to the rooftops, which were covered with reed bundles and packed mud, and I wondered if Yaltha and I would be able to sit up there and share our secrets.
I quickly scanned the courtyard. An oven strewn with pots and utensils, firewood, dung pile, mortar and pestle, loom. There was a sun-cooked vegetable garden and a little stable with four chickens, two sheep, and a goat. A single olive tree. I took it all in. This is where I’ll live. I tried not to feel the shock that undulated through me.
His family huddled in the shade of the lone tree. I wondered where Jesus’s sister was, the one from the market—the yarn spinner. His mother wore a colorless tunic and a pale yellow head scarf with wisps of dark hair escaping the edges. I guessed her to be near the age of my mother, but she was far more frayed by her years. Her face, so like her son’s, was well worn from chores and childbearing. She had a slight rounding in her shoulders, and the corners of her mouth had begun to droop slightly, but I thought how lovely she looked standing there with the sun filtering through the leaves, coins of light on her shoulders. Jesus’s confession to me in the cave slipped into my thoughts. In Nazareth some say I’m Mary’s son, not Joseph’s. They say I was born from my mother’s fornication. Others say my father is Joseph, but that I was illicitly conceived before my parents married.
“Welcome, Ana,” she said, coming to embrace me. “My daughter Salome was married only a few weeks ago and lives now in Besara. One daughter has gone and another has come.” There was a plaintive note beneath her smile, and it occurred to me that not only had her daughter left, but her husband had died only six months before.
The two men were Jesus’s brothers, James, nineteen, and Simon, seventeen, both dark skinned and thick haired like Jesus, with the same short beards and posture—the wide stance, arms crossed—but their eyes had none of the passion and depth Jesus’s did. The pregnant woman with the prickly tongue was Judith, married to James, whose age, I would discover, was fifteen, the same as mine. They looked at me with mute stares.
Yaltha removed her bridle. “One would think a two-headed sheep had arrived in your midst!”
I winced. “Greet my aunt Yaltha.”
Jesus grinned.
“She’s impertinent,” James said to Jesus, as if she wasn’t standing there.
Rankled, I said, “It’s what makes her so dear to me.”
Jesus, I would discover, was a peacemaker and a provocateur in equal measures, but one could never say which he would be at any given moment. In this moment he became the peacemaker. “You’re welcome here. Both of you. You are our family now.”
“You are indeed,” Mary said.
Judith remained silent, as did Jesus’s brothers. My aunt’s honesty had laid the friction bare.
* * *
? ? ?
WHEN THE CART WAS UNPACKED, I bid Lavi goodbye. “I will miss you, friend,” I told him.
“Be well,” he said, and his eyes watered, causing mine to do the same. I watched him lead the horse through the gate, listening to the clatter of the empty wagon.
When I turned back, the family had dispersed. Only Yaltha and Jesus stood there. He took my hand and the world righted herself.
We were to marry that same day when the sun set, but without ceremony. There would be no procession. No virgins raising their oil lamps and calling out for the groom. No singing, no feasting. By law, a marriage was the act of sexual union, nothing more and nothing less. We would become husband and wife in the solitude of each other’s arms.
Not allowed to enter the chuppah beforehand, I spent the afternoon in the storeroom, where Yaltha had spread her bed mat. Mary had offered to share her room with Yaltha, but she’d declined, preferring to be on her own amid storage jars, food provisions, wool shares, and tools.
“Do they think we have the spaciousness of a palace?” I said when we were alone, mimicking my soon-to-be sister-in-law.