i.
We sailed into the great harbor of Alexandria after eight days of turbulent seas. Though our ship—a vessel that bore Egyptian corn to Caesarea and returned to Alexandria with olives—had hugged the coastline, the waves had left me unable to keep down food or drink. Throughout the journey, I had lain curled on my mat belowdecks and thought of Jesus. At times, my distress at traveling farther and farther away from him was so great, I wondered if my sickness wasn’t from the pitch of the sea at all, but from the pain and tumult of leaving him.
Still weak and nauseated, I forced myself to leave the ship’s hull for my first glimpse of the city I’d dreamed about since Yaltha first began telling me stories of her greatness. Standing beside my aunt, I inhaled the foggy air and drew my coat to my neck, the clamor of the mainsail snapping ferociously over our heads. The harbor swarmed with ships—large merchant ships like ours, and smaller, fleet galleys.
“There!” said my aunt, pointing into the gloom. “There’s Pharos, the great lighthouse.”
When I turned, I was met by a spectacle I couldn’t have imagined. On a small island facing the harbor, a massive tower of white marble rose in three grand tiers toward the clouds, and at the top, a magnificent blaze of light. Even the Temple in Jerusalem couldn’t compare to it. “How do they make such a light?” I murmured, too awed to realize I’d spoken the thought aloud.
“The fire is reflected by massive bronze mirrors,” Yaltha replied, and I saw in her face the pride she felt for her city.
A statue crowned the pinnacle of the lighthouse dome, a man pointing skyward. “Who’s that?” I asked.
“Helios, the Greeks’ sun god. See? He’s pointing to the sun.”
The city brimmed along the waterfront, shining white buildings that stretched into the distance. My nausea forgotten, I stared transfixed at one of them that jutted out into the harbor, a dazzling edifice that seemed to float on the water’s surface. “Behold,” Yaltha said, watching my face. “The palace of the royals. I once told you about the queen who lived there—Cleopatra the Seventh.”
“The one who went to Rome with Caesar.”
Yaltha laughed. “Yes, that, among other things. She died the year I was born. I grew up hearing stories of her. My father—your grandfather—said she would write on nothing but papyrus made in our family’s workshops. She proclaimed it the finest papyrus in Egypt.”
Before I could take in the news that Cleopatra had made reference to my family, an imposing columned structure loomed up. “That’s one of the temples to Isis,” Yaltha said. “There’s a grander one near the library known as Isis Medica that houses a medical school.”
My mind had become dizzy with wonder. How alien this place was, how gloriously alien.
We grew silent, letting the city slide past like the contours of a dream, and I thought of my beloved, of how far I was from him. By now he would’ve attended Salome’s wedding in Cana and departed for Capernaum to assemble his followers and start his ministry. The memory of him standing at the gate when I departed brought a twist of pain. I longed to be with him. But not in Galilee. No, not there . . . here.
When I looked again at Yaltha, her eyes were misted, whether from wind, happiness, or her own twist of pain for Chaya, I couldn’t say.
When we disembarked, Apion hired a flat-roofed litter for the four of us with curtained windows and cushioned seats, pulled by two donkeys. We bobbed along the Canopic Way, the main corridor of the city, a cobblestone street so wide it could’ve fit fifty litters side by side. The street was lined on either side with red-roofed buildings and people milling about—women with uncovered heads, and girls, not just boys, trotting behind their tutors with wooden tablets hitched to their waists on cords. Catching sight of a brilliantly hued Egyptian woman, winged and kneeling, painted inside a portico, I made an exclamation of surprise, and Yaltha leaned to me and said, “Winged Isis. You’ll see her everywhere.” We came upon a line of horse-drawn chariots driven by men in helmets, who, Apion informed us, were on their way to the hippodrome.
A resplendent-looking pediment suddenly protruded in the distance. My heart gave a lurch. I couldn’t see the building’s facade, but the roof seemed to preside over the city. “Is that the great library?” I asked Yaltha.
“It is,” she said. “We will go there, you and I.”
During our voyage my aunt had described how the library’s half million scrolls were meticulously cataloged and arranged, all the texts in existence in the entire world. She’d told me of the scholars who lived there, how they’d determined the earth was round and measured not only its circumference, but its distance to the sun.
And we would go there.
IT WAS NOT UNTIL our litter arrived at Haran’s house that my excitement turned to apprehension. I had lied to Apion, insisting Haran had sent a letter giving his permission for Yaltha to come. How could my deceit possibly remain undiscovered? What if Haran refused to take us in? I couldn’t be elsewhere—Judas would send his letters to Haran’s house.
Before we’d boarded the ship in Caesarea, I’d made certain that Apion conveyed to my brother exactly how the dispatches should be addressed. “Haran ben Philip Levias, Jewish Quarter, Alexandria,” he’d said.
“Is that all that’s needed?” I asked.
“Your uncle is the wealthiest Jew in Alexandria,” he said. “Everyone knows where he lives.”
At this, Yaltha dispensed a grunt of derision, causing Apion to cut his eyes toward her.
She will have to hide her bitterness better than this, I thought, as we stepped into Haran’s palatial house. How would she find Chaya without Haran’s help?
My uncle looked like my father: lumpy bald head, large ears, thick chest, and beardless. Only his eyes were different—less curious and with a hawkish, preying quality. He met us in the atrium, where an oculus streamed light from the ceiling. He was standing directly beneath it in an unrelenting white shine. I could find no shadow in the room. This struck me as an ominous sign.
Yaltha approached him slowly with her face downcast. I was shocked to see her enact an elaborate bow. “Esteemed brother,” she said. “I’ve come home humbled. I beg you to receive me.” I shouldn’t have worried; she knew very well how to play this game.
He glared at her, arms folded. “You’ve come unbidden, Yaltha. When I sent you to our brother in Galilee, it was with the understanding you would not return.”
Haran turned to Apion then. “I gave you no authority to bring them here.”
The revelation of my deception had come sooner than I’d anticipated.
“Sir, forgive me,” Apion said, his mouth sputtering words. “The younger woman said . . .” He glanced at me, sweat forming on his temples, and I saw his dilemma. He feared that if he accused me, I would expose the bribes he’d taken.
Reading the situation, Haran said, “Is it possible, Apion, that you were bribed? If so, hand the money over to me now and I’ll consider keeping you as my treasurer.”
It came to me that I should save him. It appeared we would be cast out either way, and I decided to risk everything to win Apion’s friendship.
I stepped forward. “I am Ana, the daughter of Matthias. Don’t blame your employee for bringing us here. We gave him no bribe. Rather I led him to believe you’d sent a letter with consent for us to come and stay with you. His only fault was having faith in my word.”
Yaltha glanced at me, uncertain. Lavi shifted on his feet. I didn’t look at Apion, but I heard the out-breath that escaped his lips.
Haran said, “You stand here and confess you are in my house out of trickery?” He broke into laughter, and there was not a hint of derision in it. “Why have you come here?”
“As you know, Uncle, my father is dead. My aunt and I had nowhere else to go.”
“Have you no husband?” he asked.
I should’ve anticipated such an obvious question, but it caught me by surprise. I hesitated too long.
“Her husband sent her away,” Yaltha said, rescuing me. “She’s ashamed to speak of it.”
“Yes,” I muttered. “He turned me out.” Then, lest Haran inquire what terrible thing I’d done to deserve my expulsion, I quickly continued, “We traveled here with our guardian because you are my father’s eldest brother and our patriarch. My trickery came from my desire to come here and serve you. I ask your forgiveness.”
He turned to Yaltha. “She’s shrewd, this one—I cannot help but like her. Now. Tell me, long-lost sister, why have you returned after all this time? Don’t tell me that you, too, have come hoping to serve me—I know better.”
“I have no wish to serve you, it’s true. I wished to come home, that’s all. I’ve been in exile for twelve years. Is that not long enough?”
His lips curled. “So, you’ve not returned in hopes of finding your daughter? Any mother would wish to be reunited with a lost daughter before she dies.”
He was not just ruthless, but perceptive. I told myself I should never underestimate him.
“My daughter was adopted long ago,” Yaltha said. “I forfeited her. I have no false hope of seeing her again. If you wish to tell me her whereabouts, I would welcome it, but I’ve made my peace with our separation.”
He said, “I know nothing of her whereabouts, as you fully know. Her family insisted on a legal agreement that prevents us from having any contact with them.”
“As I said, she’s gone,” Yaltha reiterated. “I didn’t come for her, only for myself. Let me come home, Haran.” How contrite she looked, how convincing.
Haran stepped away from the harsh shaft of light and paced, hands clasped behind him. He gave Apion a wave of dismissal and his treasurer nearly broke into a run as he left the room.
My uncle stopped in front of me. “You will pay me five hundred bronze drachmae for each month you stay under my roof.”
Five hundred! I was in possession of fifteen hundred Herodian silver drachmae with no idea how that translated into Egyptian bronze. We needed the money to last up to a year, not just for rent, but for passage home.
“One hundred,” I said.
“Four hundred,” he countered.
“One hundred fifty and I will serve you as a scribe.”
“A scribe?” He snorted. “I have a scribe.”
“Does your scribe write Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin . . . all four?” I asked.
“Does he create lettering and scripts so beautiful people attribute even greater import to the words?” said Yaltha.
“You do these things?” Haran said to me.
“I do.”
“All right. One hundred fifty bronze drachmae and your services as a scribe. I require nothing further except that neither of you leave this house.”
“You can’t mean to confine us here,” I said. This was a blow worse than the cost of his rent.
“If you require goods from the market, your guardian, as you call him, can do your bidding.”
He faced Yaltha. “As you know, charges of murder do not expire. If I learn that either of you have left the house or made inquiries about your daughter, I’ll make sure you’re arrested.” His face hardened. “Chaya’s family doesn’t want your meddling, and I won’t risk them suing me because of it.”
He clanged a tiny gong and a young woman, not Jewish, but a long-necked Egyptian with heavily lined eyes, appeared. “Show them to the women’s quarters and put their guardian with the servants,” Haran told her, then abruptly left us.
We followed behind her, listening to the shuffle of her sandals on the tile, watching her black hair swish back and forth. We were, it seemed, to be captives here.
“Does Haran not have a wife we could appeal to?” I whispered to Yaltha.
“She died before I left Alexandria. I don’t know if he took another,” she whispered back.
The servant girl stopped before a doorway. “You will reside here,” she said to us in broken Greek, then added, “He has no wife. No one lives beneath this roof but Haran and his servants.”
“What good ears you have,” I said.
“All servants have good ears,” she replied, and I saw Lavi grin.
“Where are Haran’s sons?” Yaltha asked.
“They manage his lands in the Nile Delta.” She motioned to Lavi and sauntered off, swaying hair, swaying hips. He gazed at her with parted lips, before fumbling after her.
MY SLEEPING CHAMBER was separated from Yaltha’s by a sitting room that opened onto a courtyard garden—a tiny forest of date palms. We stood in the doorway looking out at it.
“Haran doesn’t trust you,” I said. “He knows exactly why you’re here.”
“Yes. He knows.”
“But it’s strange, isn’t it, that he goes to such lengths to keep you from Chaya. Even confining us to the house. What harm would it be for you to see her? Perhaps there is some legal agreement with her family, but I wonder if he conceals Chaya from you only to punish you. Could his need for vengeance be as strong as that?”
“The rumors surrounding my husband’s death were a disgrace for him—his own sister believed to be a murderer. He lost business over it. He lost favor in the city. He was shamed. He never got over it, and he has never stopped blaming me. His need for revenge is bottomless.”
We stood there silent a few moments, and I thought I saw something come into her face, some awareness. She said, “What if Haran conceals Chaya not only out of vengeance, but to hide some wrongdoing of his own?”
My skin prickled. “What do you mean, Aunt?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Time will tell us.”
Out in the center of the garden, a little pond overflowed with blue lotus. At least we have lodging here, I thought.
While Yaltha settled herself, I stepped outside and went to kneel beside the pond. As I examined the odd way the lotus grew from the mud at the bottom, I heard footsteps. Turning, I found Apion standing behind me. “I’m grateful,” he said. “You rescued me at your own expense.”
“I could do no less.”
He smiled. “So, niece of Haran, what is it you want from me?”
“Time will grant us an answer,” I said.
I spent my mornings in Haran’s small scriptorium making copies of his business records. “A fool possesses one copy,” he’d said. “A wise man, two.”
My uncle owned his father’s lucrative papyrus fields, the transactions of which were acutely boring—contracts, deeds, accounts, receipts. Mountainous piles of dullness. Fortunately, he still sat on the council of seventy-one elders that oversaw Jewish affairs in the city, which provided me with far more engaging documents. I copied a wonderful array of lurid complaints about pregnant widows, daughters-in-law found not to be virgins, husbands beating wives, wives deserting husbands. There was an oath from a woman charged with adultery who swore her innocence in such insistent terms it made me smile, and another from a rabbi’s wife claiming a male bath attendant had scalded her thighs with hot water. Most amazing of all was a daughter’s petition to give her own self in marriage rather than allow her father to do it. How dull Nazareth had been.
I wrote on the most beautiful papyri I’d ever beheld, white, close-grained, polished sheets, and I learned how to gum them together to create rolls twice as long as I was tall. Haran’s other scribe was an elderly man named Thaddeus who had sprigs of white hair in his ears and ink stains on his fingertips, and who fell asleep each day holding his pen.
Emboldened by his naps, I abandoned my work as well and resumed writing my stories of the matriarchs while he slept. I didn’t fear Haran’s sudden appearance, for he spent his days flitting about the city, if not attending council meetings, then business at the synagogue or Greek games at the amphitheater, and when he was home, we stayed clear of him, taking meals in our quarters. It was only necessary that I produce slightly more copies than slow, snoring Thaddeus. In this way, I composed the stories of Judith, Ruth, Miriam, Deborah, and Jezebel. I tucked the scrolls inside a large stone jar in my room, adding them to the others.
I spent the afternoons in our guest quarters, idling endlessly and fretting for my beloved, whom I pictured wandering about Galilee speaking openly with lepers and harlots and mamzers of every sort, calling for the mighty to be brought low, all of this in the presence of Antipas’s spies.
In order to distract myself from my fears, I started filling the time by reading my stories to Yaltha and Lavi. Yaltha had grown increasingly quiet and morose since our arrival, downcast, it seemed, over our inability to seek Chaya, and I hoped my stories might lift her from her misery as well. They did seem to cheer her, but it was Lavi who reveled most in them.
He appeared unexpectedly one day at our door. “May I bring Pamphile to hear your stories?” he said.
I thought at first he’d asked because of the flair I gave to my readings. In my effort to draw Yaltha out, I’d made little performances out of them, not dancing the stories as Tabitha used to do, but enlivening them with actions and dramatic articulations. My rendition of Judith slicing off the head of Holofernes had brought gasps from Lavi and Yaltha both.
“Pamphile?” I said.
“The pretty Egyptian girl,” Yaltha offered. “The house servant.”
I gave Lavi a knowing grin. “Go, fetch her and I’ll read.”
He dashed toward the door, then stopped. “I wish you to read the story of Rachel, whose face was more beautiful than a thousand moons, how Jacob labored fourteen years to marry her.”
Yaltha sat in the elaborately carved chair in our sitting room, a perch she’d taken to occupying day in and day out, often with her eyes closed, her hands rubbing together in her lap while she wandered off somewhere in her thoughts.
We’d been caged in Haran’s house through the spring and summer, unable to visit the great library, a temple, an obelisk, or even one of the little sphinxes that perched on the harbor wall. Yaltha hadn’t mentioned Chaya in weeks, but I guessed that was who she thought of while musing and fidgeting in the chair.
“Aunt,” I said, unable to bear our helplessness any longer. “We came here to find Chaya. Let’s do so even if we defy Haran.”
“First of all, child, that’s not our only purpose in being here. We also came to keep you from being tossed into Herod Antipas’s prison. If we stay long enough, we should at least succeed at that. As for Chaya . . .” She shook her head and the sad, remote look returned to her face. “That is harder than I thought.”
“As long as we’re confined here, we’ll never find her,” I said.
“Even if we were free to roam the city . . . without Haran to point us in Chaya’s direction, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“We could ask about her in the markets, the synagogues. We could . . .” My words sounded pathetic even to me.
“I know Haran, Ana. If we’re caught venturing beyond these walls, he will make good on his word and renew the charges against me. Sometimes I think he wants me to violate his terms so he can do just that. I will be the one imprisoned, and you and Lavi will be turned onto the street—where would you go? How would you receive word from Judas that it’s safe to return?”
I went to sit on the leopard-skin rug at her feet, letting my cheek rest against her knee, and gazed sideways at a row of water lilies frescoed across the wall. I thought of the mud walls in Nazareth, the dirt floors, the mud-and-straw roof that had to be fortified against the rains. I’d never minded those humble things, but I couldn’t say I missed them either. What I missed was Mary and Salome stirring pots. My goat following me around the compound. And Jesus, always Jesus. Each morning, upon opening my eyes, it would break over me afresh that he was far away. I would imagine him rising from his mat and repeating the Shema, his prayer shawl draped about his shoulders as he wandered off into the hills to pray, and missing him would become so great that I, too, would rise, then lift my incantation bowl and sing the prayers inside it.
Sophia, Breath of God, set my eyes on Egypt. Once the land of bondage, let it become the land of freedom. Deliver me to the place of papyri and ink. To the place I will be born.
Knowing that we both prayed at the morning hour each day was like a tether binding us, but I lifted my bowl for another reason, too. I longed not only for him, but for myself. How, though, could anyone be born while quarantined in this house?
As I sat there, staring at the lilies on the wall, an idea came to me. I sat up and looked at Yaltha. “If there’s any reference to Chaya in this house, it could be buried somewhere in Haran’s scriptorium. He has a large upright chest there. I don’t know what it contains, only that he takes care to keep it locked. I could try to search through it. If we aren’t free to leave, I can at least do that.”
She didn’t respond, her countenance didn’t change, but I could tell she was listening.
“Search for an adoption transaction,” she said. “Look for anything that might help us.”
The next morning when Thaddeus’s eyelids thickened and his chin dropped to his chest, I slipped into Haran’s study and searched for the key that unlocked the cabinet at the back of the scriptorium. I came upon it easily, poorly hidden in an alabaster jar on his desk.
When I opened the cabinet, the doors screeched like lyre strings plucked wrongly, and I froze as Thaddeus roused a bit, then settled back to sleep. Hundreds of scrolls were stacked tightly into compartments, row after row, their round ends staring at me like a wall of unblinking eyes.
I guessed—correctly, it would turn out—that I’d discovered his personal archives. Were they arranged by subject, year, language, alphabet, or some mysterious means known only to Haran? With a glance at Thaddeus, I slid out three scrolls from the top left compartment and closed the cabinet without locking it. The first one was a certification in Latin of Haran’s Roman citizenship. The second implored a man named Andromachos to return Haran’s black female donkey that had been stolen from his stable. The third was his will, leaving all of his properties and wealth to his oldest son.
Each morning thereafter, I retrieved the key and removed a handful of scrolls. Thaddeus’s naps typically lasted slightly less than an hour, but fearing he might wake precipitously, I allowed myself only half that time to read, making certain to mark the outside of each document I’d completed with a small dot of ink. Long manuscripts of philosophy were mixed with letters, invitations, commemorations, and horoscopes. Nothing, it seemed, was left unrecorded. If a wee beetle ate a single leaf off a papyrus plant in his field, he wrote a lament that required the sacrifice of three plants. My progress was slow. At the end of two months, I’d read through only half the documents.
“Did you find anything of interest today?” Yaltha asked one afternoon when I returned to our rooms. Always the same question. Of all the emotions, hope was the most mysterious. It grew like the blue lotus, snaking up from muddy hearts, beautiful while it lasted.
I shook my head. Always the same answer.
“Beginning tomorrow I’ll go with you to the scriptorium,” she said. “Together, we can go through the scrolls much faster.”
This surprised, pleased, and troubled me. “What if Thaddeus wakes and finds you poring over Haran’s documents? It’s one thing for him to find me with an unauthorized scroll—I can claim I have it by mistake, that it was misplaced. But you—he could go straight to Haran.”
“Thaddeus won’t be a concern.”
“Why not?”
“Because we will serve him one of my special drinks.”
I ARRIVED IN THE SCRIPTORIUM the following morning with cakes and beer, a drink the Egyptians consumed at all hours as if it were water or wine.
I set a cup before Thaddeus. “We deserve refreshment, don’t you think?”
He tilted his head, uncertain. “I don’t know if Haran would—”
“I’m sure he won’t mind, but if so, I’ll tell him it was I who arranged it. You’ve been kind to me, and I wish to repay you, that’s all.”
He smiled then and lifted his cup, and I felt a paroxysm of guilt. He had been kind, always treating my mistakes with patience and showing me how to repair errors by cleaning dribbles of ink with a bitter fermented liquid. I suspected he knew that I pilfered papyrus for my own purposes, yet he said nothing. And how did I repay him? I deceived him with a draft Yaltha had concocted with the aid of Pamphile and a sedative distilled from the lotus flower.
His oblivion was quick and miraculous. I dumped out the beer in my own cup through the window in Haran’s study, and when my aunt appeared, I already had the cabinet unlocked. We unraveled scroll after scroll, securing them with reading spools, and read side by side at my desk. Yaltha was an uncommonly noisy reader. She made constant vibrating sounds, hmms, ooos, and acks, suggesting she’d stumbled upon some stupefaction or frustration.
We read through a dozen or so scrolls, unable to find any mention of Chaya. Yaltha left at the close of an hour—that was all the time we thought we could risk. Thaddeus, however, went on sleeping. I began to stare at his inert form to be sure he was breathing. His breaths seemed shallow and too far apart, and I was vastly relieved when he woke, bleary, yawning, his hair splashed up on one side of his head. He and I both pretended, as usual, not to notice that he’d been indisposed.
Later, finding Yaltha back in our rooms, I said, “You and Pamphile must restrain yourselves when dousing his drink. Half the measure will do.”
“Do you think him suspicious of the beer?”
“No, I think him well rested.”
On a spring day, midway through the month the Egyptians called Phamenoth, Yaltha and I were sitting beside the pond, she reading Homer’s Odyssey, which was copied onto a thick codex, one of the more precious texts in Haran’s library. I’d brought it to her with Thaddeus’s permission, hoping it would fill her afternoons and distract her mind from Chaya.
Our clandestine hours in the scriptorium had lasted through the fall and winter. After the first month, Yaltha limited her visits to once a week in order to ward off any suspicions Thaddeus might have—there was only so much beer we could bring him. Our efforts had also been slowed when Haran suffered a stomach ailment and did not leave the house for several weeks. Nevertheless, we’d recently finished perusing every scroll in the locked chest. We knew more about Haran’s personal dealings than we cared to. Thaddeus was fat with beer. And we’d discovered nothing that suggested Chaya had ever existed.
I lay back in the grasses and stared at shredded bits of cloud and wondered why Judas hadn’t written to me. It normally took three months for a courier to bring a letter from Galilee. We’d been in Alexandria for twelve. Had Judas hired an unreliable courier? Or perhaps something calamitous had happened to the courier along the way. It seemed possible Antipas had given up his search for me long ago. I dug my fingernails into the soft pad of my thumbs. Why had Jesus not sent for me?
On the day my husband told me he would take up his ministry, he’d leaned his forehead against mine and closed his eyes. I tried now to picture it . . . to picture him. Already his features had dimmed a little in my mind. It terrified me, this slow disappearing.
Pamphile stepped into the courtyard, bringing our supper. “Would you prefer to eat here in the garden?”
I sat up, the image of Jesus scattering, leaving me with a sudden, sharp aloneness.
“Let’s eat here,” Yaltha said, setting aside her book.
“Has there been a letter today?” I asked Pamphile. She’d agreed to alert me to the arrival of a courier, but even so, I queried her about it daily.
“I’m sorry, no.” She gave me an inquisitive look. “This letter must be very important.”
“My brother promised to send word when it’s safe for us to return to Galilee.”
Pamphile stopped abruptly, wobbling her tray. “Would Lavi return with you?”
“We couldn’t travel without his protection.” I realized too late that I’d spoken without thinking. Lavi had lost his heart to her, but it seemed she’d lost hers to him as well. If she knew the letter meant Lavi’s departure, would she conceal it from me? Could I trust her?
She poured wine into Yaltha’s cup, then mine, and handed us bowls of lentil and garlic stew. “If Lavi returns with me,” I said, “I’ll make certain he has money to buy passage back to Alexandria.”
She nodded without smiling.
Yaltha frowned. I had no trouble reading her face: I understand you wish to secure her loyalty, but will there be money for such a promise? Other than the sum I’d set aside for our return, there were only enough drachmae to pay Haran’s rent for four more months, no more.
When Pamphile had departed, Yaltha’s spoon thudded against her bowl. I, myself, could find no appetite. I lay back once more upon the earth, closed my eyes, and searched for his face. I could not find it.
I pressed five drachmae into Lavi’s palm. “Go to the market and purchase a travel pouch made of wool, one that will hold my scrolls.” I led him to the stone jar in my sleeping chamber, pulled out the scrolls one by one, and spread them across my bed. “As you see, our old leather pouch is no longer large enough.”
His eyes moved over my stockpile.
“There are twenty-seven of them,” I said.
Afternoon light was falling from the small window, pale green from the palms. I stared at the scrolls, at years and years of begging and scrounging for the privilege of writing—every word, every ink stroke hard-won and precious, and I felt something flood through me. I don’t know if I would call it pride. It was more of a simple awareness that somehow I’d done this. I felt amazed suddenly. Twenty-seven scrolls.
During the year we’d been here, I’d completed my narratives of the matriarchs in the Bible, and also written an account of Chaya, the lost daughter, and Yaltha, the searching mother. I took it to my aunt before the ink had fully dried. Upon reading it, she said, “Chaya is lost, but her story isn’t,” and I felt that my words were a balm for her. I re-created the verses of grief for Susanna that I’d written on the potsherds I’d left behind in Nazareth. I couldn’t remember all of them, but enough to satisfy me. I wrote the tale of my friendship with Phasaelis and her escape from Antipas, and finally of the household in Nazareth.
Lavi looked up from the pile of stories. “Does the new pouch mean we’ll be traveling soon?”
“I’m still awaiting the letter telling me it’s safe to enter Galilee. I wish to be ready when it comes.”
I was in need of a larger pouch, it’s true, but my motive in sending Lavi into the city was also ulterior. I was considering how to broach the matter when he said, “I wish to marry Pamphile.”
I blinked at him, startled. “And does Pamphile wish to be your wife?”
“We would marry tomorrow if we could, but I have no means to care for her. I will have to find employment here in Alexandria, for she will not leave Egypt.”
He meant to remain here? I felt the bottom dropping from my stomach.
“And when I find work,” he said, “I’ll make a request of her father. We can’t get a license without his sanction. He’s a vinedresser in the village of Dionysias. I don’t know if he would give his consent to a foreigner.”
“I can’t imagine her father would refuse you. I’ll write a commendation for you, if you think that would help.”
“Yes, thank you,” he said.
“I need to know—will you still return to Galilee with us? Yaltha and I cannot travel alone; it’s too dangerous.”
“I won’t abandon you, Ana,” he said.
Relief flowed through me, then pleasure. I didn’t think he’d ever addressed me as Ana, not even after I’d pronounced him to be a free man. It seemed not just an act of friendship, but a quiet declaration of his autonomy.
“Don’t worry, I’ll find the money for your passage back to Alexandria,” I said, but the words had scarcely left me before I realized I had the money already. Letter or no letter from Judas, we had no choice but to leave when the money was depleted. We could simply depart earlier, before I was required to pay the last month’s rent. The surplus would pay Lavi’s passage.
“Now, go quickly to the market,” I said. “Go to the one near the harbor.”
“That is not the closest, nor the largest. It would be better—”
“Lavi, this is most important. I need you to also go to the harbor. Look for a ship from Caesarea. Seek out those who arrive on it—merchants, seamen, anyone. I wish for news of Antipas. It’s possible he’s no longer even alive. If he’s ill or dead, we can return to Galilee with peace of mind.”
I PACED ABOUT OUR QUARTERS while Yaltha read, pausing now and then to offer some commentary on Odysseus, who exasperated her by taking ten years to get home to his wife after the Trojan War. She was no less annoyed with Penelope, who waited for him. I felt a remote kinship with Penelope. I knew a great deal about waiting for men.
In the courtyard, the day was taking its leave. Lavi’s knock, when it finally came, landed with faint, rapid thuds. When I opened the door, he didn’t smile. He looked clenched and wary.
I hadn’t really expected to learn that we were free of Antipas—what was the chance the tetrarch had died in the course of a year? But I hadn’t imagined the intelligence Lavi gathered might be adverse.
He removed a generously sized pouch of gray wool from his shoulder and handed it to me. “The price was three drachmae.”
As he settled cross-legged on the floor, I poured him a cup of Theban wine. Yaltha closed the codex, marking her place with a leather cord. The lamplight flickered and snapped.
“You have news?” I said.
He looked away, the hoods pulled low over his eyes. “When I got to the harbor, I went up and down the moorings. There were ships from Antioch and Rome, but none from Caesarea. I could see three ships beyond the lighthouse approaching, one with crimson on its sail, so I waited. As I thought, it was the Roman cargo ship from Caesarea. It carried some Jewish pilgrims returning from Passover in Jerusalem, but they wouldn’t speak with me. A Roman soldier chased me—”
“Lavi,” I said. “What did you learn?”
He looked into his lap and continued. “One of the men on board didn’t appear as rich as the rest. I followed him. When we were safely from the docks, I offered him the other two drachmae in exchange for news. He was eager to take them.”
“Did he have word of Antipas?” I asked.
“The tetrarch is alive . . . and grows worse in his ways.”
I sighed, but the news was not unexpected. I retrieved the wine jug and refilled Lavi’s cup.
“There’s more,” he said. “The prophet that Judas and your husband followed . . . the one Antipas imprisoned . . .”
“Yes, John the Immerser—what about him?”
“Antipas executed him. He cut off the Immerser’s head.”
His words collected in my ears and lay there, puddles of nonsense. For a minute, I didn’t move or speak. I heard Yaltha talking to me, but I was far away, standing in the Jordan River with John’s hands lowering me beneath the water. Light on the river bottom. A floor of pebbles. The silent floating. John’s muffled voice calling, Rise to newness of life.
Beheaded. I looked at Lavi, a sick churning inside me. “The servant you spoke with—is he certain of this?”
“He said the whole country spoke of the prophet’s death.”
Some truths seemed insoluble, stones that couldn’t be swallowed.
“They say Antipas’s wife, Herodias, was behind it,” Lavi added. “Her daughter performed a dance that pleased Antipas so much he promised whatever she asked. At her mother’s urging, she asked for John’s head.”
I covered my mouth with my hand. The reward for a beautiful dance: a man’s severed head.
Lavi watched me, his expression grave. He said, “The servant also spoke about another prophet who was going about Galilee, preaching.”
I felt my heart scurry up into my throat.
“He heard the prophet preach to a great multitude on a hillside outside Capernaum. He spoke of it with awe. He said the prophet lashed out at hypocrites and proclaimed it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to come into the kingdom of God. He blessed the poor, the meek, the outcast, and the merciful. He preached love, saying if a soldier forces you to carry his pack one mile, carry it two, and if you’re struck on one cheek, turn the other one. This servant said the prophet’s following is even greater than the Immerser’s, that people spoke of him as a Messiah. As King of the Jews.” With that, Lavi fell quiet.
I fell quiet, too. The wooden door onto the courtyard was flung wide onto the Egyptian night. I listened to wind shake the palm fronds. The dark, tumbling world.
As Yaltha parted the veils that encircled my bed, I shut my eyes, feigning sleep. It was past the midnight hour.
“I know you’re awake, Ana. We will talk now.” She carried a beeswax candle, the light flickering under her chin and onto the bony ledge over her eyes. She rested the holder on the floor and the choking sweetness of the wax filled my nostrils. As she squeezed beside me onto the pillows, I turned on my side, away from her.
Since Lavi’s news seven days ago, I’d been unable to speak of John’s gruesome death or of my terror that his fate would become my husband’s. I couldn’t eat. I’d slept little, and when I did, I dreamed of dead messiahs and broken threads. Jesus on the hillside, sowing his revolution—that was a good thing, and I couldn’t help but feel pride in him. The purpose that had burned in him for so long was finally being realized, yet I was filled with a deep and immutable dread.
At first, Yaltha left me to my silence, believing I needed time alone, but now here she was, her head on my pillow.
“To avoid a fear emboldens it,” she said.
I said nothing.
“All shall be well, child.”
I reared up then. “Will it? You cannot know that! How can you know that?”
“Oh, Ana, Ana. When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”
“If Antipas kills my husband as he did John, I cannot imagine I will be well.”
“If Antipas kills him, you’ll be devastated and grief-stricken, but there’s a place in you that is inviolate—it’s the surest part of you, a piece of Sophia herself. You’ll find your way there, when you need to. And you’ll know then what I speak of.”
I laid my head against her arm, sinewy and tough like herself. I couldn’t grasp what she was saying. I fell into a dreamless sleep, a black chute that had no bottom, and when I woke, my aunt was still there.
AS WE TOOK OUR BREAKFAST the following morning, Yaltha said, “We must talk about this plan of yours to return to Galilee.” She dipped her bread into the honey and pushed it into her mouth, dribbling the nectar onto her chin, and I felt my appetite return. I tore a chunk from the wheat loaf.
She said, “You fear for Jesus’s safety—I fear for yours.”
A slate of brightness had formed beside us on the floor. I gazed at it, wishing some magic scribble of light would appear telling me what to do. Returning was dangerous, perhaps as much now as when I’d first fled, but my need to see Jesus had become urgent and insurmountable.
“If there’s a chance Jesus is in danger,” I said, “I want to see him before it’s too late.”
She leaned forward, her eyes softening. “If you return to him now, I’m afraid it would make Antipas more inclined to snatch Jesus as well.”
I hadn’t considered this. “You think my presence might endanger him further?”
She didn’t answer, but looked at me and lifted her brows. “Don’t you?”
I’d not shown up in the scriptorium all week, but I appeared that morning resolved to carry on for now in Alexandria. I slid onto the stool at my desk, which, I noticed, had been cleaned, the yellow wood gleaming, smelling of citrus oil.
“You’ve been missed,” Thaddeus commented from across the room.
I smiled at him and set to work copying a petition from a woman who asked for the tax on her grain stocks to be reduced, something about her crops failing to receive irrigation from the year’s flood—a most lackluster entreaty. I was glad, though, to give my mind something to contemplate besides my own worries, and as the morning passed, I became lost in the mindless, rhythmic movement of my hand as it formed letters and words.
Thaddeus stayed awake, perhaps a little animated by my return. Near noon, catching me glance at him over my shoulder, he said, “May I inquire, Ana—what was it that you and your aunt were searching for in the scrolls?”
I stared at him dumbly. Heat shot through me. “You knew?”
“I enjoyed my sleep, and I thank you for it, but I did wake now and then, if only barely.”
How much had he actually seen? It crossed my mind to tell him that Yaltha had been in need of tasks to fill her time and was assisting me with my work, nothing more, but the words reached the precipice of my tongue and stalled. I didn’t want to lie to him anymore.
I said, “I took the key that unlocks the cabinet. We read the scrolls inside it hoping to find some record of Yaltha’s daughter.”
He stroked his chin, and for an awful moment, I thought he might go straight to Haran. I jumped up, forcing myself to speak calmly. “I’m sorry for our deceit. I didn’t wish to involve you in what we were doing in case we were discovered. Please, if you could forgive me . . .”
“It’s all right, Ana. I have no grudge against you or your aunt.”
I felt myself unclench a little. “You won’t report this to Haran?”
“Goodness, no. He’s been no friend to me. He pays me little, then complains of my work, which I find so tedious I take naps to escape it. Your presence, though, has brought a certain . . . liveliness.” He smiled. “Now, what record were you seeking?”
“We sought anything that might tell us where her daughter could be. Haran gave her out for adoption.”
Neither Thaddeus nor any of the servants had been in Haran’s employ back then—Yaltha had been careful to inquire about this when we’d first arrived. I asked if he’d heard the rumors about my aunt.
He nodded. “It was said she poisoned her husband and Haran sent her to the Therapeutae in order to save her from arrest.”
“She poisoned no one,” I said indignantly.
“What’s her daughter’s name?” he inquired.
“Chaya,” I told him. “She was two years old when my aunt last saw her.”
He squinted, tapping his fingers against his temple as if to dislodge some memory. “That name,” he muttered more to himself than to me. “I know I’ve seen it written somewhere.”
My eyes flared wide. Was it too much to think he knew of her? He’d presided over the scriptorium and its contents for nine years. He knew more about Haran’s business than anyone. I wanted to go over and tap the other side of his head, but I remained waiting.
He got up and walked in a circle about the room and had started a second loop when he stopped. “Oh,” he said. A look passed over his face. Dismay, I thought. “Come with me.”
We slipped into Haran’s study, where Thaddeus retrieved a locked wooden box that sat unobtrusively on a low shelf. It was painted on top with an image of the falcon-winged Goddess Nephthys, guardian of the dead, a detail Thaddeus kindly provided. He produced a key from a peg beneath Haran’s desk and slipped it into a keyhole, then lifted the lid to reveal a cluster of scrolls, perhaps ten or twelve of them. “This is where Haran conceals documents he wishes to keep secret.”
He sorted through the scrolls. “Soon after I began working for Haran, he had me make copies of all the scrolls in the box. If I remember rightly, there’s a death notice in here of a girl named Chaya. Hers was an unusual name; it remained with me.”
The blood left my head. “She’s dead?”
I sank down into Haran’s grand chair, taking a slow breath as Thaddeus opened a papyrus on the table before me.
To the Royal Scribe of the Metropolis from Haran ben Philip Levias of the Jewish Council.
I attest that Chaya, daughter of my sister, Yaltha, died in the month of Epeiph of the 32nd year of the Emperor Augustus Caesar. As her guardian and kinsman, I request that her name be entered among those who have died. She is not default in the payment of taxes being the age of two years at the time of her death.
I read the notation twice, then pushed it back to Thaddeus, who perused it quickly. He said, “The laws do not require notification of the death of a child, only of an adult male who is taxable. It’s done, but rarely. I recall thinking it odd.”
Chaya is dead. I tried to picture myself standing before Yaltha, saying the words, but even in my imagination, I couldn’t say them.
He replaced the scroll and locked the box. “I’m sorry, but it’s best to know the truth.”
So shocked was I, so choked with dread at passing on this horrific news, I wasn’t at all sure knowing was best. Right then, I preferred to go on living in uncertainty, imagining Chaya alive somewhere.
I FOUND YALTHA walking about the garden. I watched her from the doorway for a while, then strode toward her, trying to steady myself.
As we sat at the edge of the pond, I told her about the death notification. She looked at the sky, where there was not a bird or a cloud, then dropped her chin to her chest as a sob broke from her lips. I wrapped my arms about her caved-in shoulders, and we sat like that for a long time, quiet and dazed, listening to the garden. Birds chirping, the rustle of lizards, a tiny zephyr in the palms.
Days passed in which Yaltha sat and stared into the garden through the open door of the sitting room. I woke one night to check on her and there she was, gazing out at the dark. I didn’t disturb her. She was grieving in her own way.
I returned to bed, where sleep came and with it a dream.
A great wind rises. The air fills with scrolls. They fly about me like white and brown birds. Looking up, I see the falcon Goddess Nephthys streak across the sky.
I woke with the dream still in my body, filling me with lightness, and what came into my mind was the wooden box in which Haran stored his secret documents. It was as if in my dream Nephthys had escaped from her confinement on the lid, as if the box had been thrown open and all the scrolls set free.
I lay very still and tried to remember everything about those moments when Thaddeus showed me the box—the key, the creak in the lid as he lifted it, the cluster of scrolls inside, reading the death notice twice. Then, in my memory, I heard Thaddeus say, The laws do not require notification of the death of a child, only of an adult male who is taxable. It’s done, but rarely. I recall thinking it odd.
The statement had seemed irrelevant at the time, but I wondered now why my uncle had taken the extra precaution of declaring Chaya dead if it wasn’t required. Why had it been so important to record it? And something else came back to me: she’d only been two when she’d died. Was it not strange that her life had ended so soon after Yaltha had been sent away?
I bolted up.
I was waiting in the scriptorium when Thaddeus arrived. “I must look once more inside the locked box in Haran’s study,” I told him.
He shook his head. “But you’ve seen the death notice. What more is there?”
I thought better than to tell him about the dream or my feeling that something was amiss. I said, “My uncle has already left to conduct his business in the city. It will be safe enough.”
“It’s not Haran I’m worried about, but his personal servant, the one with the shorn head.” I knew which one he meant. He was said to grovel before Haran, as well as snoop for him—anything to ingratiate himself.
“We’ll be quick,” I promised, and gave him my most pleading look.
He sighed and led me to the study. I counted nine scrolls inside the box. I unraveled one and read a harsh repudiation of Haran’s second wife for failing in her oath of fidelity. The second scroll was a settlement of their divorce.
Thaddeus watched me, his eyes roving toward the door. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but it would be prudent to read faster.”
I didn’t know what I was looking for either. I smoothed open a third scroll, anchoring it on the desk.
Choiak, son of Dios and a keeper of camels in the village of Soknopaiou, his wife having died and left him toil and suffering, does hand over his two-year-old daughter, Diodora, to a priest of the Temple of Isis for the sum of 1,400 silver drachmae.
I stopped reading. My mind began to reel a little.
“Have you come upon something?” he asked.
“There’s mention of a two-year-old girl.” He started to question me further, but I held up my hand, signaling him to wait as I continued to read.
The purchaser, who is granted anonymity by virtue of his status as a representative of the Goddess of Egypt, receives Diodora into his legal ownership and from this day will possess, own, and have proprietary rights over the girl. Choiak henceforth has no power to take back his daughter and through this sale agreement, written in two copies, gives his consent and acknowledges payment.
Signed on behalf of Choiak, who knows no letters, by Haran ben Philip Levias, this day in the month of Epeiph, in the 32nd year of the reign of the illustrious emperor Augustus Caesar.
I lifted my head. Heat crept from my neck into my face, a kind of astonishment. “Sophia,” I whispered.
“What is it? What does it say?”
“The two-year-old belonged to a man named Choiak, a destitute father whose wife died. He sold his daughter as a slave to a priest.” I glanced again at the document. “The girl’s name was Diodora.”
I rummaged in the box for Chaya’s death certificate and placed the two documents side by side. Two-year-old Chaya. Two-year-old Diodora. Chaya died and Diodora was sold in the same month of the same year.
I didn’t know if Thaddeus had arrived at the same supposition as I had. I didn’t take the time to inquire.
I found Yaltha napping soundly in the chair beside the door to the courtyard, her mouth open and her hands folded high on her chest. I knelt in front of her and softly called her name. When she didn’t rouse, I gave her knee a shake.
She opened her eyes, frowning, her forehead wrinkling up. “Why did you wake me?” she said, sounding annoyed.
“Aunt, it is good news. I found a document that may give us a reason to hope Chaya is not dead.”
She sat straight up. Her eyes were suddenly bright and churning. “What are you talking about, Ana?”
Please, don’t let me be wrong.
I told her about my dream and the questions it had stirred, compelling me to return to Haran’s study and reopen the box. As I described the document I’d found inside it, she stared at me, mystified.
I said, “The girl who was sold into bondage had the name Diodora. But don’t you think it’s peculiar that both Chaya and Diodora were the same age? That one died and the other sold as a slave in the same month of the same year?”
Yaltha closed her eyes. “They are the same girl.”
The certainty in her voice startled me. It impelled and excited me, too. “Think of it,” I said. “What if it wasn’t some poor camel keeper who sold a two-year-old girl to the priest, but Haran himself?”
She gazed at me with sad, stunned wonder.
“And afterward,” I continued, “Haran concealed what he’d done with a notice of Chaya’s death. Does this seem possible to you? I mean, do you think him capable of this?”
“I think him capable of anything. And he would have good reason to cover up the deed. The synagogues here condemn selling Jewish children into slavery. Haran would be removed from the council if this was discovered. He could be cast out of the community altogether.”
“Haran wanted people to believe Chaya was dead, and yet he told you she’d been adopted. I wonder why. Do you think he wanted you to leave Alexandria believing she was loved and cared for? Maybe there’s a speck of kindness in him somewhere.”
Her laugh was bitter. “He knew how anguishing it would be for me to have a daughter out there who was lost to me. He knew it would haunt me all my days. When my sons died, the grief was an agony, but with time I reconciled myself to it. I’ve never reconciled myself to losing Chaya. One moment she seems within reach and the next moment she’s in an abyss I can never find. Haran was pleased to offer me this special brand of torture.”
Yaltha leaned back in the chair and I watched her anger fade and her eyes soften. She let out an extravagant breath. “Did the document record the name of the priest who bought the girl, or what temple he served?” she asked.
“It mentioned neither.”
“Then Chaya could be anywhere in Egypt—here in Alexandria or as far as Philae.”
Finding her suddenly seemed impossible. I could tell by the disappointment in my aunt’s face that she thought so, too.
She said, “It’s enough that Chaya is alive.”
But, of course, it wasn’t.
One morning shortly after I’d arrived in the scriptorium, Haran’s servant appeared at the door. He made a little bow in my direction. “Haran wishes to see you in his study.”
During the many months we’d been here, I’d never been summoned by Haran. In fact, I’d rarely seen him, having passed him no more than two dozen times as I moved between the scriptorium and the guest quarters. I’d paid his rent requirements to Apion.
It’s a curiosity how the mind alights first on the worst scenario. I immediately thought Haran must have discovered I’d been prying into his locked cabinet and box of secrets. Wheeling about on my stool, I looked at Thaddeus, who seemed as surprised and disconcerted as I. “Shall I come with you?” he asked.
“Haran asked only for the woman,” the servant said, shifting about impatiently.
My uncle sat in his study, elbows propped on his desk, one fist balled into the other. He glanced up at me, then refocused his attention on an array of scrolls, pens, and ink vials scattered around him, making me wait. I didn’t think his servant had seen my intrusions, but I couldn’t be sure. I replanted my feet.
Minutes passed. “Thaddeus tells me your work is satisfactory,” he said. Finally. “As such, I’ve decided to waive your rent requirement. You may stay for now as guests, not boarders.”
Guests. Prisoners. There was little difference.
“Thank you, Uncle.” I tried to smile at him. It helped immensely that he had a dab of ink on the side of his nose, which he’d placed there with his smudged finger.
He cleared his throat. “I leave tomorrow to inspect my papyrus crops and workshops. I travel to Terenouthis, Letopolis, and Memphis and expect to be away for four weeks.”
We’d been shut up in this house for nearly a year and a half, but here it was—sweet freedom. It was all I could do to keep from breaking into song and dance.
“I’ve bidden you here,” he said, “to advise you in person that my absence does not change our agreement. If you or my sister leave the house, you will forfeit your right to remain here and I will have no choice but to renew the charge of murder against you. I’ve instructed Apion to watch you. He will report your movements to me.”
Sweet, sweet, sweet freedom.
FINDING NO TRACE OF YALTHA in our rooms, I hurried to the servants’ quarters, where she sometimes retreated. I found her there with Pamphile and Lavi, hunched over a game of senet, moving her ebony pawn over the board, trying to be the first player to pass into the afterlife. The game had become a salve, a way to distract herself, but her disappointment about finding Chaya still hung over her like a small cloud I could almost see.
“Aghhh!” my aunt cried, landing on a square that symbolized bad fortune.
“I’m in no hurry for you to reach the afterlife,” I said, and the three of them looked around, surprised to see me.
My aunt grinned. “Not even this paltry afterlife on the game board?”
“Not even that one.” I slipped beside her and whispered, “I have welcome news.”
She flipped her pawn onto its side. “Since Ana has requested that I not visit the afterlife today, I must withdraw from the game.”
I led her to a private spot near the outdoor kitchen and told her what had just transpired.
The corners of her mouth twitched. “I’ve been thinking. There’s one person who would have known about Haran’s deception and that’s Apion’s father, Apollonios. He was Haran’s treasurer before Apion, but also his confidant, doing his bidding. It’s likely he was involved in the matter.”
“Then we’ll go and find him.”
“He will be old now,” she said. “If he’s alive at all.”
“Do you think he would help us?”
“He was always kind to me.”
“I’ll approach Apion when the time is right,” I told her and watched her tilt back her head and drink in the spaciousness of the sky.
Apion was in the small room he called the treasury, writing numbers onto a piece of lined parchment. He looked up at my approach. “If you’ve brought money for your rent, Haran has done away with the requirement.”
“Yes, he told me himself. I’m here to ask for the favor you owe me.” I tried to look modest, to be the kind of genial person one is eager to grant favors.
He sighed audibly and laid down his pen.
“I understand my uncle has placed Yaltha and me under your watchful eye while he’s away. I would like to respectfully request that you forgo this onerous task and leave us to ourselves.”
“If you plan to venture out of the house against Haran’s wishes and expect me to say nothing to him, you are mistaken. It puts me at risk of losing my position.”
“It seems taking undisclosed bribes also puts you at risk,” I said.
He rose from the table. His dark curls glittered with oil. I caught the scent of myrrh. “You threaten me then?”
“I only ask that you look the other way while Haran is away. My aunt and I have been here more than a year and have seen nothing of the greatness of Alexandria. Are a few excursions too much to ask? I don’t wish to go to Haran about the bribes you took from me, but I will.”
He studied me, seeming to weigh my threat. I doubted I would follow through with it, but he didn’t know that. I held his gaze. He said, “I’ll ignore your goings and comings, but once Haran has returned, my debt to you will be paid. You must give me an oath you will extort me no further.”
“Extort is a harsh word,” I said.
“It’s also the correct word. Now swear before me that your uncle’s return will be the end of it.”
“I swear it.”
He sat down again, dismissing me with a flick of his wrist. I said, “May I ask, is your father still living?”
He looked up. “My father? Why is this of interest to you?”
“You may recall that when I first met you in Sepphoris—”
He interrupted, his mouth tightening, “Do you mean back when you were with child?”
It took a moment to realize what he meant. I’d forgotten the lie I’d told him; clearly he had not. When I’d pretended I was pregnant in order to obtain from him what I needed, I hadn’t known I’d be traveling to Alexandria, where the months would reveal my falsehood. I felt an embarrassed heat on my cheeks.
“Are you going to lie again and tell me you lost the child?”
“No, I confess I lied to you. I’ll not do so again. I’m sorry.” I was sorry, and yet my lie had helped win us passage to Alexandria. And my extortion, as he insisted on calling it, now offered us the freedom to roam about the city. Yes, I was sorry, and no, I was not sorry.
He nodded, his shoulders dropping. My words seemed to mollify him.
I began again. “As I was about to say . . . when we first met, I mentioned that my aunt had known your father. She was fond of him and asked me to inquire of his health.”
“Tell her he’s well enough, though he’s grown corpulent in his old age—he lives on a diet of beer, wine, bread, and honey.”
Apollonios is alive. “If by chance Yaltha wished to see him, how would she find him?”
“I don’t wish to give you another reason to stray from the house, but it seems you plan to do so anyway. My father can be found at the library, where he goes each day to join the enclave of men who sit in the colonnades and debate exactly how far God is from the world—a thousand iters or seven times a thousand.”
“They think God far?”
“They are Platonists and Stoics and followers of the Jewish philosopher Philo—I hardly know what they think.”
This time when he flicked his wrist, I left.
I moved along the Canopic Way as if thrust from a bow, flying ahead of Yaltha and Lavi and then having to pause for them to catch up.
In the center of the street, narrow pools of water cascaded one into the other for as far as I could see, and hundreds of copper pots filled with kindling lined the sides, waiting to be set afire at night to light the thoroughfare. The women were clad in blue, black, or white tunics cinched under their breasts with bright-colored ribbons, making me conscious of my plain Nazareth dress, dingy undyed flax. As they passed, I studied their coiled silver snake bracelets, hoop earrings with dangling pearls, their eyes lined in green and black, hair swept into knots atop their heads with a row of curls on their foreheads. I pulled my long, single braid over my shoulder and held on to it as if it were the end of a tether.
Nearing the royal quarter, I spied my first obelisk—a tall, narrow structure that jutted toward the sky. I craned my head back and studied it.
“It’s a monument to a particular part of the male body,” Yaltha said, perfectly serious.
I looked at it again and heard Lavi laugh, then Yaltha. I didn’t say so, but I’d had no trouble believing her jest.
“They are more useful as timekeepers,” she said, inspecting the long, bright black shadow the obelisk cast. “It’s two hours past noon. We’ve tarried long enough.”
We’d set out at midday, leaving quietly through the servant quarters when no one was about. Lavi had insisted on accompanying us. Aware of our mission, he shouldered a pouch containing the last of our money in case it became necessary to bribe Apollonios. Lavi had constantly implored me to slow down, and once had steered us across the street when a legation of officious-looking Roman men approached. I looked at him now, thinking of him and Pamphile—they seemed no closer to realizing their plans to marry than when he had first told me about them.
At the entrance to the library complex, I halted and drew an awed breath, my palms coming together under my chin. Before me, two colonnades stretched along either side of a vast courtyard that led to a magnificent building of white marble.
Finding my voice, I said, “I cannot seek out Apollonios until I’ve seen inside the library.” I knew there to be ten halls containing the half million texts Yaltha had told me about. My heart was running rampant.
My aunt linked her arm in mine. “Nor I.”
We wound through the courtyard, which was dense with people whom I imagined to be philosophers, astronomers, historians, mathematicians, poets . . . every kind of scholar, though they were likely ordinary citizens. Reaching the steps, I read the Greek inscription carved over the doors—“A Healing Sanctum”—and scrambled up them two at a time.
Inside, dimness hit my eyes first, followed by lamplight. A moment later the walls came alive with brightly hued paintings of ibis-headed men and lion-headed women. We moved along a dazzling corridor covered with Gods, Goddesses, solar disks, and all-seeing eyes. There were boats, birds, chariots, harps, plows, and rainbow wings—thousands of glyphs. I had the sensation of floating through a storied world.
When we arrived in the first hall, I could barely take in the sprawling room with its cubicles reaching toward the ceiling, each one labeled and stuffed with scrolls and leather-bound codices. Enheduanna’s exaltation to Inanna was likely in here, as well as at least a few works by female Greek philosophers. It seemed absurd to think my own writings might be housed here one day, too, but I stood there and let myself imagine it.
As we moved from hall to hall, I became aware of young men in short white tunics dashing about, some carrying armloads of papyri, others on ladders arranging scrolls in cubicles or dusting them with tufts of feathers. I noticed that Lavi watched them intently.
“You are very quiet,” Yaltha said, sidling next to me. “Is the library all you hoped?”
“It’s a holy of holies,” I said. And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.
At Yaltha’s urging we turned back to search for Apollonios and the men who debated the distance to God and back. We found them seated beneath one of the colonnades, as Apion had predicted.
“He’s the ample one with purple on his tunic,” Yaltha said, pausing in a niche to observe him.
“How will we manage to draw him away from the others?” I asked. “Are you going to boldly interrupt him?” He was at that moment ardently debating some point.
“The three of us will proceed along the colonnade and when we draw near him, I’ll call out, ‘Apollonios, it is you! I’m shocked to come upon you.’ He will have no choice but to come apart and speak with us.”
I gave her an approving look. “What if he tells Haran of his encounter with us?”
“I don’t think he’ll do so, but we have no choice. He’s our only way.”
We did as she suggested, and Apollonios, though oblivious to our identities, left his bench and came aside to greet us. “Do you not recognize an old friend?” Yaltha asked. “I’m Yaltha, the sister of Haran.”
A pained expression entered his face, passing quickly, followed by a gush of pleasure. “Ah, yes, I see now. You’ve returned from Galilee.”
“And I brought back my niece, Ana, the daughter of my youngest brother.” His gaze swept over me, then over Lavi, prompting her to introduce him as well.
The old treasurer bestowed a surplus of smiles on us, his belly so rotund he was forced to bend backward from his waist as a counterbalance. I could smell the cinnamon oil on him. “Do you reside with Haran?” he asked.
“We had nowhere else,” Yaltha said. “We’ve dwelled with him more than a year and today is the first time we’ve left his house, a freedom we’ve been able to seize only because he’s away from the city. He forbids us to leave the house.” She feigned a look of distress, or perhaps it was real. “I trust you won’t tell him we slipped out?”
“No, no, of course not. He was my employer, but never my friend. I find it remarkable, though, that he isolates you from the city.”
“He does so to prevent me from asking about my daughter, Chaya.”
He looked away from her to a crinkling of clouds overhead, frowning, arching back his spine, his fists bored into the small of his back. He knew something.
“I cannot be too long on my feet,” he said.
The four of us made our way to a pair of benches near his fellow debaters, the old man grunting heavily as he sat. “You’ve returned here to seek your daughter?”
“I’m growing old, Apollonios. My wish is to see her before I die. Haran will tell me nothing of her whereabouts. If she’s alive, she’s a woman of twenty-five now.”
“I may be able to help you, but first I must have your word and that of your niece and your friend that you won’t reveal how you’ve come to know what I’m about to tell you. Especially to Haran.”
We reassured him quickly and he suddenly appeared pale and breathless, sweat and oil beading in the folds of his neck. He said, “I’ve wished many times I could relieve myself of this burden before I die.” He shook his head, pausing for far too many minutes before continuing. “Haran sold her to a priest who served in the temple of Isis Medica here in Alexandria. I myself recorded the transaction.”
Having confessed, he sank back, seemingly exhausted, his head resting on the great orb of his body. We waited.
“I’ve wished for a way to repay you for my part in it,” he said, unable to meet Yaltha’s gaze. “I did as Haran asked and I came to regret it.”
“Do you know the name of this priest or where Chaya might now be?” Yaltha asked.
“I made it my business to know. For all these years, I’ve kept abreast of her from a distance. The priest died some years ago—he freed her before his death. She was raised as an attendant in the healing precinct of Isis Medica. She serves there still.”
“Tell me,” Yaltha said, and I saw the effort in her face to remain composed, “why would Haran choose to sell my daughter? He could have given her in adoption like he falsely told me he did.”
“Who can decipher Haran’s heart? I only know he wanted to be rid of the child in a way that would leave no trace. An adoption would have required triple documents, one for Haran, one for the adopted parents, and one for the royal scribe. And the parents would’ve been named, unlike the priest, who could be kept anonymous.”
He pushed himself up from the bench. “When you go to Isis Medica, ask for Diodora. It’s the only name Chaya knows. She was raised as an Egyptian, not a Jew.”
As he turned to leave, I said, “The men in the library who wear the white tunics and climb the ladders . . . who are they?”
“We call them librarians. They keep the books ordered and cataloged and retrieve them for scholars at the university. You will see them running at great speed delivering them. Some of them sell copies to the public. Others assist the scribes in procuring inks and papyri. A fortunate few are sent on expeditions to purchase books in distant lands.”
“Lavi would make an excellent librarian,” I said, looking at my friend to judge his reaction. He straightened. From pride, I thought.
“Does the position pay well?” Lavi asked.
“Well enough,” Apollonios said, suddenly wary and surprised, it seemed, that Lavi spoke to him directly. “But the positions are hard to acquire. Most are passed from father to son.”
“You said you wished to repay me for your part in Haran’s sin,” Yaltha said. “You can do so by obtaining this employment for our friend.”
Flustered, Apollonios opened and closed his mouth several times before saying, “I don’t know—it would be difficult.”
“You have much influence,” Yaltha said. “There must be many people who owe you favors. Securing the post for Lavi won’t make up for selling my daughter, but it would repay your debt to me. It will make the burden of guilt you’ve carried lighter.”
The old man glanced at Lavi. “He would start as a low-paying apprentice and the training is rigorous. He must be able to read Greek. Can he do that?”
“I read it,” Lavi said. This news astonished me. Perhaps he’d learned to read Greek in Tiberias.
“Yes, then, I’ll do what I can,” Apollonios said.
As the old man left, Lavi whispered to me, “Would you teach me to read Greek?”
I was happy for Yaltha and for Lavi, as well—one had located a daughter and one had found possible employment—and the memory of being inside the library glowed inside me, but my mind went to Jesus, as it did almost every hour of every day. What are you doing now, Beloved? I could see no resolution to our separation.
Crossing the city on our way back to Haran’s, we came upon an artist painting a portrait of a woman’s face on a piece of limewood. The woman sat before him in a small public courtyard, adorned in her finery. A little crowd of bystanders had gathered to watch. As we joined them, I remembered with a sickening roll in my stomach the hours I’d spent posing for the mosaic in Antipas’s palace.
“She’s posing for a mummy portrait,” Yaltha explained. “When she dies, the image will be placed over her face inside the coffin. Until then, it will hang in her house. It’s meant to preserve the memory of her.”
I’d heard of Egyptians putting odd articles into their coffins—food, jewelry, clothes, weapons, a myriad of things that might be needed in the afterlife—but this was new to me. I watched as the artist painted her face life-size and perfect on the wood.
I sent Lavi to inquire what a mummy portrait costs. “The artist says it’s fifty drachmae,” Lavi reported.
“Go and ask if he will paint mine next.”
Yaltha gave me a surprised, half-amused look. “You wish to have a mummy portrait for your coffin?”
“Not for my coffin. For Jesus.”
Perhaps also for myself.
THAT NIGHT I PLACED the portrait on the table near my bed, propping it beside my incantation bowl. The artist had painted me as I was, ornament-less, wearing the worn tunic, a plain braid dangling over my shoulder and wisps of hair loose about my face. It was just me, Ana. But there was something about it.
I took the picture in my hands, holding it up to the lamp to study it more closely. The paint gleamed in the light and the face I saw seemed like that of a newfound woman. Her eyes looked out levelly. Her chin was raised in a bold tilt. There was strength in her jaw. The corners of her lips were lifted.
I told myself that when I returned to Nazareth and saw Jesus again, I would make him close his eyes, then place the portrait in his hands. He would look at it with awe, and I would tell him with feigned seriousness, “If there should be another threat of my arrest and I’m sent once more to Egypt, this will ensure you won’t forget my face.” Then I would laugh and he would laugh.
Standing at the door to the lotus garden, I listened to the evening sky creak and rumble. All day the heat had been like a viscous film coating the air, but now suddenly wind gusted and rain poured down, black needles rattling the date palms and pummeling the surface of the pond, and then dissipating almost as quickly as they came. I stepped out into the darkness, where a bird, a wagtail, sang.
For the past three weeks, I’d spent my mornings in the scriptorium teaching Lavi to read Greek instead of attending to my usual duties. Even Thaddeus had joined in the tutoring, insisting that our student begin by copying the alphabet over and over on the back of old, discarded parchments. I was careful to destroy the evidence of his lessons lest Haran discover it on his return. Pamphile burned so many alphas, betas, gammas, and deltas in the kitchen, I told her there’d never been a more scholarly oven in all of Egypt. By the second week, Lavi had memorized the inflections of the verbs and nouns. By the third he was locating verbs in the sentence. Very soon he would be reading Homer.
Most afternoons, Yaltha and I had scampered about Alexandria, roaming the markets, gaping at the Caesareum, the gymnasium, and the splendors along the harbor, and returning twice to the library. We’d visited every Isis temple in the city but one, Chaya’s. Again and again I’d asked my aunt why she avoided it and each time she’d answered the same: I’m not yet ready. The last time I’d pestered her about it, she’d bitten off the answer and spit it at me. I’d not asked again. Ever since, I’d carried remnants of hurt, confusion, and exasperation.
The wagtail flew. The garden stilled. Hearing footsteps, I turned to find Apion approaching through the palms.
“I’ve come to forewarn you,” he said. “A message arrived this day from Haran. He returns early. I expect him in two days.”
I looked up at the sky, the moonless, starless night. “Thank you for informing me,” I said without expression.
When he departed, I raced to Yaltha’s bedchamber with my anger spilling over. I burst upon her without a knock. “Chaya is just across the city, yet all this time has passed and you’ve not gone to her. Now Apion has informed me Haran will be back in two days. I thought Chaya was the reason you came to Egypt! Why do you avoid her?”
She gathered her night shawl about her neck. “Come here, Ana. Sit down. I know you’ve struggled to understand my delay. I’m sorry. I can only tell you that on the day we spoke to Apollonios . . . even before we departed the library courtyard, I became possessed by the fear that Chaya may not want to be found. Why would an Egyptian woman who serves Isis want to be claimed by the Jewish mother who abandoned her? I became afraid she’d reject me. Or worse, reject herself.”
I’d thought of my aunt as invincible, impervious—someone assailed by life, but somehow unmaimed by it—but I saw her suddenly as a person of flaws and bruises like myself. There was an odd relief in it.
“I didn’t realize,” I said. “I shouldn’t have judged you.”
“It’s all right, Ana. I’ve judged me, too. It isn’t as if this worry hadn’t crossed my mind earlier, but I’ve never let it fully settle on me until now. I suppose my own need to find Chaya and make right what I’d done by leaving her didn’t allow me to consider that she might turn me away. I fear losing her all over again.” She paused. The candlelight wavered in an unknown breath of wind, and when she spoke again, I caught the same wavering in her voice. “I didn’t consider the need she might have . . . to remain as she is.”
I started to speak, but stopped myself.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Speak your mind.”
“I was going to repeat what you said to me, that resisting a fear only emboldens it.”
She smiled. “Yes, I resisted my fear, too.”
“What will you do? There’s little time left.”
Outside the rain had started again. We listened to it for a while. Finally she said, “I can’t know if Chaya wants to be found or how finding her might change either of us, but it’s the truth that matters, isn’t it?” She leaned over and blew out the candle. “Tomorrow we’ll go to Isis Medica.”
I stood naked on the limestone slab in the bathing room, shivering as Pamphile poured unheated water over my torso, arms, and legs. “Do you delight in torturing me?” I said, my skin rising up in tiny bumps of protest. I did truly appreciate the Egyptians’ conveniences, their bathing rooms and miraculous stone-seat privies with water running beneath to flush the waste—but how hard was it to heat the bathwater?
Setting down the pitcher, Pamphile handed me a drying towel. “You Galileans have little forbearance,” she said, grinning.
“Forbearance is all we do have,” I retorted.
Back in my chamber, freshly scrubbed and flesh tingling, I donned the new black tunic I’d bought in the market, tying it snugly under my breasts with a green ribbon, then draped a red linen mantle about my shoulders. I would wear it despite the heat outside, which was atrocious. At Pamphile’s insistence, I allowed her to line my eyes with a green pigment, then wrap my braid into a little tower on top of my head.
“You could pass for an Alexandrian woman,” she said, leaning back to take me in. The notion seemed to please her enormously.
Alexandrian. After Pamphile left, I turned the word over and over in my head.
Stepping into the sitting room, I heard Yaltha in her chamber, singing as she dressed.
When she finally stepped into the sitting room, my breath caught. She wore her new tunic, as well, cerulean like the sea, and I saw that Pamphile had tended my aunt, too, for she had streaks of black paint beneath her eyes, and her graying hair was freshly plaited and fastened in intricate coils. She looked like one of the lion-headed Goddesses painted on the wall in the library.
“Shall we go and find my daughter?” she said.
ISIS MEDICA APPEARED in the Royal Quarter near the harbor like an island unto itself. Catching my first glimpse of it from a distance, I slowed my steps to take in a complex array of walls, tall pylons, and rooftops. It was more expansive than I’d imagined.
Yaltha pointed. “See the pediment of that large building over there? That’s the main temple to Isis. The smaller ones are minor temples to other divinities.” She squinted, trying to make sense of the maze. “Over there—that’s the healing sanctuary where Chaya attends, and behind it, not visible, is the medical school. People come from as far as Rome and Macedonia to find cures here.”
“Have you ever sought a cure there?” I asked.
“No. I’ve been inside the walls only once and then merely out of curiosity. The Jewish citizenry doesn’t go there. It’s a transgression of the first commandment.”
Last night I’d learned to love her weakness; today it was her daring that excited me. “Did you go inside Isis’s temple?”
“Of course. I remember there was an altar there where people left little statuettes of Isis as offerings.”
“And the healing sanctuary? Did you go there, too?”
She shook her head. “To enter, one must present an illness and be prepared to remain through the night. Those seeking cures are put into an opium sleep in which they dream their cure. It’s said that sometimes Isis herself comes in their dreams and presents cures.”
So strange was all of this, it left me speechless, but inside me, there was a kind of humming.
THE OUTER COURTYARD swarmed with people making music. Sistrums rattled and flutes piped out soft curling sounds that spiraled like ribbons through the air. We watched a line of women wind through the scarlet pillars of the colonnade, their dance like a bright flowing centipede.
Yaltha, who understood the Egyptian tongue, cocked her head and listened to their song. “They’re marking the birth of Isis’s son, Horus,” she said. “We seem to have come on a day of celebration.”
She tugged me past the courtyard and dancers, small unnamed temples, and wall reliefs painted with blue flowers, yellow moons, and white ibises, until we arrived at the main temple, a marble structure that looked more Greek than Egyptian. We stepped inside into a foggy cloud of incense. Kyphi billowed out of the censers—the smell of wine-soaked raisins, mint, honey, and cardamom. Around us, a sea of people strained their necks for a glimpse of something at the far end. “What have they come to see?” I whispered.
Shaking her head, Yaltha led me to a low niche in the rear wall and we climbed up to stand inside it. I swept my eyes over the top of the crowd, and it was not something the throng craned to see, but someone. She stood erect in a robe of yellow and red with a black sash from her left shoulder to her right hip. It was covered in silver stars and red-gold moons. On her head, a crown of golden cow horns.
I’d never seen anyone so mesmerizing. “Who is she?”
“She would be a priestess of Isis, perhaps the highest of them. She wears Isis’s crown.”
The doll-like statuettes Yaltha had mentioned were heaped on the floor around the altar like mounds of washed-up shells.
The priestess’s voice came suddenly like a cymbal clap. I leaned toward Yaltha. “What is she saying?”
Yaltha translated. “O lady Isis, Goddess of all things, you bring the sun from rising to setting and light the moon and the stars. You bring the Nile over the land. You are the lady of light and flames, the mistress of water . . .”
I began to sway with her monotonic chant. When it ended, I said, “Aunt, I’m glad you allowed your fears about finding Chaya to thwart you for so long. If we’d come any sooner, we would’ve missed this great spectacle.”
She looked at me. “Just take care not to fall off the niche and break your skull.”
An attendant in a white tunic made her way to the altar, holding a bowl of water, taking feather steps as she labored to keep the liquid from spilling over the sides. The priestess took the bowl and poured the libation over a colorfully painted statue of Isis that stood on the altar. The waterfall splashed over the Goddess, spilling onto the floor. “Lady Isis, bring forth your divine son. Bring forth the rising of the Nile . . .”
When the ceremony ended, the priestess left the chamber through a narrow door at the back of the temple, and the multitude moved toward the entrance. Yaltha, however, made no effort to climb down from the wall niche. She stared straight ahead with rapt concentration. I called her name. She didn’t answer.
Gazing in the direction she stared, I saw nothing unusual. Only the altar, the statue, the bowl, the attendant drying the wet floor with a cloth.
Yaltha stepped down and strode against the crowd, as I scurried behind. “Aunt? Where are you going?”
She stopped a few paces from the altar. I had no understanding of what was happening. Then I looked at the attendant, who was lifting herself from the dried floor, her dark hair like brambles.
In a voice so muffled I almost didn’t hear it, Yaltha said, “Diodora?”
And her daughter turned and looked at her.
DIODORA LAID HER CLOTH on the altar. “Do you have some need of me, lady?” she asked in Greek. She bore a startling resemblance to me, not only in the kinks and whorls of her hair, but in the black eyes too large for her face, the small pursed mouth, the tall thin body like a gathering of willow boughs. We looked more like sisters than cousins.
Yaltha stood transfixed. Her eyes moved over her daughter as if she were not flesh and bone, but air and apparition, a visage she’d half dreamed. I saw her lip quiver ever so slightly, the commotion of a bee’s wing. Then she threw back her shoulders, as I’d seen her do a hundred times. Seconds passed, ceaseless seconds.
Give her an answer, Aunt.
“I wish to speak with you,” Yaltha said. “May we find a place to sit?”
Uncertainty wrinkled Diodora’s face. “I’m only an attendant,” she said and took a step backward.
“Do you also serve in the healing sanctuary?” Yaltha asked.
“That’s where I attend most often. Today, I was required here.” She picked up the cloth and wrung it out in the bowl. “Have I attended you there in the past? Do you wish to seek another cure?”
“No, I didn’t come for healing.” Later I would think Yaltha was wrong about that.
“If you have no need of me then . . . I’m tasked with removing the offerings. I must see to it.” She hurried away, disappearing through the door at the back.
“I didn’t think she could be so beautiful,” Yaltha said. “Beautiful and grown and very much like you.”
“She’s also puzzled,” I said. “I’m afraid we made her ill at ease.” I moved close to my aunt. “Are you going to tell her?”
“I’m trying to find a way.”
The door opened and Diodora emerged carrying two large empty baskets. She slackened her pace when she saw we were still there, the two peculiar strangers. Without acknowledging us, she knelt and began placing the Isis figures into a basket.
I lowered myself beside her and picked up one of the crudely fashioned carvings. Up close, I saw it was Isis cradling her newborn son. Diodora cast a sideways glance at me, but said nothing. I helped her fill both baskets. In my soul, I was a Jew, but I closed my fingers around the statuette. Sophia, I whispered to myself, calling the figure by the name I loved.
When all the offerings had been gathered, Diodora rose and looked at Yaltha. “If you wish to speak with me, you may do so on the portico of the birth house.”
THE BIRTH HOUSE was a shrine to honor the motherhood of Isis. The small columned building sat near the courtyard, which was still and quiet now, the dancing women gone.
Diodora led us to a cluster of benches on the portico and sat facing us, her hands clasped tightly and her eyes shifting from Yaltha to me. She must have known that something momentous was about to occur—it seemed perched in the air over our heads like a bird about to swoop. A hundred birds.
“My heart is full,” Yaltha told her. “So full it’s difficult for me to speak.”
Diodora tipped her head to the side. “How is it that you know my name?”
Yaltha smiled. “I once knew you by another name. Chaya. It means life.”
“I’m sorry, lady, I do not know you or the name Chaya.”
“It’s a long, difficult story. All I ask is that you allow me to tell it to you.” We sat a moment with the rustling in the air, and then Yaltha said, “I’ve come over a great distance to tell you that I’m your mother.”
Diodora touched her hand to the gully between her breasts, just that small gesture, and I felt an unbearable tenderness come over me. For Diodora and Yaltha and the years stolen from them, but also for myself and Susanna. My lost daughter.
“And this is Ana, your cousin,” Yaltha said.
My throat thickened. I smiled at her, then mirrored her gesture, placing my hand to my breasts.
She sat terrifyingly still, her face as unreadable as the alphabet ash we’d created in the oven. I could not imagine myself hearing such a thing as she’d just heard. If she lashed out in mistrust or grief or anger, I wouldn’t have blamed her. I almost preferred such reactions to this strange, inscrutable quiet.
Yaltha continued in measured sentences, sparing Diodora nothing as she relayed the details of Ruebel’s death, the murder accusations against her, and her eight-year exile with the Therapeutae. She said, “The Jewish council decreed if I left the Therapeutae’s precincts for any reason, I would be given a hundred strokes by cane, mutilated, and exiled to Nubia.”
This I’d never heard. Where was Nubia? Mutilated how? I slid closer to her on the bench.
When she’d finished the entire story, Diodora said, “If what you say is true and I am your daughter, where then was I?” Her voiced sounded small, but her face was like an ember.
Yaltha reached for Diodora’s hand, which she quickly drew back.
“Oh, child, you were little more than two years old when I was sent away. Haran swore to keep you well and safe in his household. I wrote letters to him, inquiring of you, but they went unanswered.”
Diodora frowned, rolling her eyes to the top of a column crowned with a woman’s head. After a moment she said, “If you were sent to the Therapeutae when I was two and remained there eight years . . . I would’ve been ten when you left them. Why didn’t you come for me then?” Her fingers moved in her lap as if counting. “Where have you been the last sixteen years?”
As Yaltha struggled for words, I spoke. “She has been in Galilee. She’s been with me. But it’s not as you think. She didn’t regain her freedom when you were ten, but she was banished once again, this time to her brother in Sepphoris. She had hoped to reclaim you and bring you with her, but—”
“Haran told me he’d given you out for adoption and he would not reveal your whereabouts,” Yaltha said. “I left then—I felt I had no choice. I thought you were cared for, that you had a family. I had no knowledge Haran had sold you to the priest until I returned to Egypt over a year ago to search for you.”
Diodora shook her head almost violently. “I was told my father was a man named Choiak from a village somewhere in the south, that he sold me out of destitution.”
Yaltha placed her hand on Diodora’s and once again Diodora yanked it away. “It was Haran who sold you. Ana has seen the document of sale, in which he disguised himself as a poor camel keeper named Choiak. I didn’t forget you, Diodora. I longed for you every day. I returned to find you, though even now my brother threatens to revive the old charges of murder if I should seek you out. I ask your forgiveness for leaving. I ask your forgiveness for not coming sooner.”
Diodora dropped her head onto her knees and wept, and we could do nothing but let her. Yaltha stood and hovered over her. I didn’t know whether Diodora was grieved or comforted. I didn’t know whether she was lost or found.
When she ceased weeping, Yaltha asked her, “Was he kind to you, your master?”
“He was kind. I do not know if he loved me, but he never raised his hand or his voice to me. When he died, I grieved for him.”
Yaltha closed her eyes and blew out a little breath.
I had no intention of saying anything, yet I thought of my parents and Susanna, whom I’d lost, and of Jesus, my family in Nazareth, Judas, and Tabitha, who were all so far away, and I felt no assurance that any of them would be restored to me. I said, “Let us be more than cousins. Let us be sisters. The three of us will be a family.”
Light was falling in bright bands across the colonnade, and she squinted up at me and said nothing. I felt I’d said a foolish thing, that I’d trespassed somehow. At that moment, someone called her name from a distance, singing it. “Diodooora . . . Diodooora.”
She leapt up. “I’ve neglected my duties.” She wiped her face with the sleeve of her tunic, then pulled on her tight, stoic mask.
“I don’t know when I can come again,” Yaltha said. “Haran returns from his travels tomorrow and as I said, he forbids us to leave his house. We will find a way somehow.”
“I do not think you should return,” she said. She walked away, leaving us there on the portico of the birth house.
Yaltha called out to her, “Daughter, I love you.”
The following day in the scriptorium in Haran’s house, I listened to Lavi read from the Iliad in starts and stops, finding it difficult to stay focused. My mind wandered to Diodora and to the things spoken in the birth house. I kept seeing her walk away from us.
“What will we do?” I’d asked Yaltha during the long walk from Isis Medica back to Haran’s.
“We’ll wait,” she’d replied.
With effort I turned my attention back to Lavi as he faltered over a word. When I attempted to prompt him, he held up his hand. “It will come to me.” It took an entire minute. “Ship!” he cried, beaming.
He was in a happy, though somewhat nervous mood. Earlier that morning a courier had arrived with news that he’d been granted the position at the library. His apprenticeship would begin on the first day of the following week.
“I’ve made a vow to finish reading Achilles’s adventures before my employment,” he said, lowering the codex. “My Greek is not yet perfected.”
“Don’t be concerned, Lavi. You read Greek quite well. But yes, finish the poem—you must find out who prevails, Achilles or Hector.”
He seemed to bask in my praise, sitting up taller. “Tomorrow I will go to Pamphile’s father to ask for a settlement of marriage.”
“Oh, Lavi, I’m glad for you.” His nervousness, I realized, was not merely about his reading skill. “When do you hope to wed?”
“There’s no betrothal period here as there is in Galilee. Once her father and I draw up the settlement and sign it before witnesses, Pamphile and I are considered married. She gave me a portion of her wages and I purchased a shabti box as a gift for him. I will not ask for a bride price. I hope these things will be enough to conclude the contract tomorrow.”
I walked to Thaddeus’s desk and gathered up a stack of papyrus sheets, the costliest and finest in Egypt. “You may offer him these as well. It seems an appropriate gift from a librarian of the great library.”
He hesitated. “Are you sure? Will they be missed?”
“Haran has more papyrus than exists in all of Sepphoris and Jerusalem combined. He won’t miss these few sheets.”
As I thrust them into his arms, there was a shuffling at the door. The servant who did Haran’s bidding was standing there.
“Our master has just returned,” he said, his eyes traveling to the papyri.
“Does he have need of me?” I asked, more haughtily than I should have.
“He asked me to inform the household of his return, that is all.”
Once again we were in captivity.
WAITING WAS AN INSUFFERABLE ENDEAVOR. One sat, one dithered, one stirred a pot of questions. I fretted over whether we should accept Diodora’s rejection or find a way to return to Isis Medica. I pressed Yaltha to set a course, but she persisted in her waiting, saying if the pot was tended long enough, the answer would bubble to the surface. A week passed, however, and we seemed no closer to resolving the matter.
Then one day with the sun dangling low above the rooftops, Pamphile broke in upon Yaltha and me in the sitting room, breathless from hurrying. “A visitor has arrived asking for you,” she said. I imagined it was the long-awaited courier bearing a letter from Judas—Come home, Ana. Jesus bids you to come home—and my heart began to thump.
“She waits for you both in the atrium,” Pamphile added.
I knew then who it was. Yaltha nodded at me. She knew, as well.
“Where’s Haran?” Yaltha asked.
“He has been away all afternoon,” Pamphile answered. “He hasn’t yet returned.”
“Bring the visitor to us here and say nothing of her presence to anyone but Lavi.”
“My husband hasn’t returned either.” She let the word husband slide slowly from her tongue. The marriage settlement had been signed as Lavi had hoped.
“Be certain to alert him when he arrives. Ask him to wait in the garden out of sight. When our visitor leaves, we’ll need him to slip her out through the servant quarters.”
“Who is she?” Pamphile asked, alarm appearing on her face.
“There’s no time to explain,” Yaltha said and waved her hand impatiently. “Tell Lavi it’s Chaya. He’ll know. Now, hurry.”
Yaltha opened the door onto the garden, allowing hot air to invade the room. I watched her preparing herself, smoothing her tunic, taking deep, concentrated breaths. I poured three cups of wine.
Diodora hesitated at the threshold, peering inside before she entered. She wore a rough-weave brown mantle about her white tunic and had pinned back her hair with two silver ornaments. Her eyes were painted with malachite.
“I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” Yaltha said.
When Diodora stepped inside, I quickly closed the door, which had an iron lock on the inside and on the outside, but we had no key to secure it. I reminded myself that Haran had not come to our rooms in all the time we’d been here. Why would he do so now?
Standing in the middle of the room, Diodora looked thin and childlike. Did she know how dangerous this was? Yet there was a beautiful irony in her being here; the girl he’d gone to such lengths to be rid of was in his house, beneath his roof, under his nose. It was a revenge so hidden and precise, I wanted to laugh. I offered her the cup of wine, but she refused it. I took mine and drank it in four swallows.
As Yaltha seated herself, I gave Diodora the bench and settled on the floor, where I could look into the garden to watch for Lavi.
“The news you brought me was a great shock,” she said. “I have thought of nothing else.”
“Neither have I,” said Yaltha. “I’m sorry I thrust so much on you at once. I’m not known for subtlety. My delicate side wore away many years ago.”
Diodora smiled. It was the first time we’d seen her do so and it was like a little dawn had broken over the room. “I was glad at first that you stayed away from Isis Medica as I asked, but then . . .”
When she said nothing further, Yaltha responded, “I wanted to go back if only to see you from afar, but I felt I should honor your wishes. I’m happy you’ve come.”
“I remembered what you said about your brother confining you here. Even if you decided to ignore my wishes, I didn’t know if it would be possible for you to leave. So, I’ve come to you.”
“Weren’t you concerned you might encounter Haran?” I asked.
“Yes, but I conceived a story in case I came upon him—I was relieved not to need it.”
“Please, tell us.”
She undraped a pouch from her shoulder and extracted a bronze bracelet carved with the head of a vulture. “I planned to show him my bracelet and say, ‘One of your servants may have left this behind in the healing sanctuary at Isis Medica. I’ve been sent to return it. Would you kindly let me speak with one of them?’”
Her story was shrewd—but it bore flaws Haran was too clever to miss. He would know Diodora was an attendant at Isis Medica. And look at her—she was the image of me.
“And when you spoke with the servant, what did you plan to say?” I asked.
She reached into the pouch once more and removed a small ostracon. “I planned to beg her, servant to servant, to deliver it to Yaltha. There’s a message on it to . . . to my mother.”
She lowered her eyes. The word mother hung in the air, golden and unmissable.
“You read and write?” I asked.
“My master taught me.”
She handed the ostracon to Yaltha, who read its six words aloud. “I beg you to come again. D.”
Out in the garden, I could see the last orange clamor of the sun. Haran would return home soon, yet we lit all the lamps and talked, even laughed. Yaltha asked her daughter about her work in the healing sanctuary and Diodora told of bleedings, sacred baths, and the intoxicating plants that induced dreams. “I’m one of only two attendants who write down the petitioners’ dreams when they wake. My master taught me to read and write so I could have this high position.” She amused us for a short while with accounts of the more preposterous dreams she’d recorded. “I take my dream recordings to the priest, who deciphers their meanings and prescribes cures. I know not how he does it.”
“And do these cures work?” I asked in bafflement.
“Oh yes, almost always.”
I glimpsed a movement in the garden and saw Lavi treading through the spiky palm shadows. Catching my eye, he lifted his forefinger to his lips and concealed himself behind the foliage near the open door.
“Do you live within the temple precinct?” Yaltha was asking.
“Since my master died when I was sixteen, I’ve had a bed in the temple domicile with the other attendants. I’m free now and make a small wage.”
We went on asking questions while she basked in the genuineness of our attention, but after a while she begged Yaltha for knowledge about the two years they’d spent together before being separated. My aunt told her stories about her fear of crocodiles, her favorite lullaby, how once she’d dumped a bowl of wheat flour on her head.
“You had a little wooden paddle doll,” Yaltha told her. “A brightly painted one I found in the market. You called her Mara.”
Diodora sat up very tall, her eyes widening. “Was her hair made of flax threads with an onyx bead on each end?”
“Yes, that was Mara.”
“I still have her! She’s all I have from my life before I was bought by my master. He said I arrived clutching her. I didn’t remember her name.” She shook her head. “Mara,” she repeated.
In this way, she took the bits and pieces Yaltha offered and began to piece them into a story of who she was. I’d stayed very quiet, listening—they seemed to inhabit a realm of their own. But after a while, Diodora noticed my reserve and said, “Ana. Tell me of yourself.”
I hesitated a moment before telling her about her family in Sepphoris—Father, Mother, and Judas—but said what I could, leaving out a great deal. I described Jesus and my heart pined so badly that I resorted to tales of Delilah standing in the water trough, just to have the relief of smiling.
Darkness came, and in that softening, Diodora turned to Yaltha. “When you told me who you were, I didn’t know if I should believe it. That you could be my mother . . . it seemed impossible. But I saw myself in you. Deep inside, I knew who you were. After I heard your confession, bile rose in me. I told myself, she left me once, now I will leave her, so I walked away. Then you called me daughter. You called out your love.” She went and knelt beside Yaltha’s chair. “I cannot forget that you left me. That knowledge will always remain in a corner of me, but I wish to let myself be loved.”
There was no time to ponder or rejoice in what she’d said. The door flew open. Haran stepped into the room. Behind him, the obsequious servant.
Yaltha, Diodora, and I stood and edged together, shoulders touching, as if to make a tiny fortress. “Since you didn’t knock, I assume you’ve come on a matter of urgency,” Yaltha said to Haran, sounding remarkably restrained, but when I looked at her, she gave the impression of little bolts of lightning flashing around her head.
“I was told you received a visitor,” he said. His eyes were fixed on Diodora. He searched her face, curious, but as yet unseeing, and I realized that was all he knew—a visitor.
“Who are you?” he asked, coming to stand before her.
I was desperately searching for some scenario to explain her presence—something about Diodora being Pamphile’s sister who’d come regarding Lavi’s marriage. We shall never know if my fabrication might’ve convinced him, or if Yaltha, who was also readying to speak, might’ve distracted him, for just then Diodora pulled the vulture bracelet from her pouch and offered her clumsy story, too frightened to grasp that it made little sense now. “I’m an attendant at Isis Medica. One of your servants left this behind in the healing sanctuary at Isis Medica. I’ve been sent to return it.”
He glanced at the cups of wine and gestured toward Yaltha and me. “And are these the servants who left the bracelet?”
“No, no,” she sputtered. “I was only inquiring if they knew who it belonged to.”
Haran was looking at Yaltha now, a burning, triumphant look. His gaze returned to Diodora. He took a step closer to her. He said, “Chaya, I see you’re back from the dead.”
We stood motionless, as if blinded by an inexplicable burst of light. Even Haran did not move. The room was silent. There was only the smell of the oil lamp, a cold tingling in my arms, heat shoving through the courtyard door. I looked out toward the garden and saw Lavi’s crouched shadow.
It was Yaltha who broke the thrall. “Did you really think I would not seek out my daughter?”
“I thought you smarter and more prudent than to try,” he answered. “Now I shall ask you: Did you think I wouldn’t fulfill my promise to go to the Romans and have you arrested?”
Yaltha gave him no answer. She glared at him, defiant.
I, too, had a question, but I didn’t voice it: Would you like it known, Uncle, that you declared your niece dead, then sold her into slavery? The disgrace of it would cost him. He would be thrust into scandal, public shame, and banishment, and I saw that this was his deepest fear. I decided I would remind him of what was at stake, but delicately. I said, “Won’t you have mercy on a mother who only wants to know her daughter? We don’t care how Chaya came to belong to the priest at Isis Medica. That was long ago. We’ll say nothing of it to anyone. We care only that she is reunited with her mother.”
“I’m not so great a fool as to trust three women to hold their tongues and certainly not the three of you.”
I tried again. “We don’t wish to reveal your sins. Indeed, we’ll return to Galilee and you will be rid of us.”
“Would you leave me behind again?” Diodora cried, turning to her mother.
“No,” said Yaltha. “You would come with us.”
“But I don’t wish to go to Galilee.”
Oh Diodora, you are not helping.
Haran smiled. “I’ll grant that you’re clever, Ana, but you won’t persuade me.”
He was, I realized, driven as much by revenge as by his fear of disgrace.
“Besides, I’m afraid you’ll be unable to go anywhere. It has been reliably reported to me that you’ve committed a theft.”
Theft? I tried to make sense of what he’d said. Observing my confusion, he added. “It’s a crime to steal papyrus.”
I lifted my eyes to the servant in the doorway. I could hear Yaltha breathing, a quick raspy sound. Diodora cowered against her.
“Charge me, if you must,” Yaltha said. “But not Ana.”
He ignored her and went on speaking to me. “The punishment for stealing in Alexandria can be as harsh as for murder. The Romans show little mercy, but I will do my best to have you spared the flogging and mutilation. I will plead for both of you to be exiled to western Nubia. There’s no return from there.”
I could hear nothing but the heartbeat in my head. It grew until the entire room pounded. My grip on the world loosened. I’d not been clever. I’d been reckless and full of hubris, thinking I could outwit my uncle . . . steal and deceive without consequence. I preferred to be flogged and mutilated seven times over rather than sent to this place of no return. I must be free to go back to Jesus.
I looked at my aunt, whose silence puzzled me—why didn’t she rail at him? But my voice, too, had disappeared into the dark of my throat. Fear sloshed in my belly. It seemed impossible that I’d fled Galilee to avoid arrest only to be charged in Egypt.
Haran was speaking to Diodora. “I will allow you to return to Isis Medica. But it’s on the condition that you never speak of this night, nor of your origins, nor of me and this house. And you will not attempt to seek out Yaltha and Ana. Give me your oath and you may go.” He waited.
Diodora’s eyes trailed to Yaltha, who nodded at her. “I give my oath,” she said.
“If you break it, I’ll learn of it and bring charges against you, as well,” he said. He believed her to be a fragile girl, one he could browbeat into obedience. Right then, I didn’t know if he’d appraised her rightly or wrongly. “Leave now,” he said. “My servant will see you out.”
“Go,” Yaltha told her. “I’ll come to you when I can.”
She hugged her mother, then stepped through the doorway without looking back.
Haran strode across the room and yanked the door to the courtyard closed. He slid the horizontal bolt into the post and locked it with a key tied to a cord around his tunic. When he turned to us, his face had mellowed some, not from lack of resolve, it seemed, but from weariness. He said, “You’ll be confined here tonight. In the morning, I’ll hand you over to the Romans. It’s regrettable it came to this.”
He left, closing the main door behind him. The outside bolt slid into place with a soft thud. The key turned.
I RAN TO THE COURTYARD DOOR and knocked, gently at first, then louder. “Lavi is in the garden,” I told Yaltha. “He’s been hiding there.” I called out through the thick, impenetrable door, “Lavi . . . Lavi?”
No sound returned. I went on beckoning him for several moments, slapping my palm against the wood, absorbing the sharp stings. Finally, I gave up. Maybe Haran had ensnared him, too. Crossing the room, I shook the handle on the main door, as if I could wrest it free of its hinges.
I paced. My mind was whirling. The windows in our sleeping rooms were too high and too narrow to climb through, and calling for help seemed useless. “We have to find a way out,” I said. “I will not go to Nubia.”
“Conserve your strength,” Yaltha said. “You will need it.”
I slid onto the floor beside her with my back against her knees. I looked from one locked door to the other, a sense of futility gathering in me. “Will the Romans really punish us merely on the word of Haran?” I asked.
Her hand came to rest on my shoulder. “It seems Haran means to swear his case to the Roman court instead of the Jewish one, so I’m unsure, but I suppose he’ll set forth witnesses,” she said. “Ruebel’s old friends from the militia will be eager to say I poisoned him. Tell me, who saw you take the papyri?”
“Haran’s obnoxious servant.”
“Him.” She made a grunt of disgust. “He will take pleasure in bearing witness against you.”
“But we will deny their accusations.”
“If we’re allowed to speak, yes. We won’t give up hope, Ana, but neither should we allow our hope to be false. Haran has Roman citizenship, as well as the ear of the Roman prefect of Alexandria. He commands an important business and is one of the highest-ranking members of the Jewish council. I, on the other hand, am a fugitive and you are a foreigner.”
My eyes began to burn.
“There’s also the possibility my brother could bribe the court authorities.”
I lowered my head to my knees. Fugitive. Foreigner.
Tap, tap.
We looked in unison at the courtyard door. Then came the clatter of a key.
The key pegs found the pins in the lock and Pamphile stepped inside, followed by Lavi, who held up an iron key tied with a piece of identifying parchment.
I threw my arms around each of them. “How did you come upon the key?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“Haran has two for each door,” Pamphile said. “The extra ones are kept in a pouch that hangs on a wall in his study. Lavi was able to read the labels.” She beamed at him.
“You heard Haran’s threats?” I asked him.
“Yes, every word.”
I turned to Yaltha. “Where will we go?”
“I know of only one place where Haran wouldn’t trespass,” she said. “We’ll go to the Therapeutae. Their precinct is sacred among the Jews. We’ll be safe there.”
“They’ll take us in?”
“I spent eight years there. They’ll give us a haven.”
Since the moment Haran had locked us in, the world had pitched side to side like a ship, but I felt it settle now into an immense rightness.
“The community sits on the shore of Lake Mareotis,” Yaltha said. “It will take us nearly four hours to walk the distance. Perhaps longer in the darkness—we’ll have to carry a lamp.”
“I’ll see you there safely,” Lavi said.
Yaltha gazed at him—a frown, a twist to her mouth. “Lavi, you can’t continue to stay in Haran’s house either.”
Pamphile looked like the ground had opened beneath her. “He cannot leave here.”
“He’ll be in danger if he stays,” Yaltha said. “Haran will naturally assume Lavi helped us escape.”
“Then I will leave, too,” she said. “He’s my husband now.”
I touched her arm. “Please, Pamphile, we need you to remain here at least a while longer. I’m still awaiting the letter that will tell me it’s safe to return to Galilee. I can’t bear to think it would come and I wouldn’t know of it. I need you to watch for it and when it arrives, to see that it gets to us. It’s selfish of me to ask this of you, but I beg you. Please.”
Lavi said, “We have told no one of our marriage for fear Haran would dismiss Pamphile from his employ.” He looked at his wife of only a week. “He wouldn’t suspect you of being involved in their leaving.”
“But I don’t wish to be separated from you,” she said.
Lavi spoke gently to Pamphile. “You know as I do that I can’t remain here. The library has a domicile for the librarians who aren’t married. I will stay there and I wish you to remain here until Ana’s letter comes from Galilee. Then I will find us lodging together.”
I’d been away from Jesus for one year and six months. An eternity. He was traveling about Galilee without me, preaching that God’s kingdom was near, while I, his wife, was far away. I sympathized with Pamphile, but her severance from her husband would be an eye blink in comparison to mine.
“It seems I’m given no choice,” she said. Her words brimmed with resentment.
Lavi slit open the door to the garden and peered out. He handed the key to Pamphile. “Return the key before it’s discovered missing. Then unbolt the door in the servant quarters that leads outside. If anyone questions you about our whereabouts, tell them you have no knowledge of it. Behave as if I’ve betrayed you. Let your anger be known.” He kissed her cheeks and nudged her out the door.
I worked swiftly to squeeze my possessions into my two travel pouches. My scrolls filled one entirely, leaving me to stuff the other with clothing, the mummy portrait of my face, the little bag that contained my red thread, and what was left of our money. Once again, I would leave carrying the incantation bowl in my arms.
When Skepsis, the old woman who led the Therapeutae, looked at me, I felt swallowed by her stare. She reminded me of an owl, perched there on the edge of a bench with her piercing gold-brown eyes and white feathery hair ruffled from sleep. Her squat body was hunched and still, but her head swiveled from me to Yaltha as she listened to my aunt explain how we came to be standing in the vestibule of her small stone house in the middle of the night, begging for sanctuary.
THROUGHOUT OUR LONG, exhausting trek from Alexandria, Yaltha had schooled me in the community’s strange workings. “The members are divided into juniors and seniors,” she’d explained. “The juniors aren’t necessarily the youngest members, as you would think, but rather the newest. I wasn’t thought of as a senior until I’d been with them for seven years.”
“Are the juniors and seniors seen as equals?” I’d asked. If there were a hierarchy, I would most certainly be at the bottom of it.
“Everyone is seen as equal, but the labor is divided differently between them. The community has its patrons, including Haran, so I suppose they could hire servants, but they don’t believe in them. It’s the juniors who grow and prepare and serve the food, tend the animals, build the houses—whatever labor is required, the juniors do it, along with their spiritual work. I used to work in the garden in the mornings and return to my solitude in the afternoon.”
“The seniors have no work at all?”
“They’ve earned the privilege of devoting all of their time to spiritual work.”
We trudged past sleeping villages, vineyards, wine presses, villas, and farms, Lavi walking ahead of us holding the lamp and relying on Yaltha to call out directions. I marveled that we didn’t get lost.
She said, “Every forty-ninth day, there’s an all-night vigil filled with feasting, singing, and dancing. The members work themselves into a state of ecstasy. They call it a sober drunkenness.”
What manner of place was this?
Nearing the reedy shores of Lake Mareotis, we grew quiet. I wondered if Yaltha was remembering when she’d arrived here before, freshly torn from her daughter. It was no different this time. I watched the moon bob on the water, stars floating everywhere. I could smell the sea just over the limestone ridge. I felt the mix of fear and elation I used to get long ago waiting at the cave for Jesus to appear.
At the nadir of the night, we turned off the road onto an exceptionally steep hill. Up on the slope, I could make out clusters of flat-roofed houses.
“They’re small and simple,” Yaltha said, following my gaze. “Each one has a little courtyard, a room for sleeping, and what they call a holy room for spiritual work.”
It was the third time she’d used the odd phrase. “What is this spiritual work?” I asked. After ten years of daily toils in Nazareth, it was hard to envision sitting around in a holy room.
“Study, reading, writing, composing songs, prayer. You’ll see.”
Just before we reached the tiny gatehouse, we stopped and Lavi handed us the travel pouches he’d carried. I dug inside mine for a handful of drachmae. “Take these,” I said. “When the letter from Judas arrives, have Pamphile hire a wagon and make her way to us as quickly as she can.”
“Don’t worry—I will see to it.”
He lingered a moment, then turned to leave. I caught his arm. “Lavi, thank you. I think of you as my brother.”
The night obscured his face, but I felt his smile and reached out to embrace him.
“Sister,” he said, then bid Yaltha goodbye and turned to make the long journey back.
One of the juniors was keeping watch in the gatehouse. He was a skinny man, who balked at first to let us in. His job, as he said, was to keep out thieves, charlatans, and wayfarers, but when Yaltha told him she’d once been a senior member of the Therapeutae, he’d leapt to do her bidding.
NOW, STANDING IN SKEPSIS’S HOUSE, listening to Yaltha elaborate on why I stole the papyri, I wondered if I would have the chance to experience any of the things my aunt had described. She’d already explained that we’d fled Galilee to avoid my arrest. I tried to read Skepsis’s expression. I supposed she was considering the persistent way trouble seemed to follow me around.
“My niece is an exceptional scribe and scholar, more so than any man I’ve known,” Yaltha said, finally offsetting my shortcomings with praise.
Skepsis patted the bench beside her. “Come and sit beside me, Yaltha.” She’d implored her to do so earlier, but Yaltha had refused, pacing as she’d recounted her reunion with Diodora and Haran’s threats.
Yaltha sighed heavily now and sank onto the bench. She looked haggard in the lamplight.
Skepsis said, “You’ve come to us out of desperation, but that alone is not a reason to take you in. Those who dwell here do so out of love for a quiet, contemplative life. They come to study and to keep the memory of God alive. Can you say you’re here for those reasons as well?”
Yaltha said, “When I was sent here before, you took me in rather than let me be punished. I’d left my daughter behind and I was grieving. I spent much of my time imploring you to help me find a way to leave. My happiest day was when you struck a deal with Haran that allowed me to go to Galilee . . . though it took you long enough—eight years!” Skepsis chuckled. “I feel now as I did then,” Yaltha continued. “I won’t lie and say I’ve come here for the noble reasons you mention.”
“I can say it, though,” I declared.
They turned to me with startled expressions. If I could’ve peered into my old copper mirror at that moment, I believe I would’ve witnessed the same surprise on my own face. “I’ve come with the same desperation as my aunt, but I’ve arrived with all the things you said are necessary to dwell here. I’ve come with a love for the quiet life. I wish nothing more than to write and study and keep the memory of Sophia alive.”
Skepsis scrutinized the pouch on my shoulder stuffed with scrolls, the ends of which protruded from the opening. I was still clutching my incantation bowl, holding it tightly to my abdomen. I’d not taken time during our escape to find a cloth to wrap it in and the white surface was grimy from where I’d set it down in the reeds in order to relieve myself.
“May I see the bowl?” Skepsis asked. It was the first time she’d addressed me.
I handed it to her, then watched her lift the lamp to the opening and read my inmost thoughts.
Skepsis handed back the bowl, but not before cleaning the sides and bottom of it with her hem. “I can see from your prayer that the words you spoke to us a moment ago are true.” Her eyes shifted to Yaltha. “Old friend, because you accounted for your and Ana’s sins, holding nothing back, I know you are honest in all else. As always, I know where you stand. I will give you both refuge. I require one thing from Ana in return.” She turned to me. “I require that you write a hymn to Sophia and sing it at our next vigil.”
It was as if she’d said, Ana, you shall climb to the top of the cliff, sprout wings, and fly.
“I know nothing about composing a song,” I blurted.
“Then how fine it is that you’ll have this chance to learn. Someone is required to write a new composition for every vigil and the songs have become sadly alike and unadventurous. The community will be glad to have a fresh hymn.”
A hymn. To Sophia. And she wished me to perform it. I felt both petrified and captivated. “Who will teach me?”
“You will teach yourself,” she said. “There won’t be another vigil for forty-six days—you have ample time.”
Forty-six days. Surely I would not still be here.
The first two weeks I moved through my days as if wandering about in some languorous trance. Hours of solitude, prayers, reading, writing, antiphonal singing, philosophy lessons—I’d dreamed of such pursuits, but the sudden flood of them conjured the sensation of walking around without my feet touching the ground. I had dreams of floating, of ladders stretching into the clouds. I would sit in the holy room of the house and stare half-seeing, digging my nails into the pads of my thumbs to feel the flesh of myself. Yaltha said my untethered feeling derived from the simple shock of being here.
Soon thereafter, Skepsis assigned me to the animal shed, which quickly cured me. Chickens, sheep, and donkeys. Manure and urine. Grunting and mating. The insect blizzard at the water trough. Hoof-churned dirt. It even came to me that these things might be holy, too, a sacrilege I kept to myself.
ON THE FIRST COLD DAY after our arrival, I lugged the water vessel down the hillside to gather water for the animals from the spring near the gatehouse. The summer inundation, when the Nile floods, was over and cool winds were sweeping in from the sea on one side of the ridge and up from the lake on the other, creating a little maelstrom. I wore a shaggy goatskin cloak supplied by one of the juniors, which was so impossibly large it dragged on the ground. By my count we’d been here five and a half weeks. I tried to determine what month it would be in Galilee—Marcheshvan, I thought. Jesus would not yet be in his woolen cloak.
He hovered constantly in my thoughts. When I woke, I would lie there and picture him rising from his sleeping mat. When I ate the first meal of the morning, I imagined him breaking his bread in that unhurried way of his. And on those days, as I listened to Skepsis teach the symbolic way of reading our Scriptures, I saw him on the hillside Lavi had told us about, preaching to the multitudes.
As I descended the path, I came upon the hall where the forty-ninth-day vigils took place. The vigil was in eight days, and though I’d spent hours trying to write a song, I’d made no progress. I made up my mind I would inform Skepsis she should abandon all expectations of me either composing or performing one. She wouldn’t be pleased, but I couldn’t believe she’d send me away.
There were thirty-nine stone huts scattered across the hillside, each designed for one person, though most of them held two. Yaltha and I shared a house, sleeping side by side on reed mats. Skepsis offered to restore Yaltha to her senior status, but my aunt had refused in order to work in the garden. She spent her afternoons in our minuscule courtyard, sitting under the lone tamarisk tree.
Now that I’d found my equilibrium again, I liked having the holy room to myself. It had a wooden writing board and a stand on which to unfurl a scroll, and Skepsis had sent papyrus and inks.
Reaching the spring, I squatted on the ground to fill my vessel. When I heard men’s voices in the gatehouse, I paid little attention—peddlers often came and went, the woman selling flour, the boy bearing sacks of salt—but then I caught certain words: “The fugitives are here. . . . Yes, I’m certain of it.”
I set down the vessel. Pulling the shaggy cloak to the top of my head, I crept on all fours toward the voices until I dared edge no closer. The junior who kept the gatehouse was nowhere in sight, but one of the seniors was there speaking with two men who wore short tunics, leather sandals laced to their knees, and short knives at their belts. It was the garb of the Jewish militia. “My men will keep vigil along the road in case they attempt to leave,” the taller one said. “I’ll send word to Haran. If you have intelligence for us, you may leave your missives at the gatehouse.”
It wasn’t a surprise Haran had found us, only that it’d taken him so long. Yaltha and Skepsis devoutly believed he wouldn’t defy the sanctity of the Therapeutae by sending someone inside to apprehend us. “The Jews of Alexandria would most assuredly turn against him,” Skepsis had said. I didn’t feel as confident.
When the soldiers departed, I hugged the ground and waited for our betrayer to pass by on his way back up the hill. He was a thin, bent man with eyes like dried grapes, the one called Lucian, who was second in seniority to Skepsis. When he was out of sight, I recovered the water vessel and rushed to the garden to inform Yaltha.
“That snake Lucian was Haran’s spy when I was here before,” she said. “It seems he hasn’t improved with age. The man has fasted too much and been celibate too long.”
TWO DAYS LATER, I glimpsed Skepsis and Yaltha hurrying toward me in the animal shed.
I’d been gathering green grasses to feed the donkeys. I set down the rake.
Without bothering to greet me, Skepsis lifted a parchment. “This arrived today from Haran. One of the soldiers who guards the road delivered it to the gatehouse.”
“You know about the soldiers?” I said.
“It’s my business to know what threatens our peace. I pay the salt boy to bring me news of them.”
“Read it to her,” Yaltha said.
Skepsis scowled, not used to being ordered about, but she complied, holding the parchment at arm’s length and squinting:
I, Haran ben Philip Levias, faithful patron of the Therapeutae for two decades, write to Skepsis, the community’s esteemed leader, and ask that my sister and niece, who are presently under the Therapeutae’s guardianship, be relinquished into my care, where they will be accorded every concern and favor. By delivering them to the men who encamp nearby, the Therapeutae will continue to enjoy my loyal generosity.
She dropped her hand as if the weight of the parchment had tired her. “I’ve sent him a message, refusing his request. The community will, of course, lose his patronage—his threat is clear enough. It will mean a little more fasting, that’s all.”
“Thank you,” I said, saddened we would cause any privation at all.
She tucked the message inside her cloak. As I watched her walk away, I understood that she was the only one standing between us and Haran.
I would write the song.
The library was a small, cramped room in the assembly house, teeming with scrolls that lay about on the floor, on shelves and tables, and in wall niches like piles of scattered firewood. I stepped over and around them, sneezing at the dust. Skepsis had told me there were songs here that bore inscriptions of both lyrics and melody, even Greek vocal notations, but how was I to find them? There was no catalog. Nothing was sorted. My animal shed had more order and my donkeys’ fur less dust.
Skepsis had warned me about the disarray. “Theano, our librarian, is old with a weakness that makes it impossible for him to walk,” she’d said. “He hasn’t tended the library in more than a year and there’s been no one willing or able to take his place. But go and search for the songs—they’ll be instructive.”
It struck me now she’d had another motive. She was hoping I would become her ad hoc librarian.
I cleared a space on the floor, setting the lamp well away from the papyri, and opened scroll after scroll, finding not just Scriptures and Jewish philosophy, but works by Platonists, Stoics, and Pythagoreans; Greek poems; and a comic play by Aristophanes. I set about organizing the manuscripts by subject. By late afternoon I’d categorized more than fifty scrolls, writing a description of each one, as they did at the great library in Alexandria. I swept the floor and sprinkled the corners with eucalyptus leaves. I was brushing the mint-honey smell from my palms when the marvel happened, the one that had been coming all day, unbeknownst to me.
Footsteps. I turned to the door. There, in the broken light, stood Diodora.
“You are here,” I said, needing to verbalize what I saw but couldn’t yet believe.
“So she is,” said Skepsis, stepping from behind her into the room. Her old eyes sparked with delight.
I drew my cousin to me and felt her cheek wet against mine. “How did you come to be here?”
She glanced at Skepsis, who pulled a bench from beneath the table and lowered herself onto it. “I sent a message to her at Isis Medica and asked her to come.”
“I didn’t know what had become of you and my mother until I got her letter,” Diodora said, still gripping my hand. “When you didn’t return to Isis Medica, I knew something had befallen you. I had to come and see for myself that you’re both well.”
“Will you remain with us long?”
“The priestess has given me leave for as long as I wish.”
“You will share the house with Ana and Yaltha,” Skepsis said. “The sleeping room is just wide enough for three beds.” Tucking stray pieces of hair behind her ears, she studied Diodora. “I asked you to come so you could be near your mother and she near you, but I also asked for myself. Or, I should say, for the Therapeutae. We have need of you here. Some of our members are old and sick and there’s no one to tend them. You’re accomplished in the art of healing. If you remain with us, we would benefit from your care.”
“You wish me to live among you?” Diodora said.
“Only if you wish a quiet, contemplative life. Only if you wish to study and keep God’s memory alive.” These were the same words she’d spoken to Yaltha and me the night we’d arrived.
“But yours is the God of the Jews,” Diodora said. “I know nothing of him. It’s Isis I serve.”
“We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we’ll find the God that exists behind them.”
Diodora gave no answer, but I watched a light come into her face.
“Does Yaltha know you’re here?” I asked.
“Not yet. I only just arrived and Skepsis wished you to accompany us.”
“I would not have you miss Yaltha’s face when she sees who has come,” Skepsis said. Her eyes pored over my neat, methodical stacks of scrolls. “I pray we shall soon have a healer and a librarian.”
YALTHA HAD FALLEN ASLEEP sitting on the bench in the courtyard beside our hut with her head leaning against the wall. Her arms were crossed over her thin breasts, her lower lip fluttering with each puff of breath. Seeing her at rest, Skepsis, Diodora, and I paused.
“Should we wake her?” Diodora whispered.
Skepsis strode over and shook her shoulder. “Yaltha . . . Yaltha, someone is here.”
My aunt opened one eye. “Leave me be.”
“What do you think, Diodora?” Skepsis said. “Should we leave her alone?”
Yaltha started, looking past Skepsis to where Diodora stood near the entrance.
“I think we should leave her alone,” I said. “Go back to sleep, Aunt.”
Yaltha smiled, motioning for Diodora to come and sit next to her. When they’d said their greetings, she summoned me, as well. As I sank down on the other side of her, she looked at Skepsis. “My daughters,” she said.
Diodora and I followed a zigzagging footpath to the top of the limestone cliffs that rose behind the Therapeutae community. Sunlight lay across the summit and the rocks were shining white as milk. Scampering through the few remaining poppies, I was possessed by the ebullient feeling of being set free. I didn’t like to think I could be happy with Jesus so far away and his circumstances unknown to me, yet I felt it—happiness. The realization brought a twist of guilt.
“Your countenance has fallen,” said Diodora. She’d been trained to observe the body and little escaped her notice.
“I was thinking of my husband,” I said. I told her then about the circumstances of our separation and how much it grieved me to be away from him. “I’m awaiting a letter telling me it’s safe for us to return.”
She came to a standstill. “Us? Do you believe Yaltha will leave and go back?”
I stared at her, silence gnawing around us. The night she’d come to Haran’s house, she’d become distressed when Yaltha had spoken of returning to Galilee, and she’d made it plain she had no wish to go there with us. Why had I said anything about leaving?
“I don’t know if Yaltha will leave or stay,” I told her, realizing it was true. I didn’t know.
She nodded, accepting my honesty, and we continued on more subdued. Reaching the crest ahead of me, she took in the vista and swept her arms open. “Oh, Ana. Look!”
I hastened the last few steps and there before me was the sea. The water stretched all the way to Greece and Rome, glittering striations of blue and green, ripples of white. Our Sea, the Romans called it. Galilee was a million fathoms away.
Finding a cranny protected from the winds, we sat, squeezed together between the rocks. Since Diodora’s arrival she’d been effusive, telling us about her days growing up at Isis Medica. She’d asked questions as well, eager for stories about us. Our whispered talks on our sleeping mats had left me yawning and heavy-eyed the next day. But it was worth it. She was telling me now about Theano, whose illness prevented him from tending the library. “He has a weakness of the heart. It will give out soon.”
Listening as she gave an all too vivid account of the bodily complaints she’d heard, I began to feel I should return and set to work on the hymn to Sophia. The forty-ninth-day vigil was tomorrow night and I sat idle on a rock while Diodora spoke of foot ulcers. “It surprises me,” she said. “After all the years I spent at Isis Medica, I do not yet miss it.”
“What about Isis? Do you miss her?”
“There’s no need for me to miss her. I carry her inside me. She is everything.” She continued speaking for many minutes, but I heard nothing more. I felt the song I would write quicken to life inside me. I didn’t know how to go on sitting there.
I stood. “We must go.”
She threaded her arm around mine. “The day we met, you said, ‘Let us be more than cousins. Let us be sisters.’ Do you still want that?”
“I wish it even more now.”
“It’s my wish, too,” she said.
AS WE DESCENDED THE PATH, I spied a figure beneath the eucalyptus tree where I collected my aromatic leaves. He wore the white tunic and shaggy cloak of the Therapeutae, but I couldn’t identify him. Treading farther, I lifted my hand to shield the sun and saw it was the spy, Lucian.
“It’s late in the day,” he said as we came nearer. “Why aren’t you engaged in study and prayer?”
“We could ask the same of you,” I said, assailed by the uneasy feeling he’d been waiting for us.
“I’ve been at prayer here beneath the tree.”
Diodora bristled. “And we’ve been at prayer up there on the cliffs.” I gave her an approving look.
“The rocks up there are treacherous and there are wild animals,” he said. “We would all be saddened if you came to harm.”
His face had such a quiet malevolence that I looked away. He seemed to be threatening us, but I was unsure how. “We feel safe enough there,” I told him and attempted to pass. The words She is everything were like a fire in me. I had no time for him.
He stepped to block the path. “When you are in need of a walk, it would be safer to travel down the hill and along the road to the lake. There are solitary places on the shore that are as beautiful as the sea. I will be glad to show you.”
Ah. That was it. The lake lay down the hill and across the road, just beyond the protection of the Therapeutae’s precinct.
I said, “The lake sounds like a pleasant place to pray. We’ll go there another time. Right now we have duties to attend.”
He smiled. I smiled back.
“Don’t attempt to go to the lake,” I told Diodora when we were some distance away. “You’ve just met Lucian, Haran’s spy. He means to lure us onto the road, where the militia wait to arrest us. The boy who brings the salt said the soldiers stop everyone who passes from the west, looking for an old woman with a drooped eye and a young woman with unruly curls. They could easily mistake you for me.”
My words sobered her.
When we arrived at our hut, we found Yaltha sitting in her spot in the courtyard reading a codex from the library. Seeing her, Diodora said quietly to me, “It isn’t merely a question of whether Yaltha will choose to go to Galilee or stay in Egypt, is it? It’s whether any of us will be able to leave at all.”
She’d spoken my fear out loud.
LEAVING DIODORA AND YALTHA in the courtyard, I cleansed my hands and face in preparation to enter the holy room and write the hymn that was burning a hole in my heart. I set the lamp on the table and poured ink into the palette.
I dipped my pen.
The forty-ninth-day vigil began the next day at sunset. I arrived late to find the dining hall ablaze with lamps, the seniors already reclined on their couches, eating. The juniors were hauling about platters of food. Diodora was at the serving table replenishing a tray of fish and hen eggs. “Sister!” she cried as I approached. “Where have you been?”
I held up the scroll that contained my opus. “I was finalizing the words of my hymn.”
“Lucian has been inquiring of your whereabouts. He has twice pointed out your absence to Skepsis.”
I picked up a serving bowl of pomegranate seeds. “It is good of him to miss me.”
She smiled and rolled her eyes at her platter. “I’ve refilled it four times. Let us hope they leave a morsel for us.”
Though Yaltha had been designated as a junior, I noticed Skepsis had allowed her to recline on one of the couches reserved for seniors. Lucian left his couch and stood before Skepsis. “Yaltha should be serving us alongside the other juniors,” he said angrily, his voice carrying across the room.
“Anger is effortless, Lucian. Kindness is hard. Try to exert yourself.”
“She shouldn’t be here at all,” he persisted.
Skepsis waved her hand. “Leave me to eat in peace.”
I looked at Yaltha, who was biting a turnip, unfazed.
When the banqueting wore down, the community made their way to the opposite end of the room, where a waist-high partition ran along the center with benches on each side, women to the left, men to the right.
I sat on the last bench with Yaltha and Diodora. “Get comfortable,” Yaltha told us. “You’ll be here the rest of the night.”
“All night?” Diodora exclaimed.
“Yes, but you will not lack for entertainment,” Yaltha said.
Coming behind us and overhearing, Skepsis said, “Our gathering is not entertainment, as Yaltha well knows—it’s a vigil. We watch for the dawn, which represents the true light of God.”
“And we will sing ourselves into a stupor before it arrives,” Yaltha said.
“Yes, that part is true,” Skepsis conceded.
Skepsis began the vigil with a lengthy discourse, about what, precisely, I couldn’t say. I gripped the scroll on which I’d written my hymn. My song suddenly seemed too audacious.
I heard Skepsis call my name. “Ana . . . come, offer your hymn to Sophia.”
“I call my hymn ‘Thunder: Perfect Mind,’” I told her when I reached the front of the room. Someone struck a timbrel. As the drumbeat began, I lifted my scroll and chanted.
I was sent out from power . . .
Be careful. Do not ignore me.
I am the first and the last
I am she who is honored and she who is mocked
I am the whore and the holy woman
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the mother and the daughter
I stopped and looked at their faces, glimpsing both wonder and bewilderment. Diodora was watching me intensely, her hands tucked under her chin. A smile moved on Yaltha’s lips. I felt all the women who lived inside me.
Do not stare at me in the shit pile, leaving me discarded
You will find me in the kingdoms . . .
Do not be afraid of my power
Why do you despise my fear and curse my pride?
I am she who exists in all fears and in trembling boldness
I paused once more, needing to find my breath. The words I’d sung seemed to swirl over my head. I wondered where they had come from. Where they would go.
I, I am without God
And I am she whose God is magnificent . . .
I am being
I am she who is nothing . . .
I am the coming together and the falling apart
I am the enduring and the disintegration . . .
I am what everyone can hear and no one can say
I sang on and on, and when the hymn was ended, I walked slowly back to my place.
As I passed the benches, a woman rose to her feet and then another, until everyone was standing. I looked uncertainly at Skepsis. “They are telling you that you are Sophia’s daughter,” she said. “They are telling you she is well pleased.”
I remember the rest of that night only vaguely. I know we sang without ceasing, first the men, then the women, blending finally into a single choir. The sistrums shook and the goatskin drums beat. We danced, pretending to cross the Red Sea, wheeling and counterwheeling, exhausted and delirious, until dawn came and we turned east and faced the light.
One afternoon, near the end of winter, Skepsis arrived unexpectedly in my holy room with swatches of leather, papyri, a measuring rod, needles, thread, wax, and a huge pair of scissors. “We’re going to turn your scrolls into codices,” she said. “A bound book is the best way to ensure your writing endures.”
She didn’t wait for my consent, which I would have given a hundred times over, but she set about spreading her bookmaking wares across the table. The scissors were identical to the ones I’d used to cut Jesus’s hair the day I’d told him I was with child.
“With which scrolls do you wish to begin?” she asked.
I heard her, but I could not stop looking at the long bronze scissor blades. The remembrance of them caused a toppling sensation in my chest.
“Ana?” she said.
Shaking my head to clear the memory, I retrieved the scrolls that contained my stories of the matriarchs and placed them on the table. “I wish to begin at the beginning.”
“Watch carefully and learn. I’ll show you how to make the first book, but the rest you must do yourself.” She measured and marked the scrolls and the leather cover. When she cut them, I closed my eyes, remembering the sound of the shears, the feel of his hair in my fingers.
“See, I did not injure a single one of your words,” she said when she was done, seeming to mistake my preoccupation as concern over her cutting skills. I did not correct her. Holding up a blank page of papyrus, she added, “I’ve cut an extra page so you may write a title on it.” Then she began to sew the pages together inside the leather covers.
“Now,” she said. “What is it that troubles you, Ana? Is it Haran?”
I hesitated. I had poured out my fears and longings to Yaltha and Diodora, but not to Skepsis. I said, “When spring comes, it will be two years since I’ve seen my husband.”
She smiled slightly. “I see.”
“My brother promised to send a letter when it was safe for me to return to Galilee. There’s a servant in Haran’s house who will bring it to me, but Haran will prevent my leaving.”
It seemed impossible that the Jewish militia was still posted on the road after all these months; their encampment had become a permanent outpost.
Skepsis pushed and pulled the needle, using a little iron hammer to force it through the leather. She said, “The salt boy tells me the soldiers have built a small stone hut in which to sleep, as well as a pen for a goat, and they’ve hired a local woman to cook their meals. It’s a testament to Haran’s patience and need for revenge.”
I had heard these things from Yaltha. Hearing them again left me even more disconsolate.
“I don’t know why the letter hasn’t come,” I said. “But I don’t feel I can tarry here much longer.”
“Do you see how I’m making a backstitch to make a double knot?” she asked, all of her attention refocused on the book. I said nothing more.
When the codex was completed, she placed it in my arms. “If your letter comes, I’ll do what I can to help you leave,” she said. “But it will sadden me to see you go. If your place is in Galilee, Ana, so be it. I only wish you to know that this place will be here if you desire to return.”
She left. I looked down at the codex, this thing of wonder.
Then came a day balmy with spring. I had just finished turning the last of my scrolls into books, a task I’d worked on for weeks with an exigency I couldn’t explain. Now, alone in the house, I surveyed the stack of codices with relief, then amazement. Perhaps my words would endure now.
Yaltha had left the house to visit the library, and Diodora was off caring for Theano, who lay at death’s threshold. Skepsis had already ordered his coffin to be constructed—a simple box of acacia wood. Earlier, while watering the animals, I’d heard the insistent hammering in the woodworking shop.
Eager to show Diodora and Yaltha my collection of codices, I hurried to complete one last task before they returned. I filled the palette with ink and inscribed a title onto the empty page in each book, blowing the ink gently to dry it.
The Matriarchs
The Tales of Terror
Phasaelis and Herod Antipas
My Life in Nazareth
Lamentations for Susanna
Jesus, Beloved
Yaltha of Alexandria
Chaya: Lost Daughter
The Ways of the Therapeutae
Thunder: Perfect Mind
Remembering Enheduanna, who signed her name to her writing, I reopened the books and signed mine: Ana. Not Ana, daughter of Matthias, or Ana, wife of Jesus. Just Ana.
There was only one codex I didn’t sign. When I lifted my pen to Thunder: Perfect Mind, my hand would not move. The words in the book had come from me, but also from beyond me. I closed the leather cover.
Awe took hold of me as I arranged the books inside the wall niche, then placed my incantation bowl on top. As I stepped back and took them in, Yaltha entered the room.
Pamphile was at her side.
My eyes flashed to the goatskin pouch in Pamphile’s hand. She held it out to me without a word, her face tense.
I took the pouch and fumbled with the knot on the leather tie, my fingers fat as cucumbers. Prying open the drawstring, I peered inside at a scrolled parchment. I wanted to snatch it out and read it that moment, but I loosely retied the pouch. Yaltha looked at me, understanding, it seemed, that I wished to be alone when I read it, away even from her.
“A courier arrived with it three days ago,” Pamphile said. “I hired a wagon with a donkey as soon as I could. Apion thinks I’m visiting my family in Dionysias. I led him to believe my father had fallen ill.”
“Thank you, Pamphile. You have done well.”
“It’s Lavi you should thank,” she replied, her face hardening. “He’s the one who insisted I remain at Haran’s all these months and wait for your letter. If it’d been left to me, I would’ve departed there long ago. I think my husband is more loyal to you than to me.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this—I thought she might be right. “Is Lavi well?” I asked, hoping to divert her.
“He’s happy with his work at the library. His superiors heap praise on him. I go to him whenever I can—he rents a small apartment now.”
Every moment the letter remained unopened was an agony, but I owed it to her to listen.
“Did you see a colony of soldiers on the road near the gatehouse?” Yaltha asked.
“Yes. I’ve seen these same kind of soldiers in Haran’s house. One comes each week to see him.”
“Do you know what they speak about?” I asked.
She glared at me. “Do you expect me to listen at the door?”
“I wish you to do nothing that puts you in danger.”
“You should be prepared when you pass back by the soldiers,” Yaltha said. “There’s no danger to you, but they inspect everyone going east, searching for me and Ana. You’ll be stopped. If asked, say you have no knowledge of us, that you came to sell papyrus.”
“Sell papyrus,” she repeated, then glowered at me again. “I didn’t know I would have to tell more lies for you.”
“Only one more, and only if asked,” I said.
“I wish this to be over,” she said. “Now that your letter has come, I only want to leave Haran’s employ and go live with my husband.”
I tightened my fingers on the letter’s pouch. Be patient, Ana, I told myself. You have waited so long—what are a few more minutes?
“What news do you have of Haran?” Yaltha asked her.
“The morning after you left, his shouting could be heard through the house. He searched your rooms in a rage, looking for some sign of where you’d gone. The man ripped bedcovers and shattered water pots. Who do you think was charged to clean it up? Me, of course. He plundered the scriptorium as well. I found scrolls across the floor, spilled ink, a broken chair.”
“Did he suspect you of aiding us?” I asked.
“He was content to lay the blame on Lavi, but not before he interrogated me and the rest of the servants. Even Thaddeus wasn’t spared.” She balled her fists and mimicked Haran. “‘How did they manage to flee? Did they turn into smoke and float under the locked door? Did they fly out the window? Which of you unlocked the door?’ He threatened to have us flogged. It is only through Apion’s intervention that we were spared.”
It was plain how much she’d suffered under Haran’s roof separated from Lavi. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ve been a brave and true friend.” I pulled the bench toward her. “Here, rest. I’ll return shortly. Yaltha will bring you food and water. You will stay the night with us.”
I walked self-consciously from the house, past the assembly hall, the woodworking shop, the clusters of houses, the animal shed, forcing myself not to break into a run. As I passed the eucalyptus tree, I quickened my pace, then took flight up the escarpment toward the cliffs.
Finding a boulder midway up, I sat with my back against it, letting the strength of it hold me. My heart was in an uproar. I took a breath, opened the pouch, and pulled out the parchment.
Dearest Sister,
I trust you received my earlier letter explaining why it was not safe for you to return.
My mouth parted. Judas had written before—why had I not received it?
The danger to you in Galilee has not fully passed, though it has lessened. Antipas is fully consumed by his lust to be named King of the Jews by Rome.
Last week we came into Judea on our way to Jerusalem where we will remain through Passover. Antipas has no rule here. Come to us with all haste. Sail with Lavi to Joppa and make your way to Bethany where we lodge at the home of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha.
The kingdom is close at hand. Vast throngs of people in Galilee and Judea now hail Jesus as the Messiah. He believes the fullness of time is upon us and he wishes you by his side. He compelled me to tell you that he is safe. I, though, must warn of dangers. The people are emboldened by the appearance of a Messiah and there is much talk of revolution. Jesus teaches each day in the Temple and the Jewish authorities set spies upon us the moment we enter the gates. If there is unrest, the Temple guard will most certainly arrest him. Jesus continues to believe God’s kingdom can come without swords. But I am both a Cynic and a Zealot. I only know we cannot let this moment pass. If it is necessary, I will do what I must this Passover to ensure the masses rise up and overthrow the Romans at last. The sacrifice of one for many.
As I write, I sit in Lazarus’s courtyard where your friend Tabitha is playing the lyre, filling the air with the sweetest of music. Jesus has gone to the Mount of Olives to pray. He has missed you, Ana. He bids me give you his love. We await you.
Your brother,
Judas
10th day of Shebat
Judas’s words slammed into me. I will do what I must this Passover . . . The sacrifice of one for many. What did he mean? What was he trying to tell me? I began to breathe very fast, like I’d run a great distance. My head churned with confusion. I turned the parchment over, wishing he might have explained himself on the back, but it was devoid of words.
I reread the letter. This time different pieces of it whirled up, broken-off words. He wishes you by his side . . . He bids me give you his love . . . He has missed you. How had I endured these two years without him? I pressed the letter to my breast and held it there.
I tried to calculate time. Judas had written the letter early this past winter, seven weeks ago. Passover in Jerusalem was fourteen days away. I stuffed the parchment into the pouch and scrambled to my feet. I must get to Jerusalem, and quickly.
Yaltha stood alone in the courtyard. I thrust the letter into her hand, not asking Pamphile’s whereabouts. As she read, I watched her face, noticing the flare of surprise toward the end. “Finally, you’ll go to your husband,” she said. I waited for her to say more, but that was all.
“I must find a way to leave in the morning.”
Would she not mention Judas’s strange message about ensuring the masses rise up? Behind her the light was sinking. Golden-brown scintillas drifting far below over the lake. “What does my brother mean by the sacrifice of one for many?” I asked. “What is he saying?”
I watched her step beneath the branches of the tamarisk tree and become pensive. Her need to deliberate filled me with unease.
“I think I already know what he means,” I said quietly. I’d known before I’d finished the letter, but I couldn’t bear to acknowledge it right then. It had seemed impossible that my brother would go so far, but as I stood with Yaltha beneath the tree, I pictured the child whose father was murdered by the Romans and whose mother was sold into slavery, the boy who swore to avenge them, and I knew—yes, he would go that far.
“Judas,” Yaltha hissed. From the corner of my eye I saw a tiny green lizard dart up the stone wall. “Yes, of course you know what he means. You know him better than anyone.”
“Please say it. I cannot.”
We sat on the bench and she placed her hand at my back. “Judas means to have his revolution, Ana. If Jesus doesn’t bring it about peaceably, Judas means to ignite it by force. The surest way to incite the masses is for the Romans to execute their Messiah.”
“He will deliver Jesus to the Romans,” I whispered. Saying the words, I felt like I was falling off the edge of the world. During the time we’d been in Egypt, I’d stored away a thousand tears, and I let them loose now. Yaltha pulled my head to her shoulder and let me sob my fear, helplessness, and fury.
The deluge went on for several minutes, and in the aftermath, I experienced a great calm. I said, “Why would Judas be so brazen as to reveal his intention to me?”
“That is hard to know. Confessing to you may have been a way of alleviating his guilt.”
“When it comes to overthrowing the Romans, Judas feels no guilt.”
“He may have been trying to find the boldness to go through with it. Like throwing your money bag over a wall to ensure you’ll climb over.”
She was doing her best to humor my need to understand at least some part of Judas’s warped design, but I realized how futile it was. “I’ll never understand any of this,” I said. “And right now, it doesn’t matter. It only matters that I get to Jerusalem.” I stood and peered over the wall toward the road, another anxiety taking over—Haran and his soldiers.
At that same moment, Skepsis and Diodora entered the courtyard. “Theano has died,” Skepsis announced. “Diodora and I have just finished preparing his body—”
“Has something happened?” Diodora interrupted, noticing my reddened eyes. Or perhaps it was the taut, menacing air.
I picked up Judas’s letter and read it to them, then tried my best to elucidate Judas’s plan. Diodora, who knew nothing of Jewish messiahs and radical Zealots, seemed utterly mystified. She enfolded me in her arms. “I’m happy you will see your husband, but I am sad you will leave us.” She turned to her mother. “Will you go, too?” she asked in an unassuming way, but her face betrayed her fear.
“I’ll remain here,” Yaltha said, looking past Diodora to me. “Having found Diodora, I cannot leave her again. I’m getting too old to make the journey anyway, and Egypt is my home. I’m content here among the Therapeutae. It will grieve me to be separated from you, Ana, but I cannot leave.”
I felt a crumpling inside, but I refused to let my disappointment show. I said, “I understand, Aunt. Your decision is as it should be.”
Shadows had begun to darken the edges of the courtyard, and Diodora went into the house for a lamp, though I had the feeling she left out of kindness, not wanting me to see her joy.
She returned with a look of confusion on her face. “The woman sleeping inside—she’s the servant in Haran’s house who showed me to your quarters.”
“Yes, Pamphile,” Yaltha said. “She delivered the letter from Judas. She was weary. I helped her with some chamomile.”
We settled around the glowing circle of lamplight and I posed the question that loomed over everything. “How will I get past the soldiers?” I looked at their faces—I had no answer. They stared back—they had no answer either.
“Is there no way to leave here except by the road where the soldiers stand guard?” Diodora asked. “Is there a footpath that skirts around them?”
Skepsis shook her head. “We are hemmed in by the cliffs. The road is our only way of leaving, and the soldiers are positioned too close to the gatehouse to miss anyone who comes and goes from here.”
“Could you disguise yourself somehow?” Diodora asked. “As an old woman? You could cover your head and use a crutch.”
“I doubt they’d be fooled by that,” said Yaltha. “It’s far too risky. But . . .”
I prodded her. “What is it? We must consider everything.”
“Pamphile will leave tomorrow. The wagon she arrived in is large enough for you to hide in the back.” She glanced at Skepsis, shrugging uncertainly. “What if we concealed her beneath the sacks that store the vegetable seed?”
“The soldiers always search the carts that bring flour and salt,” Skepsis said. “They would search Pamphile’s wagon, too.”
They grew quiet. A thin, gray hopelessness crept into the air. I didn’t want them to give up. It was true I no longer believed in the God of rescue, only the God of presence, but I believed in Sophia, who whispered bravery and wisdom in my ear day and night, if I would only listen, and I tried now to do that, to listen.
What I heard was hammering. Faint, but so clear I thought for a moment Pamphile had wakened and was rapping on the door from inside the house. The realization that the sound resounding in my head was actually a memory startled me. I knew instantly what that memory was. I’d heard it that morning while watering the animals. It was the hammering from the woodworking shop as Theano’s coffin was being built.
The sound formed into an idea. I said, “There is one way for me to leave here safely, and that’s inside Theano’s coffin.”
They sat there with blank faces.
“I would not be inside the coffin long, only until Pamphile drives the cart an ample distance past the soldiers. I will take any risk to reach Jesus, but this one puts me in the least peril. The soldiers would never think to open the coffin.”
“That is true,” Diodora said. “Violating the dead is a serious offense. One can be put to death for opening a tomb.”
“And for Jews, a corpse is unclean,” I added. I tried but was unable to read Yaltha’s expression. She must have thought my idea was elaborately strange. “I believe it is the very boldness of the notion that will cause it to work,” I continued. “Do you think differently, Aunt?”
She said, “I think the idea of you riding away in Theano’s coffin is absurd, but it’s also ingenious, Little Thunder.”
My eyes rounded—no one had ever called me Little Thunder but Jesus. I received the name from her like a charge. Go, be boiling clouds and lightning spears and sky-splitting roars.
“Now,” she said. “Let’s imagine how you will accomplish this insane act.”
All of us turned pointedly to Skepsis, who was studying the trails of blue on the back of her hands. None of this could be done without her. I was proposing we confiscate Theano’s coffin, requiring another one to be swiftly constructed for him. Furthermore, if Skepsis entered into the deception, she would deceive the whole community.
“Lucian is our biggest concern,” she said. “If he suspects it’s not Theano in the coffin, he’ll convey his suspicions to the soldiers, and Ana is certain to be discovered.” She fell quiet, mulling further. When she lifted her face, her eyes were doing their owlish dance. “Theano’s wish was to be buried here on our grounds, but I’ll put out word that he wished to be buried in his family’s tomb in Alexandria. This is quite typical for our wealthier members. Of course, Theano’s family is not rich, but they would have enough for a mud-brick tomb, I’m sure. I’ll tell everyone that the servant who delivered the letter—what was her name?”
“Pamphile,” I answered, amazed at the intricacies she was working out. Until this moment, Lucian had not received a thought from me.
“I’ll explain that Pamphile was sent from Theano’s family to bring his body to Alexandria. This should resolve the matter.”
“It should also put an end to the outpost of soldiers at our gate,” said Yaltha. “If Ana is no longer here, there will be no need for the soldiers.”
“What about you?” said Diodora, looking at Yaltha. “Haran would still wish to arrest you.”
Skepsis lifted a finger. I knew this to be a good sign. “When Ana is well away, I’ll address the community, stating she has returned to her husband in Galilee and Yaltha has taken the vows to remain part of the Therapeutae for life. It will not take Lucian long to put this news in Haran’s ear. I think Haran will be relieved to have a legitimate reason to put an end to all this.”
“My brother will at least be thrilled to no longer pay the soldiers from his own money bags. The only reason he has kept the outpost going this long is so not to be perceived as backing down.”
I admired the scheme that had just come into being and feared in equal measure that it would fail.
Diodora said, “What will we do with poor Theano during all of this?”
“That will be easy. We’ll keep him concealed in his house until Ana is gone,” Skepsis said. “Then we three, along with Gaius, our carpenter, will give him a proper burial without Lucian’s knowledge.”
It sounded anything but easy.
“And Gaius is trustworthy?” Yaltha asked.
“Gaius? Most certainly. When I leave here, I’ll ask him to begin work this very night on a second coffin and to create two small holes in one of them for breathing.”
That detail sent a shudder through me. I imagined the tight, airless space and wondered for the first time if I could go through with this.
“The community has been notified to gather at the first hour tomorrow to say the prayers for the dead for Theano,” Skepsis said. “You should be among us, Ana.”
“When will she be placed in the coffin?” Diodora asked. Her eyes were wide and worried, and I thought she was feeling the tight, airless space, too.
“After the prayers, Ana, you slip away to the woodworking shop, where Gaius will lightly nail you inside the coffin. Four short nails, no more. I’ll instruct him to place an awl in the wagon for Pamphile, but also one inside the coffin so you may pry the lid yourself. Then he and his helper will load you onto the wagon. Meanwhile, I will keep Lucian occupied.”
Yaltha held out her knotty hands to me and I took them. “I’ll go with Ana to the woodworking shop to make certain everything is done as prescribed,” she said.
“I’ll go, too,” Diodora said. “We want no danger to come to you, sister.”
A noise came from within the house. Then footsteps. Pamphile called, “Yaltha? Ana?”
“I tell you,” I said, “the greatest danger to me is Pamphile refusing to open the lid!”
Yaltha laughed. She was the only one to understand my uneasy jest.
At first, Pamphile seemed agreeable to our well-laid plan, but when I told her Lavi must travel with me to Judea, she rolled out her lower lip and folded her arms over her chest. “Then I will not do it.”
Behind me, I heard Yaltha, Skepsis, and Diodora sigh with one accord. For the past half hour, the three of them had been like a small Greek chorus, offering refrains and harmonious sighs while I tried my best to convince Pamphile to join our subterfuge. We were crowded into the holy room, which had grown thick with the smell of palm oil from the lamps. Yaltha had left the door open to the courtyard, but the little room was stifling. A trickle of sweat darted between my breasts.
“Please, Pamphile,” I pleaded. “My husband’s life may depend upon your answer. I must get to Jerusalem and stop my brother.”
“Yes, so you said.”
She enjoys this, I thought, this power she holds. “It’s too dangerous for me to travel alone,” I said, feeling the words like stones in my mouth. “Without Lavi I won’t be able to go!”
“Then you must find someone else,” she said.
“There is no one else.”
“This needs to be settled quickly,” Skepsis interjected. “If you are leaving here by coffin, I must alert Gaius right away. And Pamphile must come with me and stay at my house for the night. Otherwise, some will wonder why a servant from Theano’s family would lodge with you.”
Yes, please, take her.
I tried again. “If you’re worried Lavi may not return to Alexandria, I assure you I have enough money to purchase his passage back. I’ll show you, if you like.”
“I don’t care to see your money. I trust that you would send him back.”
“Then what is it?” Diodora asked.
Pamphile’s eyes shrank. “I have already lived apart from my husband for five months because of you. I don’t intend to do so any longer.”
I did not know how to get through to her. She was lonely for her husband. How could I blame her? I glanced helplessly at Yaltha, who stepped past me, closer to Pamphile, in order to make some last effort. I remember thinking: We’ve come to the split in the river. I felt, whether or not it was true, that my life would be decided now. It would rush one way or go the other.
Yaltha spoke with uncommon gentleness. “Did you know that Ana has been apart from her own husband for two years?”
I saw it then—a softening in Pamphile’s face.
“I’m sorry for the months you were separated from Lavi,” I told her. “I know the pain of it. I know what it’s like to lie in bed and ache for your husband, to wake up and feel his absence.” Even as I said these things, I felt Jesus moving around the edges of my vision like a lost dream.
She said, “If Lavi left, how long would he be gone?”
A smidgen of hope. “Three weeks, perhaps. No more.”
“And what will become of his position at the library? Will they receive him back?”
“I correspond with a scholar there,” said Skepsis. She was thumping her finger impatiently on the table. “I’ll make certain your husband is given leave.”
Pamphile dropped her arms to her sides. “Let it be as you wish,” she said.
I COULD NOT SLEEP that night, even with Yaltha’s chamomile. My thoughts spun. It was the deep of night, but I rose from my mat and stole past Diodora and Yaltha, who were making quiet slumbering sounds.
Standing in the darkened holy room, I felt the finality of being here. My large woolen travel pouch sat on the table, stuffed full. Diodora and Yaltha had watched in silence as I’d packed it. It contained the pouch that held my red thread, Judas’s letter, the mummy portrait, money, two tunics, a cloak, and undergarments. I’d left the new black-and-red Alexandrian dress for Diodora. I would have no use for it anymore.
I could hardly bear to look at the niche where my ten codices were stacked in a beautiful leaning tower with my incantation bowl perched on top. It wasn’t possible to take them with me. I might’ve carried a second bag and squeezed in five codices, maybe six, but something inexplicable inside me wished the books to remain all together. I wanted them here among the Therapeutae, where they might be read and preserved and perhaps cherished. I moved about the room, telling everything goodbye.
Yaltha’s voice came from the doorway. “I will safeguard your words until you return.”
I turned to her. “I will likely never return, Aunt. You know that.”
She nodded, accepting what I’d said without questioning it.
“After I leave, place my writings in the library with the other manuscripts,” I said. “I’m ready now for others to read them.”
She came and stood close to me. “Do you remember the day in Sepphoris when you opened your cedar chest and showed me your writings for the first time?”
“I’ve not forgotten it, nor will I ever forget it,” I said.
“You were something to be reckoned with. Fourteen years old and full of rebellion and longings. You were the most stubborn, determined, ambitious child I’d ever seen. When I saw what was inside your cedar chest, I knew.” She smiled.
“Knew what?”
“That there was also largeness in you. I knew you possessed a generosity of abilities that comes only rarely into the world. You knew it, too, for you wrote of it in your bowl. But we all have some largeness in us, don’t we, Ana?”
“What are you saying, Aunt?”
“What most sets you apart is the spirit in you that rebels and persists. It isn’t the largeness in you that matters most, it’s your passion to bring it forth.”
I gazed at her, but could not speak. I went down on my knees; I don’t know why, except I felt overcome by what she’d said.
She placed her hand on my head. She said, “My own largeness has been to bless yours.”
The coffin lay on the floor in the middle of the woodworking shop smelling of fresh wood. Yaltha, Diodora, and I gathered beside it and stared somberly into the empty cavity.
“Don’t think of it as a coffin,” Diodora advised.
“We mustn’t delay,” Gaius said. “Now that the prayers for Theano are over, members will be lining the path, wanting to proceed behind the wagon as far as the gatehouse. We can’t risk one of them wandering nearby and finding you. Quickly, now.” He gripped my elbow as I stepped into the coffin. I stood there a moment before sitting, unable to think of the wooden box as anything other than what it was. I told myself just not to think at all.
Diodora bent and kissed my cheeks. Then Yaltha. As my aunt hovered over me, I tried to memorize her face. Gaius placed the travel pouch at my feet and the awl in my hand. “Hold on to it.” I lay back and looked up into the bright room. The lid slid over me. Then darkness.
The coffin juddered as Gaius hammered in four nails, causing my head to knock against the bottom. In the stillness that followed, I became aware of two thin beams of light. They reminded me of the fine strands of a spider’s web lit with sunlight and dew. I turned my head and found the source, a tiny perforation on each side. My breathing holes.
The coffin was lifted with a jerk. Unprepared for it, I let out a small cry. “You’ll have to stay quieter than that,” Gaius said, his voice sounding far away.
As they carried me outside, I braced for another jolt, but the coffin slid smoothly into the wagon. I couldn’t tell when Pamphile climbed in, maybe she was there already, but I heard the donkey bray and felt the lurch of the cart as we started down the hill.
I closed my eyes so as not to see the coffin’s lid, which was a hand’s breadth from my nose. I listened instead to the rumble of the wagon, then to the muffled singing that began to follow us. Don’t think, don’t think. It will be over soon.
When we made a sharp turn north, the singing receded into the distance and I knew we’d passed the gatehouse and turned onto the road. Moments later, one of the soldiers shouted “Halt!” and the wheels on the cart ground to a stop. The beat of my heart came so hard, I imagined the sound of it streaming out through the air holes. I was afraid to breathe.
The soldier addressed Pamphile. “We were told a man among the Therapeutae died. Where are you taking him?”
It was difficult to hear her answer. “To his family in Alexandria,” I believed she said.
Relief surged through me. I thought we would be waved on now, but the cart didn’t move. The soldiers’ voices drew closer, seeming to move to the back of the cart. A thread of panic began to unravel in me. My eyes flew open, met by the lid of the coffin. I drew a pant and shut them again. Don’t move. Don’t think.
We lingered an interminable time for reasons I could not deduce. Then I heard one of them say, “There’s nothing back here but the coffin.”
Suddenly the wagon staggered forward.
We plodded on and on, jostling along the rutted road for much longer than seemed necessary. Pamphile had been instructed to stop the cart when the soldiers were out of sight, preferably along a lonely stretch, and free me. The heat inside the coffin had concentrated. I took the awl and knocked against the side of the coffin. I didn’t know whether people might be about, but I no longer cared. I forced the end of the awl beneath the lid and attempted to pry it upward, but there was not enough room inside for my arms to lift up or press down. I rapped harder on the side. “Pamphile!” I screamed. “Stop now and free me!”
The wagon traveled on for some minutes more before she brought it to a stop.
I heard the split of wood as she pushed her awl under the lid and wrested the coffin open. There was a dazzling rush of light.
LAVI AND I SET SAIL for Judea on the fifth of Nisan.