dreams. “I’m one of only two attendants who write down the petitioners’ dreams when they wake. My master taught me to read and write so I could have this high position.” She amused us for a short while with accounts of the more preposterous dreams she’d recorded. “I take my dream recordings to the priest, who deciphers their meanings and prescribes cures. I know not how he does it.”
“And do these cures work?” I asked in bafflement.
“Oh yes, almost always.”
I glimpsed a movement in the garden and saw Lavi treading through the spiky palm shadows. Catching my eye, he lifted his forefinger to his lips and concealed himself behind the foliage near the open door.
“Do you live within the temple precinct?” Yaltha was asking.
“Since my master died when I was sixteen, I’ve had a bed in the temple domicile with the other attendants. I’m free now and make a small wage.”
We went on asking questions while she basked in the genuineness of our attention, but after a while she begged Yaltha for knowledge about the two years they’d spent together before being separated. My aunt told her stories about her fear of crocodiles, her favorite lullaby, how once she’d dumped a bowl of wheat flour on her head.
“You had a little wooden paddle doll,” Yaltha told her. “A brightly painted one I found in the market. You called her Mara.”
Diodora sat up very tall, her eyes widening. “Was her hair made of flax threads with an onyx bead on each end?”
“Yes, that was Mara.”
“I still have her! She’s all I have from my life before I was bought by my master. He said I arrived clutching her. I didn’t remember her name.” She shook her head. “Mara,” she repeated.
In this way, she took the bits and pieces Yaltha offered and began to piece them into a story of who she was. I’d stayed very quiet, listening—they seemed to inhabit a realm of their own. But after a while, Diodora noticed my reserve and said, “Ana. Tell me of yourself.”
I hesitated a moment before telling her about her family in Sepphoris—Father, Mother, and Judas—but said what I could, leaving out a great deal. I described Jesus and my heart pined so badly that I resorted to tales of Delilah standing in the water trough, just to have the relief of smiling.
Darkness came, and in that softening, Diodora turned to Yaltha. “When you told me who you were, I didn’t know if I should believe it. That you could be my mother . . . it seemed impossible. But I saw myself in you. Deep inside, I knew who you were. After I heard your confession, bile rose in me. I told myself, she left me once, now I will leave her, so I walked away. Then you called me daughter. You called out your love.” She went and knelt beside Yaltha’s chair. “I cannot forget that you left me. That knowledge will always remain in a corner of me, but I wish to let myself be loved.”
There was no time to ponder or rejoice in what she’d said. The door flew open. Haran stepped into the room. Behind him, the obsequious servant.
xviii.
Yaltha, Diodora, and I stood and edged together, shoulders touching, as if to make a tiny fortress. “Since you didn’t knock, I assume you’ve come on a matter of urgency,” Yaltha said to Haran, sounding remarkably restrained, but when I looked at her, she gave the impression of little bolts of lightning flashing around her head.
“I was told you received a visitor,” he said. His eyes were fixed on Diodora. He searched her face, curious, but as yet unseeing, and I realized that was all he knew—a visitor.
“Who are you?” he asked, coming to stand before her.
I was desperately searching for some scenario to explain her presence—something about Diodora being Pamphile’s sister who’d come regarding Lavi’s marriage. We shall never know if my fabrication might’ve convinced him, or if Yaltha, who was also readying to speak, might’ve distracted him, for just then Diodora pulled the vulture bracelet from her pouch and offered her clumsy story, too frightened to grasp that it made little sense now. “I’m