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.
We wandered up the stairway onto the loggia, past the sleeping quarters. Peering into my room, I thought of the girl who’d studied and read and begged for tutors, who’d made inks and word altars and dreamed of her face in a tiny sun. In my youth, I’d heard old Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai say that each soul possessed a garden with a serpent that whispered temptations. That girl I remembered would always be the serpent in my garden bidding me to eat forbidden things.