hands. He would look at it with awe, and I would tell him with feigned seriousness, “If there should be another threat of my arrest and I’m sent once more to Egypt, this will ensure you won’t forget my face.” Then I would laugh and he would laugh.
xv.
Standing at the door to the lotus garden, I listened to the evening sky creak and rumble. All day the heat had been like a viscous film coating the air, but now suddenly wind gusted and rain poured down, black needles rattling the date palms and pummeling the surface of the pond, and then dissipating almost as quickly as they came. I stepped out into the darkness, where a bird, a wagtail, sang.
For the past three weeks, I’d spent my mornings in the scriptorium teaching Lavi to read Greek instead of attending to my usual duties. Even Thaddeus had joined in the tutoring, insisting that our student begin by copying the alphabet over and over on the back of old, discarded parchments. I was careful to destroy the evidence of his lessons lest Haran discover it on his return. Pamphile burned so many alphas, betas, gammas, and deltas in the kitchen, I told her there’d never been a more scholarly oven in all of Egypt. By the second week, Lavi had memorized the inflections of the verbs and nouns. By the third he was locating verbs in the sentence. Very soon he would be reading Homer.
Most afternoons, Yaltha and I had scampered about Alexandria, roaming the markets, gaping at the Caesareum, the gymnasium, and the splendors along the harbor, and returning twice to the library. We’d visited every Isis temple in the city but one, Chaya’s. Again and again I’d asked my aunt why she avoided it and each time she’d answered the same: I’m not yet ready. The last time I’d pestered her about it, she’d bitten off the answer and spit it at me. I’d not asked again. Ever since, I’d carried remnants of hurt, confusion, and exasperation.
The wagtail flew. The garden stilled. Hearing footsteps, I turned to find Apion approaching through the palms.
“I’ve come to forewarn you,” he said. “A message arrived this day from Haran. He returns early. I expect him in two days.”
I looked up at the sky, the moonless, starless night. “Thank you for informing me,” I said without expression.
When he departed, I raced to Yaltha’s bedchamber with my anger spilling over. I burst upon her without a knock. “Chaya is just across the city, yet all this time has passed and you’ve not gone to her. Now Apion has informed me Haran will be back in two days. I thought Chaya was the reason you came to Egypt! Why do you avoid her?”
She gathered her night shawl about her neck. “Come here, Ana. Sit down. I know you’ve struggled to understand my delay. I’m sorry. I can only tell you that on the day we spoke to Apollonios . . . even before we departed the library courtyard, I became possessed by the fear that Chaya may not want to be found. Why would an Egyptian woman who serves Isis want to be claimed by the Jewish mother who abandoned her? I became afraid she’d reject me. Or worse, reject herself.”
I’d thought of my aunt as invincible, impervious—someone assailed by life, but somehow unmaimed by it—but I saw her suddenly as a person of flaws and bruises like myself. There was an odd relief in it.
“I didn’t realize,” I said. “I shouldn’t have judged you.”
“It’s all right, Ana. I’ve judged me, too. It isn’t as if this worry hadn’t crossed my mind earlier, but I’ve never let it fully settle on me until now. I suppose my own need to find Chaya and make right what I’d done by leaving her didn’t allow me to consider that she might turn me away. I fear losing her all over again.” She paused. The candlelight wavered in an unknown breath of wind, and when she spoke again, I caught the same wavering in her voice. “I didn’t consider the need she might have . . . to remain as she is.”