“I know you take herbs to keep you from becoming with child. I know about the linseed and resins.”
Mother said, “I see. And I suppose if I were to convince your father to abandon the betrothal, you would make sure this news did not reach his ears? Is that it?”
In all truth, such an ingenious thing had not occurred to me. I’d meant only to wound her as she’d wounded me. She’d come up with the threat herself and offered it to me as if on a platter, and I seized on it. I was fourteen, desperate. A betrothal to Nathaniel ben Hananiah was a form of death. It was life in a sepulchre. I would’ve done anything to be delivered.
“Yes,” I said, stunned by my fortune. “If you convince him, I’ll say nothing.”
She laughed. “Tell your father what you wish. It’s of no concern to me.”
“How can you say that?”
“Why should I care if you tell him what he already guesses?”
When Mother’s footsteps faded, I cracked the door to find her minion posted at the threshold, hunched on a low stool. There was no sign of Yaltha.
“Will you sleep here, too?” I asked Shipra, not disguising my anger.
She slammed the door shut.
Inside my room the silence became a searing aloneness. With a glance back at the door, I pulled my incantation bowl from beneath the bed and removed the cloth to expose the words of my prayer.
I heard wind scratching the sky, and the room dimmed as the clouds scattered. Sitting on the floor mat, I cradled the bowl against my belly for several moments, then turned it slowly, like stirring silt, and canted my prayer into the drab light. I sang it over and over until I was weary of begging God to return to me. The largeness in me (what a cruel jest that was!) would find no blessing, nor would my reed pens and inks. The words I wrote would not be read by unborn eyes. I would become the forgotten wife of a horrid little man lusting for a son.
I cursed the world God had created. Could he not have thought up anything better than this? I cursed my parents for bartering me off without a care for my feelings, and Nathaniel ben Hananiah for his dismissiveness, his sneer, his silly purple hat—what was he trying to offset by wearing that towering protuberance? I cursed the rabbi Ben Sira, whose words flapped through the synagogues of Galilee as if borne by angels: “The birth of a daughter is a loss. Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good.”
Offspring of serpents. Bags of rotten foreskins. Decayed pig flesh!
I leapt to my feet and kicked the damnable incantation bowl and its empty words, wincing at the pain that jarred through my injured ankle. Dropping back on the bed, I rolled side to side, my body possessed by a soundless keening.
I lay there until my rage and grief subsided. I caressed the red thread tied on my wrist, rubbing it between my thumb and forefinger, and his face flared in my mind. This deep, clear sense of him. We hadn’t exchanged a word, Jesus and I, but I felt the ripple of intimacy when his hand had clasped mine. It caused a voracious pining at the center of me. Not for him, I didn’t think. For myself. Yet a thought pushed into my mind, a sense that he was as wondrous as inks and papyrus, that he was as vast as words. That he could set me free.
Dusk came, then nightfall. I did not light the lamps.
vii.
I dreamed. No, not a dream exactly, but a memory echoing in the coils of my sleep.
* * *
? ? ?
I AM TWELVE, studying with Titus, a Greek tutor my father has hired after giving in to my inconsolable begging. Mother has assured me I would have a tutor over her dead and buried body, and yet she did not succumb. She lived to rail at me, at Father, and at the tutor, who was no more than nineteen and terrified of