THE SUMMER had been so good.
The second crop of figs was pulling down our old tree in the courtyard, and the olive pickers beating the branches in the orchards, and I felt a happiness I’d never known, and I knew that I felt it.
It was the beginning of time for me—from the last days in Alexandria to the coming to this place.
As the months passed, we finished all the repairs on our house so that it was near to perfect for all of our families—that of my uncles, Simon and Alphaeus and Cleopas, and for Joseph and my mother, and for me.
The Greek slave, Riba, who had come with Bruria gave birth to a child.
There was much whispering and fussing about this matter, even among the children, with Little Salome whispering to me, “She didn’t hide in that tunnel from the robbers far enough, did she?”
But the night of the baby’s birth, I heard it crying, and I heard Riba singing to it in Greek, and then Bruria was singing to it, and my aunts were laughing and singing together, with the lamps lighted, and it was a happy night.
Joseph woke up and took the baby into his arms.
“That’s no Arab child,” said my aunt Salome, “that’s a Jewish boy and you know it.”
“Who said it was an Arab child!” cried Riba. “I told you—.”
“Very well, very well,” Joseph said quietly, as always, “we’ll call him Ishmael. Does that make everyone happy?”
I liked the baby at once.
He had a good little chin and large black eyes. He didn’t cry all the time like my aunt Salome’s new baby, who fussed if you made a strange noise, and Little Salome loved to carry him around while his mother worked. And so there was Little Ishmael. Little John of Aunt Salome and Alphaeus was one of fifteen Johns in the village, along with seventeen Simons, and thirteen by the name of Judas, and more Marys than I had fingers on both hands—and these just in our kindred on this side of the hill.
But I go ahead of my story. These babies didn’t come till winter.
Summer burnt hot without the sea breeze of the coast, and bathing in the spring was great fun every night when we returned from Sepphoris, and the boys got into water fights with each other, while around the bend in the creek you could hear the girls laughing and talking amongst themselves. Upstream at the cistern cut in the rock where the women filled their jars there was much talking and laughing too, and my mother even sometimes came in the evening just to see the other women and walk with them.
As the summer wore on, there were weddings in the village, both of them long all-night celebrations at which it seemed everybody in Nazareth was drinking and dancing, the men dancing with the men wildly, and the women dancing with the women, and even the maidens, though they were fearful and stayed together always next to the canopy under which the bride sat, the bride covered in the most fine veils and shining gold bracelets.
Many in the village played the flutes; and several men the lyres and the women beat the tambourines over their heads, and old men hit the cymbals to make a steady time for the dancing. Even Old Justus was brought out and propped on pillows against the wall, and nodding, and smiling at the wedding, though the spit dripped down his chin and Old Sarah had to wipe it away.
The father of the bride sometimes did the wildest dance of joy, rocking and throwing up his arms, and turning fast in his brightly trimmed robes, and some of the people drank themselves drunk and their brothers or sons picked them up and took them into their houses without a whisper as was expected.
There was good food to eat, roasted lamb, and thick porridge of meat and lentils, and tears shed, and we little ones played out in the fields late, running and screaming and hooting and jumping, in the darkness, because nobody cared. I ran as far up into the forest as I dared to go and then up the hill and looked at the stars, and danced the way I’d seen the men dance.
More things happened that year than I can possibly tell.
There was one wedding of the rich farmer’s daughter, Alexandra, a beauty, everyone said, and what a bride she was in her gold-threaded veils. When the canopy and the torches came to her door, everyone sang at the sight of her.
People came from other villages to share that feast, and when the Pharisees gathered to wish everyone well, and would not eat, the mother of Alexandra the beauty went and bowed to the ground to Rabbi Sherebiah and told him the food had been slaughtered and prepared as was perfect and clean, and if he would not partake of her food for this wedding of her daughter, she herself would not eat or drink at this wedding though it was her only daughter.
Rabbi Sherebiah called for his servant to bring him the water to wash his hands, as Pharisees always did that, washed their fingers right before they ate, even though they were clean, and then he ate from the banquet, holding up the morsel for all to see, and everyone cheered, and all the Pharisees did as he did, even Rabbi Jacimus, though Pharisees almost never dined with anyone but each other.
Then Rabbi Sherebiah danced in spite of his wooden leg, and all the men danced.
Our beloved Rabbi Berekhaiah came forward and danced a slow and wondrous dance that delighted all of us little ones who were his pupils. Moreover, after that his father-in-law, not to be outdone, had to dance, as did every old man in the village.
The mother of Alexandra went off to sit with the bride and the women and they were drinking happily that the Pharisees had come to the banquet.
Work went on.
Buildings went up in Sepphoris as if they were plants growing wild in a marsh. The burnt places were healed the way bruises are healed. The marketplace grew larger all the time, with more and more merchants there to sell to those furnishing their new houses. And there were laborers aplenty for us to hire for our work. And everyone called us the Egyptian Gang.
No one complained of our prices, and as Alphaeus and Simon directed the building of foundations and floors and new walls, Cleopas and Joseph were making the pretty banquet tables, and bookshelves, and Roman chairs we’d made in Alexandria.
I did learn to paint borders more cleverly than before. And even to paint some of the flowers and leaves, though pretty much I filled in what the skilled painters had outlined for us.
When we did stonework, it was of the richest kind, when matching the marble pavers took patience, and the plan took careful layout. We went to the village of Cana to do a floor there for a man who had come back from the Greek islands and wanted his library to be beautiful.
People came to hire us from other places as well. A merchant from Capernaum asked us to come there, and I really did want us to go because we would be near the Sea of Galilee if we went, but Joseph said those journeys were yet to come when the building stopped in Sepphoris.
And we took a lot of jobs home with us to Nazareth to be finished, especially the job of making couches or inlaid tables, and we learned of the best silversmiths and enamelers in Sepphoris and went to them for their finishing of the pieces.
If there was any bad thing, other than the talk of the soldiers chasing the rebels in Judea—which did go on without cease—it was that Little Salome and I couldn’t be together much anymore at all.
She was busy all the time now with the women, much more so than she’d been in Alexandria, and it seemed to me that for all the work we had, and the money coming into our purses, that the women had a harder lot.
Food they had bought aplenty in Alexandria, but here they grew the vegetables, and had to pick them from the garden; and whereas one could always buy hot bread in Alexandria in the bakers’ street, they baked all their bread here, after grinding the wheat themselves very early every morning.
Whenever I tried to talk to Little Salome, she put me off, and more and more she used the same voice to me that the women used to the children. She had grown up overnight, and was always tending to a baby. It was either Baby Esther who was beginning to keep quiet now and then for the first time, or the baby of some woman who had come to visit Old Sarah. This was no more the child who had whispered and laughed with me in Alexandria, or even the little girl who cried on the trip north from Jerusalem. She went to school with us now and then—there were a few young girls in the school who sat apart from the boys—but she was impatient with it, and wanted to get home to work, she said. Cleopas told her she had to learn to read and write Hebrew, but she didn’t care for it.
I missed her.
Now what the women liked to do, however, was weaving, and when they set up their looms in the courtyard in the warm months, it caused talk from one end of Nazareth to the other.
It seemed that the women of this place used a loom with one pole to it, and one crosspiece at which they had to stand. But we had brought back from Alexandria bigger looms, with two sliding crosspieces, at which the woman could sit, and the women of the village all came to see this.
A woman could sit at this loom, as I said, which indeed, my mother did, and a woman could go much faster with her work, as my mother did, and make cloth to be sold in the marketplace, which my mother did—when she had time, that is, from Little Symeon and Little Judas with the help of Little Salome.
But my mother loved weaving. Her days of weaving the temple veils with the eighty-four young girls chosen for this, housed in Jerusalem, had given her great speed and skill, and she turned out cloth that was of the quality of the best in the marketplace, and she knew how to dye cloth as well, even to work in purple.
Now it was explained to us that those girls had been chosen to make the Temple veils because all things for the Temple had to be made by those in a state of purity. And only girls beneath the age of twelve were certain to be pure, and those chosen had a tradition, and my mother’s family was part of it. But my mother didn’t talk much of those days in Jerusalem. Only to say the veil had been very big and very elaborate, and two a year had to be made.
It was this veil that covered the entrance to the Holy of Holies: the place where the Lord Himself was present.
No woman ever went to the Holy of Holies: only the High Priest. And so my mother had loved her work on the veil, and that the work of her hands had gone there.
Many women of the village came to talk to my mother and watch her with this loom. It was different after she began weaving in the open courtyard. She had more friends. Our kindred who had not come to talk were now coming often.
And ever after that summer they would call on her, and some of the young girls who did not have little ones underfoot would come to hold the babies on their knees. This was good for my mother because she was fearful.
In a village like Nazareth, all the women know everything. How cannot really be explained. But that is the way it is, and the way it was. And she almost surely knew of the hard questions put to Joseph when I was taken into the school. And it hurt her.
I knew this because I knew every little move of her face, of her eyes and her lips, and I could see it. I could see her fearfulness of other women.
Of men, she had no fear, because no good man was going to look at her or talk to her or in any way disturb her. That was the way of the village. A man did not talk to a married woman unless he was her very near kin and even then, he never sought her out alone, unless he was her brother. So she had no real fear of men. But of women? She had been afraid, until the days of the loom, and the women coming to learn from her.
All this about my mother’s fearfulness I hadn’t really put together in my mind until it changed. My mother’s fearfulness was her manner. But now as it changed, I was happy.
And another thought came to me, a secret thought, one of the many I couldn’t tell anyone: my mother was innocent. She had to be. If she wasn’t innocent, then she would have been afraid of men, wouldn’t she? But she had no fear of men. No, and no fear of going to the stream for water, and no fear of going into Sepphoris now and then to sell the linen she had woven. Her eyes were more innocent than those of Little Salome. Yes, a secret thought.
Old Sarah was far too old to do any fancy work with a needle, or anything with a needle for that matter, or a loom, but she taught the young girls how to make embroidery, and they gathered around her often, talking and laughing and telling stories with my mother very nearby.
Now with all the hammering and polishing and fitting and sewing and weaving, the courtyard was a busy place. Add to that children screaming and crying and laughing, babies crawling on the stones, and the open stable where the men tended to the donkeys who carried our loads to Sepphoris, and the older boys going in and going out with loads of hay, and a pair of us rubbing the gold into a new banquet couch, one of eight for the same man, and the cooking over the fire in the brazier, and then the mats spread out on the stones for us to eat, and all of us gathered in prayer, trying to make the little ones be quiet for just a little while as we thanked the Lord for all our blessings; add all this, and you have a picture of our lives that first year in Nazareth which engraved itself upon my mind and which stayed with me over all the many years I was to live there.
“Hidden,” Joseph had said. I was “hidden.” And from what he wouldn’t say. And I couldn’t ask. But I was happily hidden. And when I thought of that, and of Cleopas’s strange words to me, that someday I must answer the questions, I felt like I was someone else. I’d feel my skin all over and then I’d stop thinking about it.
I learnt new words, words I’d always heard and said, but I came to know what they meant, and they were from the Psalms mostly. Let the fields be joyful, yes, joyful, and all the trees of the wood rejoice. Make a joyful song to the Lord; sing praise.
The darkness was gone; death was gone; fire was gone. And though people did talk of the boys who had run off to fight with the rebellion, and there was now and then a woman howling in her sorrow when she had news of her lost son, our life was full of sweet things.
In the long late light, I ran through groves of trees up and down the slopes until I couldn’t see Nazareth. I found flowers so sweet that I wanted to pick them and make them grow at home. And at home, there was the sweetness of the wood shavings, and the nice smell of the oil that we rubbed into the wood. There was the smell of baking bread always, and we knew when the best sauce was there for dinner as soon as we came home.
We had good wine from the market of Sepphoris. We had delicious melons and cucumbers from our own soil.
In the synagogue, we clapped our hands and danced and sang as we learned our Scripture. It was a little harder in school, with the teachers making us write out our letters on our wax tablets, and making us repeat what we didn’t do well. But even this was good and the time went fast.
Soon the men were harvesting the olives, batting the branches of the groves with their long sticks and gathering the berries. The olive press was busy, and I liked to pass there when I could and see the men at work, and the sweet-smelling oil pouring out.
The women of our house crushed olives in a small press for the purest oil at home.
The grapes in our gardens were ready for picking, and the figs, we had had all the figs we could want to be dried, to be made into cakes, to be eaten as they were. The later figs were so many from our courtyard and the garden that some were taken to the village market at the bottom of the hill.
The grapes we didn’t eat were put out to dry as raisins; no wine was made from them as the land around Nazareth had no vineyards, but was for wheat and barley and sheep and the forests I loved.
As the air grew cooler, the early rains came with great force. Thunder roared over the rooftop, and everyone offered prayers of thanks. The cisterns of the house filled, and the freshwater poured into the mikvah.
In the synagogue, Rabbi Jacimus, who was our strictest Pharisee, told us that now the water from the gutters flowing into the mikvah was “living water,” and that when we purified ourselves in “living water,” this is what the Lord wanted of us. We must pray that the rains were enough not only for the fields and for the streams but to keep our cisterns full and our mikvah living as well.
Rabbi Sherebiah didn’t completely agree with Rabbi Jacimus and they began to quote the sages on these points and to “dispute” in general, and finally the Old Rabbi called for us to offer our prayers of thanksgiving that the Windows of Heaven had been opened, and the fields would soon be ready for the planting to begin.
At night, over supper, as the rain came down on the roof high above, we talked about Rabbi Jacimus and this matter of “living water.” It was troubling to James and to me too.
We’d come to Nazareth after the rains. And the mikvah was empty when we came. We’d replastered it, and then filled it from the cistern in which the water had been resting a long time. But this was rainwater, was it not? Had it been living water when we filled the mikvah?
“Wasn’t this living water?” I asked.
“If it’s not living water,” said James, “then we were unclean after the mikvah.”
“We bathe often in the stream, don’t we?” Cleopas asked. “And as for the mikvah, it has a tiny hole in the very bottom, so the water continues to move always. And when the rain filled the cistern, it was living water. It’s living water. So be it.”
“But Rabbi Jacimus says that’s not good enough,” said James. “Why does he say this?”
“It is good enough,” said Joseph, “but he’s a Pharisee and Pharisees are careful. You have to understand: they think that if they take great care with each part of life, they’ll be safer from transgressing the Law.”
“But they can’t say that our mikvah is not pure,” said my uncle Alphaeus. “The women use the mikvah—.”
“Look,” said Joseph. “See two paths on a mountain ridge. One is close to the edge, the other is farther away. The one farther away is safer. That is the path of the Pharisee—to be farther from the edge of the cliff, farther from falling off the cliff and into sin, and so Rabbi Jacimus believes in his customs.”
“But they aren’t Laws,” said my uncle Alphaeus. “Pharisees say all these things are Laws.”
“The Rabbi Sherebiah said that it was the Law,” said James timidly. “That Moses was given Laws that weren’t written down, and these were passed down through the sages.”
Joseph shrugged. “We do the best we can do. And now the rains have come. And the mikvah? It’s full of freshwater!”
He threw up his hands as he said this and he smiled, and we all laughed at it, but we weren’t laughing at the Rabbi. We were laughing as we always laughed at things we talked about for which there seemed no one answer.
Rabbi Jacimus was hard in his ways, but he was a gentle man, a wise man, and he told wonderful stories. Stories were our history, and who we were, and there were times when I liked nothing better than stories.
Yet I was coming to understand something of the greatest importance: all stories were part of one great story, the story of who we were. I hadn’t seen it so clearly before, but now it was so clear that it thrilled me.
Often in the school and sometimes in the synagogue, Rabbi Berekhaiah stood up, though he was shaking on his bent legs and he raised his arms and with his head bent and his eyes cast upwards he would cry out: “But who are we, children, tell me?”
And then we would sing it out after him:
We are the people of Abraham and Isaac. We went down into Egypt in the time of Joseph. We became slaves there. Egypt became the smelting forge and we suffered. But the Lord had redeemed us, the Lord raised up Moses to lead us, and the Lord brought us forth parting the waters of the Sea of Reeds, and into the Promised Land.
The Lord gave the Law to Moses on Sinai. And we are a holy people, a people of priests, a people of the Law. We are a people of great Kings—Saul, and David, and Solomon, and Josiah.
But Israel sinned in the eyes of the Lord. And the Lord sent Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon to lay waste to Jerusalem, even to the House of the Lord.
Yet Our Lord is a Lord slow to anger, and steadfast in his love, and full of mercy, and he sent a redeemer to end our captivity in Babylon, yea, this was Cyrus the Persian, and we returned to the Promised Land and rebuilt the Temple. Turn and look towards the Temple, for there every day the High Priest offers a sacrifice for the people of Israel to the Lord on High. All over the world there are Jews, a holy people, faithful to the Law and to the Lord, who look towards the Temple, and know no other gods but the Lord.
Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.
And you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, and with all your strength.
And these words, that I command you this day, will be in your heart:
And you will teach them diligently to your children, and you will talk of them when you sit in your houses, and you walk by the roads and when you lie down and when you get up.
We did not have to be at the Temple to keep the sacred Feasts. Jews all over the world kept the sacred Feasts.
It was not safe yet to travel to the Temple. But the news came to us that the fighting had stopped in Jerusalem, and that the Temple had been purified. The fire signals coming from Jerusalem told us all was well.
And we went out at dawn before the Day of Atonement to watch for the first light because we knew that the High Priest was rising with that first light to begin his ceremonies in the Temple, his bathing which he would do again and again that day.
We hoped and prayed there would be no rebellion, no trouble.
Because on this day the High Priest would seek to atone for all the sins of the people of Israel. He would put on his finest vestments. The Rabbi Jacimus, the anointed priest himself, had described to us these holy garments, and we had learned how they were to be from the Scripture:
The long tunic of the High Priest was blue, and tied with a sash at the waist, and its hem was trimmed with tassels and small golden bells. One could hear these bells when the High Priest walked. Over this tunic the High Priest wore a second garment called the ephod which had much fine gold and fancy work on it, and a breastplate of twelve shining gems, one each for the tribes of Israel, so that when the High Priest went in before the Lord, he would have there the Twelve Tribes. And on the head of the High Priest was a great turban with a golden crown. It was a “glorious thing to behold.”
But before the High Priest put on these beautiful vestments, these vestments as fine as those of any pagan priest in any Temple anywhere, he would dress in simple linen, pure and white, to perform the sacrifices.
On this day, the High Priest laid hands upon the bullock to be sacrificed for Israel. And he would lay hands upon the two goats.
Now one of these goats would be sacrificed, but the other, the other would carry all the sins of the people of Israel out into the wilderness. It was the goat for Azazel.
And what was Azazel? We little boys wanted to know. But we already knew. Azazel was evil; it was the demons; it was the world “out there,” without the Law, in the wilderness. And everyone knew what the word “wilderness” meant because all the people of Israel had once roamed through the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. And the goat would carry the sins back to Azazel to show that the sins of Israel had been forgiven by the Lord, and evil could take back what was evil as we would have no more of it.
But the most important thing which the High Priest did was to enter the Holy of Holies of the Temple, the place where the Lord Himself was Present; the place where only the High Priest could go.
And all Israel prayed that the power of the Lord there would not break out upon the High Priest, but that his prayers of atonement would be heard for himself and for all of us, and that he would come out to the people having been in the Presence of the Lord.
In the late afternoon, we gathered in the synagogue where the Rabbi read the scroll that the High Priest was reading in the Court of the Women: “And on the tenth day of the seventh month there shall be a day of atonement … and you shall afflict your souls.”
The Rabbi told us what the High Priest was telling the crowd in the Temple Court: “More than what I’ve read out before you is written here.”
At last darkness came. We stood on the rooftop barefoot waiting. Those on the highest places cried out. They could see the fire signals from the nearest villages south, and now they lighted the fires to spread the word north and east and west:
Everyone was shouting with joy. We were dancing. Our fast was ended. The wine was being poured. The food was put on lighted coals.
In a cleansed and renewed Temple, the High Priest had completed his task. He had come out of the Holy of Holies safely. His prayers for Israel had been complete. His sacrifices complete. His readings complete. And he was gone now as we were to a banquet among his kindred in his home.
The early rains had been good. The planting had started.
And hard on the Day of Atonement came the Feast of Booths where all Israel had to live for seven days in booths built of tree branches to remember the journey from Egypt into Canaan, and for the children this was special fun.
We gathered the finest branches we could from the forest, especially the willow branches from along the stream, and we lived in these booths, all of us, men, women, children as if they were our houses, and we sang the happy Psalms.
Finally, news came that Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas had arrived home, along with all those who had gone to Caesar Augustus. We gathered in the synagogue to hear the announcement from a young priest who had just returned from Jerusalem and was charged with giving the word. He spoke Greek very well.
Herod Antipas, a son of the dreaded Herod the Great, was to be the ruler of Galilee and Perea. And Herod Archelaus whom everyone still hated very much would be the Ethnarch of Judea, and other children of Herod ruled other places beyond. One princess of Herod was given the palace of the Greek city of Ascalon. I thought that was a pretty name.
When I asked Joseph about the pretty city of Ascalon later, he told me there were Greek cities all through Israel and Perea, and even in Galilee—cities with temples to idols of marble and gold. There were ten Greek cities around the Sea of Galilee and they were called the Decapolis.
I was surprised to hear it. I had become so used to Sepphoris with its Jewish ways. I knew that Samaria was Samaria, yes, and we had no doings with Samaritans though they were very close to our borders. But I hadn’t thought there were pagan cities in the land. Ascalon. I thought it beautiful. I formed a picture in my mind of Princess Salome, the daughter of Herod, wandering around her palace in Ascalon. What was a palace to me? I knew what a palace was, as surely as I knew what a pagan temple was.
“It’s the way of the Empire,” said my uncle Cleopas. “Don’t be distressed over it, that we have all these Gentiles among us. Herod, King of the Jews,” he said in a mean tone of voice, “built plenty of temples to the Emperor and to those pagan gods. That’s our King of the Jews for you.”
Joseph put his hand up for Cleopas to be quiet. “In this house we are in the Land of Israel,” he said.
Everybody laughed.
“Yes,” said Alphaeus, “and outside that door, it’s the Empire.”
We didn’t know whether or not we could laugh at that, but Cleopas nodded to it.
“But where does Israel stop and start?” asked James, who sat with us.
“Here!” said Joseph, “and there!” He pointed. “And anywhere that there are Jews gathered together who keep to the Law.”
“Will we ever see those Greek cities?” I asked.
“You saw Alexandria, you saw the best of them, the greatest,” said Cleopas. “You saw a city second only to Rome.”
We had to nod to that.
“And remember her and remember all of this,” said Cleopas. “Because in each of us, you must realize, is the full story of who we are. We were in Egypt, as were our people long ago, and as they did, we came home. We saw battle in the Temple, as our people did under Babylon, but the Temple is now restored. We suffered on our journey here, as our people suffered in the wilderness and under the scourge of the enemies, but we came home.”
My mother looked up from her sewing.
“Ah, so that’s why it happened this way,” she said, like a child would say it. She shrugged her shoulder and shook her head, and went on picking at the embroidery. “Before I couldn’t understand it—.”
“What?” asked Cleopas.
“Well, why an angel would come to Joseph and tell him to come home through all the bloodshed and the terrors, but you just made sense of it, didn’t you?”
She looked to Joseph.
He was smiling, but I think he was smiling because he hadn’t thought of this before. And she had the bright eyes of a child, the trust of a child, my mother.
“Yes,” he said. “Now it does seem that way. It was our journey through the wilderness.”
My uncle Simon had been asleep on his mat, his head on his elbow, but he rose up now and said in a sleepy voice, “I think Jews can make sense of anything.”
Silas laughed hard at that.
“No,” said my mother, “it’s true. It’s a matter of seeing it. I remember, in Bethlehem, when I was asking the Lord, ‘How, how …?’ and then—.”
She looked at me, and ran her hand over my hair as she often did. I liked it as always, but I didn’t cuddle close to her. I was too big for that.
“What happened in Bethlehem?” I asked. I blushed. I’d forgotten Joseph’s order to me not to ask. I felt a sharp pain all through me. “I’m sorry that I said it,” I whispered.
My mother looked at me, and I could see she knew that I was feeling bad. She looked at Joseph and then at me.
No one said a word.
My brother James had a hard look on his face as he stared at me.
“You were born there, you know that,” said my mother, “in Bethlehem. The town was crowded.” She spoke haltingly, looking at Joseph and then at me as she went on. “It was full of people that night, Bethlehem, and we couldn’t find a place to stay—it was Cleopas and Joseph and James and I, and—the innkeeper put us in the stable. It was in the cave beside the place. It was good to be in there, because it was warm, and God had sent a snow.”
“A snow!” I said. “I want to see snow.”
“Well, maybe someday you will,” she said.
No one said a word. I looked at her. She wanted to go on. I knew she did. And she knew how much I wanted her to go on.
She started to talk again.
“You were born there in the stable,” she said calmly. “And I wrapped you up and put you in the manger.”
Everyone laughed the usual gentle family laugh.
“In the manger? The hay for the donkeys?” This was the secret of Bethlehem?
“Yes,” said my mother, “and there you lay, probably in a softer bed than any newborn in Bethlehem that night. And the beasts kept us very warm, while the tenants froze in the rooms above.”
Again, the family laughter.
The memory made them all happy, except for James. James looked almost dark. His thoughts were far away. He’d been by my reckoning maybe seven years old when this took place, the age I was now. How could I know what he thought?
He looked at me. Our eyes met, and something passed between us. He looked away.
I wanted my mother to tell me more.
But they had begun to talk of other things—of the good early rains, of the reports of peace coming from Judea, of the hope that we might go up to Jerusalem for the coming Passover if things continued to go well.
I got up and went out.
It was dark and chilly but it felt good after the close warmth of the house.
That couldn’t be the whole story of Bethlehem! That couldn’t be all that happened. My mind could not put all the pieces together, the questions, the moments and words spoken, and doubts.
I remembered my terrible dream. I remembered the winged man, and the mean things that he said. In the dream, they hadn’t hurt me. But now they stung me.
Oh, if only I could talk to someone, but there was no one, no one to whom I could tell what was in my heart, and there never would be!
I heard steps behind me, soft, dragging steps, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I heard a breathing that I knew was from Old Sarah.
“You come inside, Jesus bar Joseph,” she said, “it’s too cold out here for you to be standing and looking at the stars.”
I turned around and did what she said because she told me to, but I didn’t want to. I went with her inside the house. And back to the warm gathering of the family and this time I lay down like my uncles with my head on my arm and looked at the low brazier with its burning coals.
The little ones started fussing. My mother got up to tend to them, and then called for Joseph to help.
My uncles went off to bed in their rooms. Aunt Esther was in the other part of the house, with Baby Esther, who was howling as always.
Only Old Sarah sat on her bench because she was too old to sit on the floor, and James was there, and James was looking at me, and the fire was in both his eyes.
“What is it?” I asked him. “What’s this thing you want to say?” I asked. But I said it low.
“What was that?” asked Old Sarah. She stood up. “Was that Old Justus?” she asked. She went off into the other room. It wasn’t anything really bad. It was only Old Justus coughing because his throat was so weak that he couldn’t swallow.
James and I were alone.
“Say it to me,” I said.
“Men said they saw things,” James said. “When you were born, they saw things.”
“What?”
He looked away. He was angry, and hard.
At age twelve, a boy can take on the yoke of the Law. He was past that now.
“Men claimed to see things,” he said. “But I can tell you what I saw, myself, with my eyes.”
I waited.
His eyes came back to me, and his look was sharp.
“These men came. To the house in Bethlehem. We’d been in Bethlehem for a while. We’d found good lodgings. My father was tending to his affairs, finding our kindred, all of that. And then in the night, these men came. They were wise men, from the East, maybe from Persia. They were the men who read the stars and believe in magic, and advise the Kings of Persia as to what they should do and not do on account of the signs. They had servants with them. They were rich men, beautifully robed. They came asking to see you. They knelt in front of you. They brought gifts. They called you a King.”
I was too surprised to speak.
“They said they had seen this great star in the Heavens,” he said, “and they had followed that star to the house where we were. You were in a crib. And they laid their gifts before you.”
I didn’t dare to ask him anything.
“Everyone in Bethlehem saw those magi come, and their servants with them. They rode camels, those men. They spoke with authority. They bowed before you. And then they went away. It was the end of their journey, and they were satisfied.”
I knew he was telling me the truth. No lie would ever pass the lips of my brother James.
And I knew that he knew I had caused that boy in Egypt to die, and that I’d brought him back to life. And he’d seen me bring clay sparrows to life, a thing I hardly remembered.
A King. Son of David, Son of David, Son of David.
The women were coming in now. And my older cousins had wandered in from where I didn’t know.
My aunt Salome picked up the last of the bread and scraps from supper.
Old Sarah had taken her place on the bench.
“Pray that child sleeps till morning,” said Old Sarah.
“Don’t fret,” said Aunt Salome. “Riba sleeps with one eye open for all of them.”
“A blessing,” said my mother, “that sweet girl.”
“Poor Bruria would not be alive if it were not for that girl. That girl tends to her as if she were a child. Poor Bruria …”
“Poor Bruria …”
And so on it went.
My mother told me to go to bed.
The next day James wouldn’t look at me. It was not a surprise. He hardly ever looked at me. And as the days passed, he never did.
The winter months grew colder and colder.
When it came time for the Feast of Lights, we had many lamps burning in our house, and from the rooftops one could see big fires from all the villages, and in our streets, the men danced with torches just as they would have if they had gone to Jerusalem.
On the morning at the end of the eighth day, as the Feast was ending, and I was sleeping, I heard shouts from outside. Soon everyone in the room was up and running.
Before I could ask what it was, I went with them.
The early morning light was perfectly gray. And the Lord had sent a snow!
All of Nazareth was beautifully covered with it, and it came down in big flakes, and the children ran out to gather the flakes as if they were leaves, but the flakes melted away.
Joseph looked at me with a secret smile, as everyone else went out into the silent snowfall.
“You prayed for a snow?” he asked. “Well, you have a snow.”
“No!” I said. “I didn’t do it. Did I?”
“Be careful what you pray for!” he whispered. “You understand?” His smile grew bigger, and he led me out to feel the snowflakes for myself. His laughter and happiness made me feel all right.
But James, who stood by himself, under the roof that jutted out over the courtyard stones, stared at me; and when Joseph went off, he crept up, and whispered in my ear:
“Why don’t you pray for gold to drop from Heaven!”
I felt my face on fire.
But he was gone with the others. And we were almost never, never alone.
Later that day—the eight days of the Feast of Lights had ended at dawn—I sought out the grove of trees, the only place in the whole creation where I could be alone. The snow was thick. I wore heavy wool around my feet with thick sandals, but the wool was wet by the time I got there and I was very cold. I couldn’t stay long under the trees, but I stood there, thinking to myself and looking at the wonder of the snow covering the fields and making them look so very beautiful like a woman dressed in her finest robes.
How fresh, how clean it all looked.
I prayed. Father in Heaven, tell me what you want of me. Tell me what all these things mean? Everything has a story to it. And what is the story of all this?
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw the heavens had given us more snow, and it was making a veil over Nazareth. Slowly as I watched, the village disappeared. Yet I knew it was there.
“Father in Heaven, I won’t pray for snow, Father in Heaven, I will never pray for what is not your will. Father in Heaven, I won’t pray for this one to live or that one to die, oh, no, never for that one to die, and never, never will I try even to make it rain or stop rain, or to make it snow, never until I understand what it means, all of it.… ” And there my prayer ran out into flashing memories, and the snow caught my eyes as I looked up into the trees and the snow came down softly on me as if it were kissing me.
I was hidden in the snow, I was hidden and safe, even from myself.
Far away someone called my name.
I woke from my prayer, I woke from the stillness, and the softness of the snow, and I ran down the hill, waving, and calling, and heading for the warm firelight and the family all around it.