what you need to prepare the body. But you must hurry. The centurion wishes to hand over the body quickly.” He glanced up into the half-light. “And he has to be buried before sunset. The Sabbath will be upon us soon.”
Salome scooped the coins from his hand, and grabbing Mary of Bethany by the hand, she pulled her down the hillside. “We’ll wait for you here. Be quick!” he called after them.
Now, in the cave, the lamp flames darted. Light spattered across Jesus’s skin. His skin. His. I reached out and touched it. I let my fingers brush the inside of his elbow. Then I dampened the towel and wiped the dirt and blood from his hands, arms, chest, and face, from the coils of his ears and the creases in his neck, all the while falling and falling, slamming into myself, into the boundless pain.
We rubbed his skin with olive oil, then anointed him with nothing but myrrh. It had been the only sweet spice Salome had been able to obtain in the city at the late hour, and this had dismayed Mary. “When the Sabbath ends,” she said, “we’ll return to the tomb and anoint him more properly with cloves and aloe and mint.”
I watched Salome draw a broken wooden comb through his hair. I’d witnessed his slaughter and not a tear had crossed my cheeks, but I cried in silence now at the comb passing through his locks.
Mary of Magdala grasped the edges of the shroud and drew it slowly down the length of him, but in that last instant before his face was gone from me, I bent and kissed both his cheeks.
“I will meet you in the place called Deathless,” I whispered.
vi.
That evening Martha turned the Sabbath meal into the funeral feast, but no one cared to eat. We were sitting on the damp courtyard tiles, huddled beneath a canopy. All around us were the coming dark and the plop of rain drizzle . . . and silence, a great stunned silence. No one had spoken of Jesus since we’d left the tomb. We had squeezed through the cave opening, where Lavi waited for us, heaved the stone across it, and left our voices inside. Then we’d walked slowly to Bethany, shocked, weary, mute with horror—I, still barefoot, and Lavi, carrying my sandals.
I looked at them now—Mary and Salome; Lazarus, Mary, and Martha; Mary of Magdala, Tabitha, and Lavi. They stared back with solemn, devastated faces.
Jesus is dead.
I wished for Yaltha. For Diodora and Skepsis. I forced myself to picture them beneath the tamarisk tree beside the little stone hut. I tried to see the bright, white cliffs at the top of the hill, and Lake Mareotis shining at the foot of it like a piece of fallen sky. I managed to hold all of this in my mind for several moments before the ghastly memories pushed their way back in. I didn’t know how the rubble inside me could ever be put back together.
As the night drew around us, Martha lit three lamps and set them in our midst. All of their faces shone suddenly, cheeks and chins the color of honey. The rain finally stopped. Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.
I broke the silence. I told them about the letter Judas had sent summoning me home. “He wrote to me that Jesus was in danger from the authorities, but I know now that most of that danger came from Judas himself.” I hesitated, feeling a mix of disgust and shame. “It was my brother who led the Temple guard to arrest Jesus.”
“How do you know this?” exclaimed Lazarus.
“I encountered him this morning in the Garden of Gethsemane. He confessed it to me.”
“May God strike him down,” Martha said with fierceness. No one refuted her. Not even I.
I watched their sharp, appalled expressions, how they struggled to comprehend. Mary of Magdala gave her head a shake, the amber light catching in her hair. She lifted her face to me, and I wondered if she knew