CHAPTER FOUR
YOCHANON
They smelled it before they saw it, and hearts lightened.
“It doesn’t look as big as it used to,” Magdalene commented as she pulled down her veil.
Spreading out from a great height they beheld the walks and towers of Sepphoris, but they were done with busy cities and all wished to avoid it, looking rather to the spread of villages surrounding it.
“We can walk around it, through quieter neighborhoods,” said Jude who had become quieter.
When Magdalene asked him why he was so quiet, he said, “Because I should have gone with Jesus. I told myself I was tired. I told myself I just wanted to see home. I even said I didn’t much like that Judas, but the truth is I was afraid. And now I think, if ever I have the change to travel again, if ever Jesus goes somewhere and I can follow, then I will.”
But now they walked down the sloping land, through the olive trees in the warmth of midday with the distant sounds of Sepphoris, and they were not only between the city and the country, but between the terraced field of farmers, and the hilly country of those who kept the sheep, Cain and Abel, the ancient enemy.
“But we were the ancient enemy” John said “We were shepherds, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Even Moses and David. Looking for a permanent home. It was King Ahab who was the farmer.”
Evil Ahab who had plotted for Naboth’s vineyard all so he could have a garden. It was in the Garden Adam had heeded Eve and the whole world had fallen. Gardeners and growers just couldn’t be trusted. God took a grain offering, but at the Temple what they really wanted was meat. What did it all mean? Mary thought, I am neither grower nor herder. What’s it mean indeed, but by then they were already approaching Nazareth.
With Mount Tabor to the east and Nain and the Samaritan border a little south, a day southwest of the inland sea of Galilee, Nazareth was larger than one immediately thought. It spread across a shelf in view of Sepphoris, and at a point dropped to a cliff. As the first of the stars appeared grey white in the dusky sky, they ceased wandering on the spidery streets and arrived at the home of Mary Widow of Joseph.
The house of his Aunt Mary was plain stone, a simple series of squares, though the stonework was finer than the surrounding homes, for this was the house of masons. Joseph and his wife had moved into this house to care for Mary’s aging father and her mother long ago and here, in this old house, Joseph had raised his family and cared for his mother by marriage and his wife’s sister until she had wed Zebeddee and moved to Capernaum. Attached to the house was the carpentry shop and a room for apprentices, these all surrounding a courtyard. The roof was a series of canopies where the family spent much of their time, looking over the valley.
Mary and Joseph had been fruitful to the tune of four other sons and two daughters. Joseph and his own brothers had traveled to Sepphoris to work on the houses and palaces of the city which had been rebuild after revolution destroyed it. They would rise early in the morning, though the women rose earlier to prepare their food, and they would return exhausted, late at night, and the women wait up later, cleaning when they at last took to bed.
But in better times, when Joseph did not travel into the city, and when there was plenty of work to do here, he and his sons and brothers, seeing there were far too many of them in so small a house, built two others rooms onto the old house where the boys came and went as they pleased, and so the home of the widow Mary was a sprawling place and she and her mother rose to serve the returned travelers quickly.
“Jesus is not with you,” Mary said.
Magdalene saw the look in her face, and it was a strange one. For while she was clearly troubled, Magdalene sensed that she was not entirely surprised.
“The airs of the world did him good,” Jude said. “Having explored a little, he had to explore more.”
“That is just like him,” said his younger brother Joses, but his mother ignored it and continued eating. Touches of red were in Mary’s hair where she had applied henna to it, but she was still young and noble in her looks. In the house her hair was bare, but when she went into the market she wore a thin veil over her head of gossamer material and there were copper rings on her fingers so that to John, his aunt resembled the queens of old.
“I half hoped they would,” Mary said with a sigh. “And now who would have fruit?”
While they talked of their travels… leaving some things out, and John sensibly gave no mention of Judas, Joses sat back and lit his clay pipe, touching the air with the pungent smell of burning grasses, and old Chana sipped her wine while Magdalene described the night markets of Sidon.
“You all might have gone to Jerusalem,” old Chana said. “A Jew is not safe in the world with all of its pagan devices.”
“Grandmother,” John said. “A Jew is like any other man and cannot hide behind walls making the world smaller.”
“Fie!” Chana waved him off.
“Jerusalem is a fine city and the city of my childhood. I was not always this thing you see before you.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Old, a shell of a woman, sitting in the Galilee far from the palaces of power. Joachim married me there and I wept to leave it, and for years we had no children. I knew I was cursed of God, and I was nearly past childbearing when I received a gift.”
Mary raised an eyebrow and looked on her mother with something Magdalene thought was irony.
“One day, Joachim came into the house and said that a man, a messenger of God had come to him and said that my womb would be open, that I would bear a child, a daughter, and whoever heard of the Lord sending one of his messengers to announce a girl child! But this one did. And in nine passes of the moon… There she was, so beautiful. Was there any more beautiful? And I swore, like my namesake of old, to dedicate my child to service in the temple. God heard and rewarded me, and soon after your mother was conceived,” Chana said to John, “to comfort me in the loss of my firstborn. Mary, just a tender babe, was sent to Jerusalem.”
“Mother, I was ten,” Mary said. “And I was sent to the school of maidens where the worst thing that would have happened to me was marrying into one of the priestly families.”
“Shush, let me tell the tale.”
“A tale indeed.”
“The purple tapestry over the Holy of Holies—that which no woman may see—covered by a veil woven by women. Girls, truly. Mary worked on it in those days before she was returned to us full of light and radiance, clearly meant for God alone. Well, when your father came along,” Chana said to Joses, “I was surprised, for your mother was smitten and so was he, and I had sworn she would not be smitten by any man, but only by God. She was… different. The angel had said so. I wondered if Joachim had been wrong. And then it happened. That day… After she and Joseph had sealed things, that was the day when—”
“That’s enough, Mother,” Mary cut in, quiet, smooth, but irresistible.
“The star!” Chana said, her voice almost a whisper. “The Star… in your mouth. The cherry tree! Elizabeth…. And John. How can you say, 'enough'?”
Mary placed a long hand over her mother’s and squeezed it.
“And yet I do say enough,” she said.
And there was an end to it.
“I don’t blame him you know?” Magdalene said when she and Mary sat on the roof in the night and all had gone to sleep.
“If I were a man, I would have kept traveling too.”
Mary said, “I half hoped and half feared he would.
“There was a time when every night I dreamed of a bird, like a hawk or like a dove, yes it’s strange, and it was made of white flame. It flew all through the house disturbing us, and every time I saw my son I thought, “Why are you here? Time for you go.” And I thought, “Please never leave.” All at once.
“And then his father died, and the burning light all around him dimmed, and there was a part of me comforted. A part that said he will marry, marry even you, settle here, give me grandchildren, other grandchildren, his children. And even as I thought that a fire in my head said that was not his story. I loved him, wanted to hold him to me, but at the same time I wished to take a broom and chase him out of the house and into the world. And now my heart is broken, but my soul is relieved.”
Mary shook her head.
“I cannot make sense of it.”
“We traveled the road from Sidon to Caeserea, and on the last night, before we turned inland, she rose up, the Woman of the Sea, the one I saw only once on the shores of the Galilee. Greater than I’d ever seen her, and stars were in her hair.”
“Of old they called her Asherah of the Sea,” Mary said. “She was the wife of God, and God. She was our mother and the priests, jealous that women had their own ways, tried to make us forget her.”
“She told me she was in all places,” Magdalene said.
“At first her voice was the rushing of waves, and I knew not what it meant. But then, in the passing day, I began to understand. She said I must journey on, so I came back here with John and Jude and James. But then I will become lonely. I will travel south down the Jordan. I will travel till I reach the place where Yochanon spreads his word.”
Mary nodded.
“Men have been saying for a century now that the Messiah is coming,” Mary said, “the judgment, and that the heavens will open up and the sun will turn black and the moon to blood, that the terrible day of the Lord comes. They have said it again and again.”
“But what do you think?”
“Over thirty years ago my cousin Elizabeth, dried up so men said, grew fruitful, ripe, and brought forth John. And she prophesied and I prophesied, and my mother says I was announced by God. Of the things which happened when Yehoshana was born I never speak, but it is as if all this time men have shouted, God has shouted and the Goddess has said nothing. But now women speak and out of woman comes all things. The Jordan is a woman. The river is the Mother of All. When you go there you will find the birth of the New World.”
The next morning, Magdalene rose and went to the well, back and forth and back and forth before the sun rose. Water was needed for the house, and why should Mary and Chana break their backs getting it? She went to the little stream and washed herself in the shadow of shrubs, thinking of baptism, of the temple of Eshmun and being born again. The whole world was on its way to being born again and she longed to be a part of it. She had already eaten by the time John rose, and she said, “We have a journey to make, and I am eager for it to be ended.”
“You are like a bride rushing to her wedding day!” John laughed merrily.
“A pregnant bride!” Joses sniggered, and his mother pinched him.
“I am a pregnant bride!” Magdalene declared, “and what I am about to bear, who can say?”
Mary looked on Magdalene and saw what she’d always seen. It was not like looking on a daughter, no, not exactly, for she had daughters and they were little enough like Magdalene, but like looking on a strange mirror image, a second self.
Once, pregnant, I traveled quickly to the south like you, she thought. Only it is as if I have been rpegnant these last thirty years and still I am waiting for this child to be born.
There was a caravan bound for Scythopolis, and it had set out from Sepphoris just yesterday, but Magdalene imagined that she had John could catch up with it before the day was over, and they would all travel through Samaria together. Israel was a land of mountains and hills, staggered terraces amongst which farmers made their living, and Magdalene marveled that this was the land that out of all lands God had given to his people. By the water, following the Jordan, was the flattest and safest course, and by the time the sun stood three hours in the sky, they were headed down the valley, out of Nazareth and to the river’s green banks. Around noon they heard the distant tramping feet of Romans coming from the south, and John tugged at Magdalene’s sleeves.
“Indeed,” the woman in white murmured, and they left the road, going down into the rushes. One could never tell what would happen, but with Romans it was better to not be seen at all.
Magdalene thought of men she’d heard praying for a Messiah, longing for the day of the Christ. Did anyone actually pray for that? Not even her, hidden in these bushes, expected such a one to come, she thought as the troops marched by, row after precise row.
“Well, then what?” a voice spoke to her? “What is it you are hoping for?”
And Magdalene replied to the voice:
“I cannot even say.”
She knew men who spoke with great dissatisfaction in the way things were in this world, and how could they not? Every flash of Roman power was an assault, an emasculation of men who wished power for themselves. The taxation, the extortion, being impressed into service, the executions, lines and lines of the crucified weighed on them, and men called out for an end to this life. But what was that to a woman, who rose to haul jugs of water back and forth back and forth from a well, or work the pedal of the water wheel till her hips were exhausted? What was this to a woman who bled from her girlhood with every turn of the moon and was castigated for it though it created the human race, who lay on her back and bore men who would belittle her and women who would know only more pain? What was Rome to the widow on her last coin, the mother with a dead son, the prostitute with her reputation pumped out of her by the loins of hypocritical men? So, as the last of the soldiers marched past, and the tramping of their feet faded, she prayed not for the end of this humiliating world, but for the birth of a new one just on the other side of her breath, waiting for her, its appearance like what she could not say.
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