I’d collected over the site to conceal that it’d been disturbed.
When we emerged into the sunlight, Lavi spread his cloak on the ground and I sat looking toward the balsam grove. I drank from the wineskin in my pouch and nibbled a piece of bread. I waited past the second hour. I waited past the third.
He did not come.
xx.
On the day Mother announced my betrothal ceremony would take place in thirty days, I’d sewn thirty ivory chips onto a swath of pale blue linen. Each day since, I’d cut one off. Now, alone on the roof of the house, I stared at the cloth, sobered by the meagerness of chips that remained. Eight.
It was the twilit hour. Moroseness didn’t come easily to me—anger did, yes; passion and stubbornness, always—but sitting here, I felt bereft. I’d returned twice to Tabitha’s house but had been denied entry. Earlier today Mother had informed me that my friend had been sent to live with relatives in the village of Japha, south of Nazareth. I was certain I would never see her again.
I was afraid I would never see Jesus again either. I saw nothing but God’s backside.
Had it always been so? When I was five, visiting the Temple in Jerusalem for the first time, I’d attempted to follow Father and Judas up the circular steps through the Nicanor Gate, when Mother yanked me back. Her hand clamped tight on my arm as I tried to twist free, my eyes straining after my brother, who moved toward the gleaming marble and gold gilt of the sanctuary where God lived. The Holy of Holies. She shook my shoulders to get my attention. “Under penalty of death, you can go no further.”
I stared at the smoke plumes rising from the altar beyond the gate. “But why can’t I go, too?”
For years, whenever I recalled her answer, it would bestow on me the same jolt of surprise I’d felt the day she’d uttered it. “Because, Ana, you are female. This is the Court of Women. We can go no further.” In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything.
Taking up the snipping knife, I sliced away another ivory chip from the cloth. Seven.
Eventually I told Yaltha about Jesus. About the colorful threads draped over his fingers in the market stall, and how, but for them, I wouldn’t know of him at all. I described the rough feel of his palm when he’d come to my aid, the sickening thud of his head on the tile when the soldier had shoved him. When I revealed how I came upon him again at the cave as he prayed the Kaddish and the exigency I felt to speak to him but stifled, she smiled. “And now he inhabits your thoughts and inflames your heart.”
“Yes.” I didn’t add that he caused heat and light to move about in my body as well, but I felt she knew that, too.
I could not have borne Yaltha telling me that my longing for him only came from my despair over Nathaniel. It was true that Jesus had stepped into my path at the same moment the rest of my world collapsed. I suppose he was, in part, a consolation. She must’ve known it, but she refrained from saying it. Instead she told me that I had traveled to a secret sky, the one beyond this one where the queen of heaven reigns, for Yahweh knew nothing of female matters of the heart.
* * *
? ? ?
FOOTSTEPS JARRED THE LADDER, and I turned to see Yaltha’s head pop up like a fishing bob. She was agile enough, but I feared one evening she would topple off into the courtyard. I hurried to offer her my hand, but instead of taking it, she said in a low voice, “Hurry. You must come down. Judas is here.”
“Judas!”
She hushed me and peered into the shadows below. Earlier, one of Antipas’s soldiers, the vicious one, had been positioned close by at the back entrance to the house. “Your brother waits for you at the mikvah,” she whispered. “Take care no one sees you.”
I waited for her to descend, then followed, remembering