Berenice, the only women who write are sinners and necromancers. I ask you, how do they know this? And James . . . he means to speak to you about me, I’m sure.”
“He has done so already. He met me at the gate.”
“And what did he say?”
“That you broke a water pot in order to write on the shards and then stripped the oven of its kindling to make ink. I believe he fears you’ll smash all the pots and deprive us of cooked food.” He smiled.
“Your brother stood right there in the doorway and said I should give up my perverse craving to write and give myself to prayer and grief for my daughter. Does he think my writing is not a prayer? Does he think because I hold a pen I don’t grieve?”
I took a breath and continued, calmer. “I’m afraid I spoke sharply to James. I told him, ‘If by craving you mean I have a longing, a need, then yes, you’re right, but don’t call it perverse. I dare to call it godly.’ He left me then.”
“Yes, he mentioned this, too.”
“I’m confined here for sixty-eight more days. Salome brought me flax to spin and threads to sort and Mary gave me herbs to grind—but mostly I have a reprieve from daily tasks. At last there’s time for me to write. Don’t take it from me.”
“I won’t take it from you, Ana. Whether you’ll be able to write in the same manner after your confinement—I don’t know, but for now write all you wish.”
He looked so weary all of a sudden. Because of me, he’d returned to find a small war had broken out. I laid my cheek against his and felt his breath skim my ear. I said, “I’m sorry. I tried for so long to belong, to be as they needed me to be. Now I wish to be myself.”
“I’m sorry, Little Thunder. I, too, have kept you from being yourself.”
“No—” He placed his finger at my lips, and I let my protest fall silent.
He picked up the shard on which I’d been writing. There in Greek, in tiny brokenhearted letters: I loved her with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my might.
“You write of our daughter,” he said, and his voice broke.
xvii.
After Jesus observed his seven days of mourning, he found work in Magdala hewing stone for an elaborate synagogue. The city wasn’t as far away as Capernaum, only a day’s walk, and every week he came home for Sabbath with tales of a resplendent building that would hold two hundred people. He told me of a small stone altar on which he’d carved a chariot of fire and a seven-branched menorah.
“Those are the same images on the altar in the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem,” I said, a little aghast.
“Yes,” he said. “So they are.” He didn’t have to elaborate—I knew what he was doing, and it struck me as more radical than anything he’d done before. He was declaring in the most prominent and irrevocable way that God could not be confined any longer to the Temple alone, that his Holy of Holies, his presence had broken out and lodged everywhere.
When I look back on it, I see that act as a kind of turning point, a heralding of what was to come. It was around this time he became more outspoken, openly critical of the Romans and Temple priests. Neighbors began to show up at our house to complain to Mary and James that Jesus had been at the well or the olive press or the synagogue deriding the false piety of the Nazareth elders.
One day a rich Pharisee named Menachem came while Jesus was away. Mary and I met him at the gate and listened as he fulminated. “Your son goes about condemning rich men, saying they build their wealth off the backs of the poor. It’s slanderous! You must appeal to him to cease or there will be little work for your family in Nazareth.”
“We would rather be hungry than silent,” I told him.