middle of the market, I paid no heed to the people who stepped around us, to Father’s soldier waving them along, to the utter spectacle we were. “You could’ve told me what awaited me here!” I cried.

  “And did you not betray me? An eye for an eye—that would be reason enough to have kept this meeting from you.” She smoothed the front of her coat and glanced nervously toward Father. “We didn’t tell you because we had no wish to endure your fit of protest. It’s bad enough that you raise a dispute now in public.”

  She sweetened her tongue, eager to bring an end to my revolt. “Gather yourself. Nathaniel is waiting. Do your duty; much is at stake.”

  I glimpsed the sour-looking little man observing us from a distance and jutted out my chin in the defiant way I’d seen Yaltha do when Father forbade her some small freedom. “I will not be inspected for blemishes like a Passover lamb.”

  Mother sighed. “One cannot expect a man to enter something as binding as a betrothal without judging his bride worthy. This is how it’s done.”

  “And what about me? Shouldn’t I be allowed to judge him worthy?”

  “Oh, Ana,” she said. She gazed at me with the tired old sorrow she felt from enduring such a fractious child. “Few girls find happiness in the beginning, but this is a marriage of honor. You will want for nothing.”

  I will want for everything.

  She gestured for Shipra, who appeared beside us as if she might be called upon to drag me to my fate. The market closed in around me, the feeling of having nowhere to go, no escape. I was not like Judas, who could just leave. I was Ana—the entire world was a cage.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please,” I said. “Do not ask this of me.”

  She nudged me forward. The howling in my head returned, but softer, like someone moaning.

  I walked toward my father, my feet the carapaces of two turtles, my sandals tolling.

  I was a head taller than Nathaniel ben Hananiah, and I could see he was repulsed by the need to look up at me. I rose on my toes even higher.

  “Ask her to speak her name so I may hear her voice,” he said to Father, not addressing me.

  I did not wait for Father. “Ana, daughter of Matthias.” I half shouted it as if he were old and deaf. Father would be livid, but I would give the man no cause to think me modest or easy to tame.

  He glowered at me, and I felt a smidgen of hope that he would find a reason to reject me.

  I thought of the prayer inside my bowl, of the girl beneath the cloud. Yaltha’s words: Take care what you ask, for you shall surely receive it.

  God, please. Do not desert me.

  The moments sagged beneath a thick, implacable silence. Finally, Nathaniel ben Hananiah looked at my father and nodded his consent.

  I stared into the dim, hazed light of the market, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, listening to them speak of the betrothal contract. They debated the months until the marriage ceremony, my father arguing for six, Nathaniel for three. Not until I turned away did grief close over me, a dark forsakenness.

  My mother, her triumph secured, turned her attention back to the cloth in the silk stall. I walked toward her, fighting to hold myself erect, but midway there the floor tilted and the world slid sideways. Dizzied,
I slowed, my red cloak cascading around me, the hem snatching at the bells on my sandals, my foot torquing. I fell onto my knees.

  I tried to stand but slumped back, surprised by a sharp pain in my ankle. “She has taken ill,” someone shouted, and people scattered as if to flee a leper. I remember their shoes like hooves, the little dust storm on the floor. I was the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas—no one would dare touch me.

  When I looked up, I saw the young man from the yarn stall coming toward me. A tuft of red thread dangled from the sleeve of his robe. It drifted to the floor as he bent in front of me. It occurred to me he’d witnessed everything that had transpired—the argument with my mother, the transaction for my betrothal, my suffering and humiliation. He had seen.

  He reached out his hand, a laborer’s hand. Thick knuckles, calluses, his palm a terrain of hardships. I paused before taking it, not from aversion, but fascination that he’d offered it. I leaned against him the slightest bit, testing the weight on my foot. When I turned my face to his, I found my eyes almost level with his own. His beard was so close I could, if I were bolder, nod my head and feel it graze my skin, and it surprised me that I wanted to. My heart bounded up, along with an odd smelting in my thighs, as if my legs might give way once again.

  He parted his lips as if to speak. I remember the eagerness I felt for his voice, for what he would say to me.

  What happened next would plague me through the strange months to come, raining down at odd moments and sometimes waking me in the night, and I would lie there and wonder how it might have been different. He might have led me to the yarn stall, where I would sit on the wood plank among the balls of thread, waiting for the throb in my ankle to subside. My parents would find me there. They would thank the kind man, give him a coin, buy all the yarn the girl had so carefully sorted and wound. My father would say to him: For your kindness, you must dine with us.