"Ask that he write to the family which is best for her," said Joseph. "And when such arrangements are made, that there is a place for her, let him come. Let him come and the Rabbi and I will go with him to see Shemayah."
"Yes," said the Rabbi. "The man can't turn away Hananel."
"Hananel! He's the son of insults," said James under his breath. "He once told me while I was working on his very walls that he would move Cana stone by stone so that it was farther away from Nazareth if only he could do so."
The Rabbi laughed.
"Perhaps he'll be proud to rescue the beloved child from this miserable place," Bruria offered.
Joseph smiled and winked and pointed agreeably at Bruria. He looked at me and whispered,
"Such is the path, perhaps, to the man's heart."
I took my leave, letting them come behind me. For this I needed a pair of better sandals, and fresh clothes. It wasn't a long walk, but the wind was fierce.
After I was dressed and ready to go, my mother drew me aside, though my brothers, as they prepared for work, were all watching her.
"Listen, what you did by the creek," she said. "It was kind, don't you ever think that it wasn't."
I nodded.
"It's just, well, you see, Avigail had asked her father . . . as well as us. She'd asked Shemayah if he would look kindly on you. It was before she spoke to us and before we told her that such a thing wouldn't happen."
"I see," I said.
"Have I wounded you?"
"No. I understand. He's been doubly shamed."
"Yes, and not a wise man, and not a patient one."
And what of her, my Avigail? What of her at this very moment when the sun beat down on the noisy town. In what dark room was she locked away, staring into the shadows?
I took a walking stick for good company and headed out for Cana.
Chapter Eleven
THERE WERE SCRIBES and scribes in Israel. A village scribe might be the man who wrote up marriage contracts, bills of sale, and petitions for hearing to the King's court or to the Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem. Such a man might write letters for anyone and everyone who paid him to do so, and he could read what came in, and see that the contents were understood by those who lacked a facility for language. Amongst our people far and wide, reading was common; but writing took experience and skills. And so we had those kinds of scribes. There were three or four of them in Nazareth.
Then there was the other kind of scribe, the great Scribe who had studied the Law, who had spent years in the libraries of the Temple, the Scribe who knew the traditions of the Pharisees, the Scribe who could dispute with the Essenes when they criticized the Temple or the priesthood, a Scribe who could instruct the boys who came to the Temple to learn all that was contained in the Law and the Prophets and in the Psalms and in the writings, hundreds and hundreds of books of writing apart from these.
Hananel of Cana had been such a great Scribe. He'd spent his early years in the Temple; and he had been a judge for many years in different courts that convened to try cases from Capernaum to Sepphoris.
But he was too old now for such things, and he had long ago prepared for this day by building the largest and most beautiful house in Cana. It was large because it contained all his books, which numbered in the thousands. And it had once contained the rooms of his sons and daughters. But they'd gone to the grave long ago, leaving him alone in this world with occasional letters from a granddaughter who lived in Jerusalem and letters perhaps, no one knew, from a grandson who had stormed out of the house in a rage against its rules two years ago.
James and Little Joseph, Little Simon, Little Judas, and my cousins and nephews and I - we had built Hananel's house. And it had been one of the joys of those years, laying floors of gorgeous marble, and painting walls in rich colors of red or deep blue, and decorating them with borders of florets and twining ivy.
The house was sprawling, Greek in design, with an inner court surrounded by open rooms meant to provide the very finest setting for the company who came to see Hananel - the highborn of Galilee, the scholars from Alexandria, the Pharisees and Scribes from Babylon. And indeed the house had been filled with such people for many years, and it was a common thing to see these travelers on the road to visit Hananel, to bring him books, to sit in the gardens of the house or beneath its painted ceilings and talk to him about the goings-on of the world and about matters of the Law which men so loved to discuss when gathered together.
But as death had emptied the house, as the granddaughter in Jerusalem retired a widow and childless to live with her husband's people, the house grew quiet around the old man.
And so it stood, a monument to the way in which life might be lived, but was not lived, a shining fortress on the hill above the small gathering of houses that made up the town of Cana.
As I stood at the iron gate, a gate my brothers and I had put on its hinges, I looked out on the land that belonged to Hananel - for as far as I could see. And beyond that, I knew, surrounding the distant peak of Nazareth, were the lands of Shemayah.
A great many who lived in the surrounding towns worked these lands - these fields, these orchards, these vineyards. But the greatest pride of the two men was their olive groves. Everywhere I saw these groves and beside them the inevitable mikvah where the men bathed before the harvest because the oil from these olives had to be pure if it was to go to the Temple in Jerusalem, if it was to be sold to the pious Jews of Galilee, or Judea, or the many cities of the Empire.
Students now and then came to Hananel, but he was rumored not to be a patient teacher.