EVEN LITTLE SALOME AND I were weary of the tossing ship when we finally reached the small harbor of Jamnia. It was a port that only the pilgrims and the slow cargo ships used now, and we had to anchor far out on account of the shallows and the rocks.
Little boats carried us in, the men dividing themselves to care for the women in one boat and the little ones in another. The waves were so rough I thought we would be pitched into the sea. But I loved it all the same.
At last we were able to jump out and make our way through the foaming tide to the land.
We all fell to our knees and kissed the ground that we’d reached the Holy Land safely, and we hurried inland, wet and shivering, to the town of Jamnia, which was quite a way from the coast, where we rested at the inn.
It was crowded after the boat, a little upstairs room full of hay, but we were so happy to be there that it didn’t matter at all to us. And I went to sleep listening to the men disputing with the other men, and voices hollering and laughing below and more and more pilgrims came in.
The next day there were donkeys aplenty for sale for all of us pilgrims and we began our journey across the beautiful plain with its distant groves of trees, saying goodbye to the misty sea, and heading slowly towards the hills of Judea.
Cleopas had to ride on the donkey, though he protested at first, and we made our way slowly, many of the other families in the great crowd passing us as we went, but we were all of us so happy to be in Israel that we didn’t care to hurry, and Joseph said we had plenty of time to be in Jerusalem for the purification.
When we put up at the next roadside inn, we made our beds in a large tent beside the building, and there were warnings from those traveling down to the sea that we shouldn’t go on, that we should just go north right to Galilee. But Cleopas was by this time out of his head, and singing “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem” and every other song of the city he could remember.
“Take me to the gates of the Temple and leave me there, a beggar, if you will!” he said to Joseph, “if you mean to go on to Galilee!”
Joseph nodded and said we would go on to Jerusalem and to the Temple.
But the women were growing afraid. They were afraid of what we would find in Jerusalem and afraid for Cleopas.
His cough came and went but he was hot all the time, and thirsty and restless. And laughing, always laughing under his breath. He laughed at the little children, and the things other people said, and he looked at me and he laughed. And sometimes he was laughing just to himself, maybe remembering things.
The next morning we began the hard slow climb into the hills. Our ship companions had long ago gone ahead, and we were with those who had come from many different places. I still heard Greek spoken around us as much as Aramaic. And even some Latin.
But our family had stopped speaking Greek to others, and was using only the Aramaic.
It wasn’t until the third day that we finally saw our first view of the Holy City from the slope above it. We children jumped up and down with excitement. We were shouting. Joseph stood smiling. Ahead of us lay twists and turns in the road, but we could see it all before us—this sacred place which had been in our prayers and in our hearts and in our songs since we were born.
There were camps about the high walls with tents of all sizes, and cooking fires, and as we drew closer and closer, the crowds were so big that we hardly moved for hours at a time. People everywhere were speaking Aramaic now, though I still heard some Greek, and all of the men were on the lookout for those they knew, and here and there clasping hands and waving and calling out to friends.
For a long time, I couldn’t see anything. I was in a crowd of the children, mingled with the men, my hand in Joseph’s hand. I only knew we were moving little by little, and we were close to the walls.
Finally we passed through the open city gates.
Joseph reached down and caught me up under his arms, and put me on his shoulders and I saw the Temple clearly above the small city streets.
I felt sad that Little Salome couldn’t see this, but then Cleopas said loudly he had to have her up with him on the donkey, and so Aunt Mary lifted her and she could now see too.
And look! We were in the Holy City of Jerusalem, and the Temple was right in front of us.
Now in Alexandria, I had, like any good Jewish boy, never let my eyes stray to the pagan temples. I had not looked up at the pagan statues. What were idols to a Jewish boy who was forbidden to make such things and held them to have no meaning? But I’d passed the temples and the processions with their music, looking only to the houses to which Joseph and I had to go, which seldom took us out of the Jewish quarter of the city anyway, and I suppose that the Great Synagogue was the grandest building that I had ever entered. And besides pagan temples were not for entering anyway. Even I knew that they were supposed to be the house of the pagan gods for whom they were named and put together.
But I knew of these temples, and somehow from the corner of my eye, I had taken their measure. I had taken a measure as well of the palaces of the rich, and had some idea of what any carpenter’s son would call the scale of things.
And for the Temple of Jerusalem I had no measure at all. No words from Cleopas or Alphaeus or Joseph, or even Philo had made me ready for what I saw.
It was a building so big and so grand and so solid, a building so shining with gold and whiteness, a building stretching to the right and to the left so far that it swept out of my mind anything I’d ever seen in the rich city of Alexandria, and the wonders of Egypt passed away from me, and my breath was taken out of me. I was struck dumb.
Cleopas now had Little Symeon in his arms so he could see, and Little Salome was holding Baby Esther who was bellowing for no reason, and Aunt Mary was holding up Joses, and Alphaeus had my cousin Little James.
As for Big James, my brother, James who knew so much, James had seen it before, when he was very small and had come here with Joseph before I was ever born, even he seemed amazed by it, and Joseph was quiet as if he had forgotten us and everyone around us.
My mother reached up and put her hand on my hip and I looked down at her and smiled. She was pretty to me as always, and shy with her veil drawn over most of her face, and clearly so happy that we were here at last and she looked up as I did to the Temple.
All through the crowd, and it was a great crowd of those shifting and moving and coming and going, there was this feeling of people falling quiet and still just to look at this Temple, trying to know its size, trying to take it in, trying perhaps to remember this moment because many of them were here from far away and long ago or for the first time.
I wanted to go on, to enter the Temple—I thought that’s what we would do—but that was not to be.
We were pushing towards it but losing our sight of it, and dipping down into crooked and tight streets, the buildings seeming to close over our heads, people pressing against one another, and our men asking for the synagogue of the Galileans, where we were to lodge.
I knew Joseph was tired. After all, I was seven years old, and he’d been carrying me a long while. I asked him to put me down.
Cleopas was now very feverish, and yes, laughing with happiness. He asked for water. He said he wanted to bathe now, and Aunt Mary said he couldn’t. The women said we had to get him to bed right away.
My aunt was almost in tears over him and Little Symeon started to cry so I picked him up but he was too heavy and James took him in his arms.
And so it was through the crooked and narrow streets we went, streets that might have been in Alexandria, though they were much more crowded, Little Salome and I laughing that “the whole world was here,” and everywhere there was fast talk, raised voices, people speaking Greek, even Hebrew, people speaking Hebrew, and some speaking Latin but not very many, and most Aramaic like us.
When we reached the synagogue, a big building of three stories, the lodgings were full as everyone expected, but as we were turning away to look for the synagogue of the Alexandrians, my mother cried out to her cousins, Zebedee and his wife, and their children who were just coming in, and they all flocked to her with much embracing and kissing, and they wanted us very much to come up with them and share the space already made for them on the roof. Other cousins were already there waiting. Zebedee would see to it.
Now the wife of Zebedee was Mary Alexandra, my mother’s cousin, who was always called Mary same as my mother, and same as my aunt Mary who was married to my mother’s brother, Cleopas. And when these three women hugged and kissed they cried out: “The Three Marys!” and this made them very happy, as if nothing else was going on.
Joseph was busy paying the price, and we pushed our way with Zebedee and his clan, and Zebedee had brothers with wives and children, through the crowded courtyard where the donkeys were given over for care and feeding, and then we climbed the stairs, and then went up a ladder, the men carrying Cleopas who was laughing all the way in his low manner because he was ashamed.
On the roof, a swarm of kindred greeted us.
Standing out from all the rest was an old woman who reached out for my mother as my mother called her name.
“Elizabeth.” And this name I knew well. And that of her son, John.
My mother fell into this woman’s arms. There was much crying and hugging as I was brought to her, and to her son, a boy of my age who never spoke a word.
Now as I said, I knew of Cousin Elizabeth, and I knew of many of the others because my mother had written many letters home from Egypt and received many from Judea and from Galilee too. I’d often been with her when she’d gone to the scribe of our district to dictate these letters. And when she had received letters, they had been much read and reread, and so the names had stories to them which I also knew.
I was much taken by Elizabeth as she had a very slow and pretty manner to her, and I thought her face pleasing in a way I couldn’t put into words to myself. I often felt this way about old people, that the lines in their faces were very worth study, and that their eyes were bright in the folds of their skin.
But as I am trying to tell you this story from the point of view of the child that I was, I will leave it at that.
My cousin John too had about him this same manner as his mother, though he made me think of my own brother, James. In fact, the two of them marked each other, just as I might have expected. John had the look of a boy of James’s age, though he wasn’t, and John’s hair was very long.
John and Elizabeth were clothed in white garments that were very clean.
I knew from my mother and her talk of her cousin that John had been dedicated from his birth to the Lord. He would never cut his hair, and he would never share in the wine of supper.
All this I saw in a matter of moments, because there were greetings and tears and hugs, and commotion all around.
The roof couldn’t hold any more people. Joseph was finding cousins, and as Joseph and Mary were cousins themselves of each other, that meant happiness for both of them, and at the same time, Cleopas was fussing that he wouldn’t drink the water his wife had brought, and Little Symeon was crying, and then Baby Esther began to cry and Simon her father picked her up.
Zebedee and his wife were making room for our blanket to be put down, and then Little Salome tried to hold Little Esther. And Little Zoker got loose and tried to run. Little Mary was also wailing—and all in all so much happening around me—that it was hard to pay much attention to any one thing.
Before anyone knew it, I had grabbed Little Salome’s hand and tugged her away, slipping under this person and that, and stepping over this person and that, and we were at the edge of the roof.
There was a little wall there, just high enough so we couldn’t fall—.
I could see the Temple again! The crowded roofs of the city lay all in front of it, rising and dipping on the hills and coming up to the Temple’s mighty walls.
There was music coming from the streets below, and I could hear people singing, and the smoke of cooking fires smelled good, and everywhere people chattered, below and on the roofs and it became like a holy chant.
“Our Temple,” said Little Salome proudly to me, and I nodded. “The Lord who made Heaven and Earth dwells in the Temple,” she said.
“The Lord is everywhere,” I answered.
She looked at me.
“But He’s in the Temple!” she said. “I know that the Lord is everywhere. But for now we should talk of his being in the Temple. We are here to go to the Temple.”
“Yes,” I said. I looked at the Temple.
“To dwell with his people, He’s in the Temple,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “And … everywhere.” I looked only at the Temple.
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. “You know that it’s true. The Lord is with us, you and me, right now. The Lord is always with us.”
She laughed and so did I.
The cooking fires made a mist in front of us, and all the noise was like a mist of another kind. It made my thoughts clearer. God is everywhere and God is in the Temple.
Tomorrow we would go to it. Tomorrow we would stand in the court inside its walls. Tomorrow, and then the men would go for the first sprinkling of the purification of the blood of the red heifer in preparation for the Feast of Passover which we would all eat together in Jerusalem to celebrate our coming out of Egypt long, long ago. I would be with the children and the women. But James would be with the men. We would watch from our place, but we would all be within the walls of the Temple. Nearer to the altar where the lambs of Passover would be sacrificed. Closer to the Sanctuary into which only the High Priest would go.
We had known about the Temple ever since we had known about anything. We had known about the Law ever since we had known anything. We had been taught at home by Joseph, and Alphaeus and Cleopas and then in school by the Teacher. We knew the Law by heart.
I felt a quiet inside myself in all the noise of Jerusalem. Little Salome seemed to feel that way too. We stood close to each other without talking or moving, and all the talking and laughter and crying babies, and even the music didn’t touch us for a little while.
Joseph came up to us, and guided us back to the family.
The women were just coming back with food they’d bought. It was time for everyone to gather and time for prayer.
For the first time I saw worry in Joseph’s face as he watched Cleopas.
Cleopas still fought with his wife over the water, not wanting to take it.
I turned and looked at him, and I knew right away he didn’t know what he was doing. He wasn’t right in the head.
“You come sit by me!” he said to me.
I did it, sitting at his right hand, crossing my legs. We were all very close together. Little Salome sat on his left, watching everything he did.
He was angry but not at anybody there. Suddenly he asked when we would get to Jerusalem? Did anybody remember we were going to Jerusalem? It frightened everyone.
My aunt suddenly was very tired of it and threw up her hands. Little Salome went quiet also, just looking at her father.
Cleopas looked around himself and he knew he had said something wrong. Then he seemed himself again, just like that. He picked up the cup of clean water and he drank it. He took a deep breath and looked at his wife. My aunt came nearer again. My mother moved beside her, and put her arm around her. My aunt needed to sleep, I could see it, but she couldn’t do that now.
The sauce was hot from the brazier. I was very hungry. The bread was warm too.
It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem. I bowed my head. Zebedee, being the eldest, led us in the prayer in our family tongue, and the words were a little different to me. But it was still very good.
Afterwards, my cousin John bar Zechariah stared at me as though he had something very important on his mind but he didn’t say anything.
At last we began dipping our bread. It was so good—not just a sauce but a thick pottage of lentils and soft cooked beans and pepper and spices. And there were plenty of dried figs to chew after the hot flavor of the pottage, and I loved it. I didn’t think about anything except the food. And Cleopas was eating a little which made everyone happy.
It was the first really good supper since we’d left Alexandria. And there was plenty of it. I ate until I almost couldn’t eat anymore.
Afterwards, Cleopas wanted to talk to me and made everyone leave us alone. Aunt Mary just made a quitting gesture again and moved away to rest for a moment, and then went to other chores with the clearing away, and Aunt Salome was tending to Little James and the other children. Little Salome was helping with Baby Esther and Little Zoker whom she loved so much.
My mother came near to Cleopas.
“Why, what are you going to say?” my mother asked him. She sat down on his left, not very close but close enough. “Why should we go away?” She said this in a kind way but she had something on her mind.
“You go away,” he told her. He sounded like he had drunk himself drunk but he hadn’t. He had drunk less wine than anybody else. “Jesus, come in so you can hear me if I whisper in your ear.”
My mother refused to leave. “Don’t you tempt him,” my mother said.
“And what do you mean by that?” Cleopas asked. “You think I’ve come to the Holy City of Jerusalem to tempt him?”
Then he clutched at my arm. His fingers were burning.
“I’m going to tell you something,” he said to me. “You remember it. This goes in your heart with the Law, you hear me? When she told me the angel had come, I believed her. The angel had come to her! I believed.”
The angel—the angel who’d come in Nazareth. He’d come to her. That was what he’d said on the boat, wasn’t it? But what did this mean?
My mother stared at him. His face was wet and his eyes very big. I could feel the fever in him. I could see it.
He went on.
“I believed her,” he said. “I am her brother, am I not? She was thirteen, betrothed to Joseph, and I tell you, she was never out of the sight of us outside of our house, never could there have been any chance of anyone being with her, you know what I’m saying to you, I mean a man. There was no chance, and I am her brother. Remember, I told you. I believed her.” He lay back a little on the clothes bundled behind him. “A virgin child, a child in the service of the Temple of Jerusalem, to weave the great veil, with the other chosen ones, and then home under our eyes.”
He shivered. He looked at her. His eyes stayed on her. She turned away, and then moved away. But not very far. She stayed there with her back to us, close to our cousin Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was watching Cleopas, and watching me. I didn’t know whether she heard him or not.
I didn’t move. I looked down at Cleopas. His chest rose and fell with each rattling breath and again he shivered.
My mind was working, collecting every bit of knowledge I had ever learned that could help me make sense of what he had said. It was the mind of a child who had grown up sleeping in a room with men and women in that same room and in other rooms open to it, and sleeping in the open courtyard with the men and women in the heat of summer, and living always close with them, and hearing and seeing many things. My mind was working and working. But I couldn’t make sense of all he’d said.
“You remember, what I said to you, that I believed!” he said.
“But you’re not really sure, are you?” I whispered.
His eyes opened wide and a new expression came over him, as if he was waking from his fever.
“And Joseph isn’t either, is he?” I asked in the same whisper. “And that is why he never lies beside her.”
My words had come ahead of my thoughts. I was as surprised as he was by what I’d said. I felt chilled all over. Prickly all over. But I didn’t try to change what I’d said.
He rose up on his elbow, and his face was close to mine.
“Turn it around,” he said. He struggled for breath. “He never touches her because he does believe. Don’t you see? How could he touch her after such a thing?” He smiled, and then he laughed in that low laugh of his, but no one else heard it. “And you?” he went on. “Must you grow up before you fulfill the prophecies? Yes, you must. And must you be a child first before you are a man? Yes. How else?” His eyes changed as if he stopped seeing things in front of him. Again he struggled for breath. “So it was with King David. Anointed, and then sent back to the flocks, a shepherd boy, wasn’t it? Until such time as Saul sent for him. Until such time as the Lord God sent for him! Don’t you see, that’s what confounds them all! That you must grow up like any other child! And half the time they don’t know what to do with you! And yes, I am sure! And have always been sure!”
He fell back again, tired, unable to go on, but his eyes never left me. He smiled and I heard his laughter. “Why do you laugh?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I am still amused,” he answered. “Yes, amused. Did I see an angel? No, I did not. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t laugh, but then maybe again I would laugh all the more. My laughter is the way I speak, don’t you think? Remember that. Ah, listen to them down in the streets. Over there, over here. They want justice. Vengeance. Did you hear all that? Herod did this. Herod did that. They’ve stoned Archelaus’s soldiers! What does it matter to me now? I would like to breathe without it hurting me for one quarter of an hour!”
His hand came up, groping for me. He touched the back of my head, and I bent down and kissed his wet cheek.
Make this pain go away.
He drew in his breath, and then he appeared to drift and to sleep, and his chest began to rise and fall slowly and easily. I placed my hand on his chest and felt his heart. Strength for this little while. What harm is there in it?
When I moved away, I wanted to go to the edge of the roof. I wanted to cry. What had I done? Maybe nothing. But I didn’t think it was nothing. And the things he’d said to me—what did they mean? How was I to understand these things?
I wanted the answers to questions, yes, but these words only made more questions, and my head hurt. I was afraid.
I sat down and leaned against the low wall. I could barely see over it now. With all the families huddled so near, and so many backs to me and so much chatter and soft singing to children, I thought I was hidden.
It was dark now and there was torchlight all over the city, and loud happy cries, and plenty of music. Cooking fires still, or maybe fires for warmth as it was a little colder. I was a little colder. I wanted to see what was going on below. Then I didn’t. I didn’t care.
An angel had come to my mother, an angel. I was not Joseph’s son.
My aunt Mary caught me by surprise. She pulled me hard around to look at her. She was crouching over me. Her face was full of glittering tears, and her voice was thick:
“Can you cure him!” she asked.
I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say to her.
My mother came down upon us and tried to pull her away. They stood over me, their robes brushing my face. Words were whispered. Angry words.
“You can’t ask this of him!” my mother whispered. “He’s a little child and you know it!”
Aunt Mary sobbed.
What could I say to my aunt Mary? “I don’t know!” I said. “I don’t know!” I said again.
Now I did cry. I drew my knees up and I crouched even closer to the wall. I wiped at my tears.
They went away.
The families close to us were settled down, the women having gotten the little ones to sleep. Down below a man played the pipe and another man sang. The sound was clear for a moment, and then gone in the hush.
I couldn’t see the stars for the mist. But the sight of all the torches of the city, tumbling uphill and downhill, and above all, the Temple rising like a mountain with its great fluttering torches drove every other thought from my mind.
A good feeling came over me, that in the Temple I would pray to understand all these words—not only what my uncle had said to me, but all the other things I had heard.
My mother came back.
There was just room near the wall by me for my mother to kneel down and then to sink back on her heels.
The torchlight hit her face as she looked towards the Temple.
“Listen to me,” she said.
“I am,” I answered. I answered in Greek without thinking.
“What I have to say to you should have waited,” she said. She spoke Greek as well.
With the noise in the streets, with the low nighttime talk on the roof, I could still hear her.
“But it can’t wait now,” she said. “My brother has seen to that. Would that he could suffer in silence. But it’s never been his way to do anything in silence. So I say it. And you listen. Don’t ask questions of me. Do as Joseph told you in that regard. But listen to what I say.”
“I am,” I said again.
“You’re not the child of an angel,” she said.
I nodded.
She turned towards me. The torchlight was in her eyes.
“The angel said to me—that the power of the Lord would come over me,” she said. “And so the shadow of the Lord came over me—I felt it—and then in time came the stirring of life inside me, and it was you.”
I said nothing.
She looked down.
The noise of the city was gone. The torchlight made her look beautiful to me. Beautiful perhaps as Sarah looked to Pharaoh, beautiful as Rachel to Jacob. My mother was beautiful. Modest, but beautiful, no matter how many veils she wore to hide it, no matter how she bowed her head or blushed.
I wanted to be in her lap, in her arms, but I didn’t move. It wasn’t right to move or say a word.
“And so it happened,” she said, looking up again. “I have never been with a man, not then, not now, nor will I ever. I am consecrated to the Lord.”
I nodded.
“You can’t understand this … can you?” she asked. “You can’t follow what I’m trying to tell you.”
“I do follow,” I said. “I do see.” Joseph wasn’t my father, yes, I knew. I had never called Joseph Father. Yes, he was my father according to the Law, and married to my mother, but he wasn’t my father. And she was so like a girl always, and the other women like her older sisters, I knew, yes, I knew. “Anything is possible with the Lord,” I said. “The Lord made Adam from the dust. Adam didn’t even have a mother. The Lord can make a child with no father.” I shrugged.
She shook her head. She wasn’t like a girl now, but not like a woman either. She was soft and almost sad. When she spoke again, she didn’t sound like herself.
“No matter what anyone ever says to you in Nazareth,” she said, “remember what’s been said tonight.”
“People will say things … ?”
She closed her eyes.
“This is why you didn’t want to go back there … to Nazareth?” I asked.
She gave a deep breath. She put her hand over her mouth. She was amazed. She took a deep breath, and she was gentle:
“You haven’t understood what I’ve said to you!” she whispered. She was hurt. I thought she might cry.
“No, Mamma, I do see, I understand,” I said at once. I didn’t want her to be hurt. “The Lord can do anything.”
She was disappointed, but then she looked at me and for my sake, she smiled.
“Mamma,” I said. I reached out for her.
My head was pounding with thoughts. The sparrows, Eleazer dead in the street and rising living from the mat, too many other things, things slipping away in my mind, and my mind too full. And all Cleopas’s words and what were they? You must grow up like any other child or was it Little David back to the flock until they called him? Don’t let her be sad.
“I see. I know,” I said to her. I smiled a little smile I never gave to anyone but to her if it was giving. More a little sign than a giving. She had her smile for me. A little thing.
And now, she shook off everything that had gone before, and she reached out for me.
I went up on my knees, and she did too, and she held me tight to her.
“It’s enough for now,” she said. “It’s enough for you to have my word,” she whispered in my ear.
After a while, I got up with her and we went back to the family.
I lay down on my bed of bundles, and she covered me, and under the stars, with the city singing, and Cleopas singing, I went sound asleep.
After all, it was the farthest place to which I could go.