The Book of Longings(7)
His pronouncement on the poor, rendered with such ease, such malice, incensed Judas, who bellowed back, “The poor have reaped only the brutality of Antipas! How are they to pay his taxes on top of Rome’s tributes, and their mandatory tithes to the Temple? They are being broken, and you and Antipas are the pestle.”
For moments there was not a sound. Then Father’s voice, barely a hiss: “Get out. Leave my house.”
Mother sucked in her breath. As uncaring as Father had been to Judas over the years, he’d never gone so far as this. Would Judas have lashed out if I hadn’t provoked his disgust earlier that day with my own words of malice? I felt sickened.
My brother’s footsteps echoed in the flickering light below, then died away.
I turned to look at Mother. Her eyes were shining with abhorrence. For as long as I’d had memory, she’d despised my father. He’d refused to allow Judas into the narrow precincts of his heart, and Mother’s revenge had been methodical and spectacular—she pretended to be barren. Meanwhile, she swallowed wormwood, wild rue, even chasteberries, known to be rare and of great price. I’d found the preventatives in the herb box Shipra kept hidden in the storeroom below the courtyard. With my own ears I’d heard the two of them discuss the wool Mother soaked in linseed oil and placed inside herself before Father visited her and of the resins with which she swabbed herself afterward.
It was said women were made for two things: beauty and procreation. Having granted Father beauty, Mother saw to it he was denied procreation, refusing him children besides me. All these years, and he’d never caught on to her deception.
At times it had crossed my thoughts that my mother might not be driven solely by vengeance, but also by her own female peculiarity—not an unbounded ambition like mine, but an aversion to children. Perhaps she feared the pain and risk of death that came with birthing them, or she abhorred the way they ravaged a woman’s body, or she resented the exhausting efforts required to care for them. Perhaps she simply didn’t like them. I couldn’t blame her for any of that. But if she feigned an inability to give birth for such reasons, why, then, did she birth me? Why was I here at all? Had her chasteberries failed to work?
The question vexed me until I reached thirteen and heard the rabbi speak of a rule that allowed a man to divorce his wife if she had not given birth in ten years, and it was as if the heavens parted and the reason for my existence toppled from God’s throne and landed at my feet. I was my mother’s safeguard. I was born to protect her from being cast out.
* * *
? ? ?
NOW MOTHER WALKED behind my father holding herself erect, her chin high, looking neither right nor left. In the sunlight, her golden coat seemed lit with a hundred flames. The air shone brighter around her than the rest of us, filled with haughtiness and beauty and the scent of sandalwood. Searching the crowded streets once more for Yaltha, then Judas, I began to repeat my secret prayer, moving my lips but making no sound. Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it . . .
The words calmed me as the city flowed past, magnificent structures that awed me each time I ventured out. Antipas had filled Sepphoris with imposing public buildings, a royal treasury, frescoed basilicas, a bathhouse, sewers, roofed sidewalks, and paved streets laid out in perfect Roman grids. Large villas like Father’s were common throughout the city, and Antipas’s palace was as rich as any kingly residence. He’d been reconstructing the city since Rome razed it all those years ago when Judas lost his parents, and what had risen from the ashes was a wealthy metropolis that rivaled any but Jerusalem.
Lately, Antipas had begun construction on a Roman amphitheater on the northern slope of the city that would seat four thousand people. Father himself had come up with the idea as a way for Antipas to impress the emperor Tiberius. Judas said it was just another way to shove Rome down our throats. Father, however, wasn’t finished with his scheming. He advised Antipas to mint his own coins, but break from Roman custom by leaving off his image and replacing it with a menorah. The ingenious gesture gave Antipas the appearance of reverencing the same Mosaic law I’d broken earlier that morning. The people called Herod Antipas the Fox, but my father was the slyer one.
Was I like him, as Judas had implied?
As the market came into sight, the crowd thickened. We plowed past clusters of men—members of court, scribes, government officials, and priests. Children hauled sheaves of herbs, barley, and wheat, armloads of onions, doves in stick cages. Women bore wares on their heads with bewildering steadiness—jars of oil, baskets of late-harvest olives, bolts of cloth, stone pitchers, even three-legged tables, whatever they could sell, all the while greeting one another, “Shelama, shelama.” I never saw these women without envy for how they came and went freely without the bondage of a chaperone. Surely peasantry was not all bad.
Inside the basilica, the commotion intensified along with the airless heat. I began to sweat inside my elaborate coat. I swept my eyes over the cavernous room, over row after row of stalls and market carts. There was an odor of sweat, charcoal, skewered meat, and the putrid salted fish from Magdala. I pushed the back of my hand to my nostrils to lessen the stench and felt the soldier who’d tromped behind us nudge me forward.
Up ahead, my mother stopped midway along a row of stalls that sold goods from the silk route—Chinese paper, silks, and spices. She idly inspected an azure cloth while my father continued on to the row’s end, where he lingered, his eyes roaming the multitudes.