practice. My brothers even more so—they’re the ones who usually accompany her. We don’t let her cross the valley alone.”
“You come from Nazareth, then?”
“Yes, I make door lintels, roof beams, and furniture, but my work doesn’t rival my father’s—there have been few commissions for me there since he died. I’m compelled to come to Sepphoris now to be hired as one of Herod Antipas’s laborers.”
How was it he spoke so freely? I was female, a stranger, the daughter of a wealthy Roman sympathizer, yet he didn’t hold himself apart.
His eyes swept over the cave. “I sometimes stop to pray here on my way. It’s a lonely place . . . except today.” He laughed, the soaring sound I’d heard in the market, and it caused me to laugh as well.
“Do you labor on Herod Antipas’s amphitheater?” I asked.
“I cut stone for it in the quarry. When quotas are reached and hiring ceases, I travel to Capernaum and join a band of fishermen on the Sea of Galilee and sell my portion of the catch.”
“You are many things, then. A carpenter, a stonemason, a yarn sorter, and a fisherman.”
“I’m all of those,” he said. “But I belong to none of them.”
I wondered if, like me, he possessed a longing for something forbidden to him, but I didn’t ask, for fear of probing too far. Instead I thought of Judas and said, “You don’t mind working for Antipas?”
“I mind my family’s hunger more.”
“It falls on you to feed your sister and brothers?”
“And mother,” he added.
He did not say wife.
He spread his damp cloak on the ground and gestured for me to sit. As I did so, I looked at Lavi, who appeared to sleep. Jesus sat down at a discreet distance, cross-legged, facing the cave opening. For a long interval we watched the rain and the wild, untethered sky without speaking. The nearness of him, his breathing, the way everything I felt inhabited me—I found rapture in these things, in this being together in the lonely place, and all around the thundering world.
He broke the silence by asking about my family. I told him my father had come from Alexandria to serve Herod Antipas as head scribe and counselor, that my mother was the daughter of a cloth merchant in Jerusalem. I confessed I would be beset with loneliness if not for my aunt. I didn’t mention that my brother was a fugitive or that the disagreeable man he’d seen with me in the market was now my betrothed. I wanted so badly to tell him my writings were buried not far from where he sat, that I was a student, an ink maker, a composer of words, a collector of forgotten stories, but I kept these things inside, too.
“What brought you outside of the city on the day the rains begin?” he wanted to know.
I could not say You, the reason is you. “I walk often in the hills,” I told him. “This morning I was impetuous, believing the rains would not arrive so soon.” It was at least a partial truth. “And you? Did you come here to pray? If so, I fear I’ve kept you from it.”
“I don’t mind. I doubt God does either. Lately, I’ve been poor company for him. I bring him nothing but questions and doubts.”
I thought of my conversation with Yaltha on the roof and the doubts about God that had assailed me ever since. “I don’t think doubts are wrong if they are honest,” I said quietly.
He turned his face to mine and his eyes felt different on me. Was it a revelation to him that a girl would presume to instruct a devout Jewish man on the vagaries of devotion? Had he caught a glimpse of me, Ana, the girl at the bottom of the incantation bowl?
His belly groaned. He pulled a pouch from the pocket in his sleeve and removed a flatbread. He broke it into three even pieces and offered a portion to me and the other to Lavi, who had woken.
“You would break bread with a woman and a Gentile?” I said.