the song of a flute. When I wake, it goes on singing in me.”
I rose and walked past her toward the window, seized by a sudden foreboding that my aunt would leave and return to Alexandria in search of her daughter. I told myself it wasn’t a premonition like the others I’d had, but fear. Only fear. Anyway, by what means could Yaltha possibly leave Nazareth? She no longer had access to my father’s wealth and power, and even if she did, how could a woman travel alone? How could she set about locating a daughter who’d been lost for nineteen years? No matter how haunting the flute’s call, she could not leave.
She tossed back her shoulders as if casting off a heavy cloak and looked down at the potsherds. “That’s enough of my story. Tell me that you will make use of these shards.”
I knelt and picked up one of the larger pieces, hoping to mask my ambivalence. It had been more than seven years since I’d held a reed pen. Seven years since Jesus had wakened and assured me I would write again one day. Without realizing it, I’d given up on one day. I’d even given up on faraway day. I no longer opened the chest of cedar and read my scrolls. The last vial of ink had turned into a thick gum years ago. My incantation bowl was buried at the bottom of my chest.
“I’ve watched you over the years since we arrived here,” Yaltha said. “I see you’re happy with your husband—but in every other way you seem lost to yourself.”
“I have no ink,” I told her.
“Then we shall make some,” she said.
xvi.
When Jesus returned, he found me sitting on the floor of our room, writing on a piece of potsherd. My breasts were dry now, but the ink Yaltha and I had made from red ocher and oven soot flowed each day from my reed pen. I looked up to see him standing in the doorway still clasping his staff. He was covered in dust from the road. I could smell the faint stench of fish on him from across the room.
Ignoring the purity laws, he strode into the room and put his arms about me, burying his face at my shoulder. I felt his body quiver, then a small heaving in his chest. Smoothing my hand across the back of his head, I whispered, “She was beautiful. I named her Susanna.”
When he lifted his face, his eyes were filled with tears. “I should’ve been with you,” he said.
“You are here now.”
“I would’ve arrived sooner, but I was out on the boat when Simon arrived in Capernaum. He waited two days for me to come ashore with our catch.”
“I knew you would come as soon as you could. I had to beg your brothers to send for you. They seem to think your earnings are more important than your mourning.”
I saw his jaw tighten and guessed they’d had words over it.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” I told him. “I’m still considered unclean.”
He pulled me closer. “I’ll go to the mikvah later, and I’ll sleep on the roof, but right now I won’t be denied your nearness.”
I filled a bowl with water and led him to the bench, where I removed his sandals and washed his feet. He leaned his head against the wall. “Oh, Ana.”
I rubbed his hair with a damp towel and brought him a clean robe. As he donned it, his eyes drifted to the potsherds and the inkpot on the floor. One day I hoped to continue writing the lost stories, but the only words that I had now were for Susanna, bits and pieces of grief that fit onto the small jagged shards.
“You’re writing,” Jesus said. “I’m glad.”
“Then you, Yaltha, and I are alone in this particular gladness.”
I tried to keep my resentment contained but found it flaring up uncontrollably. “It’s as if your family believes God has decided to destroy the world again, not by flood this time, but by Ana writing. Your mother and Salome have said nothing, but I think even they disapprove. According to Judith and