YOCHANON CONTINUED
Bethany was a city set on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives and west of that great hill made of hills and across a deep valley rose the the white and yellow limestone houses, palaces, walls and castles of Jerusalem. To Marta it looked as if God, mistaking the land for butter, had sliced the top of a hill off to spread on his celestial toast. Above a stand of old olive trees, blown by a south east wind, rose one of the finer houses, one might say the finest house, of blue grey stone touched by with elegant bevilled windows and, rather than simply a series of canopies on the roof, a series of actual rooms surrounded by a parapet for a second story. These, it was said, were made by Hismarian, Mary and Marta’s grandmother, who had been born of a priestly family, the Oniads to be exact, and educated in Alexandria. To console her for leaving her Egyptian home, her husband, Pharsaelos, had made the house far more luxurious than it had been.
Also, to make Hismarian happy, hr had filled the house with expensive scrolls and build one of the few libraries outside of the synagogue. He had filled her chests with gold and silver, rings with thick stone jewels, mother of pearl combs and unguents to preserve the skin, crushed pearls, honey, myrrh and turmeric. The merchants arrived in Bethany before they arrived in the city itself, and from them Hismarian had known every perfume. Grandmother had been, even in great age, beautiful. Bangles jangled from her artful ears and she wore veils of sheer silk, just barely topping her elaborately piled hair. Men, Jew, Greek and Roman, fell before her.
“Such is the power given to women,” she would tell Marta as the girl sat watching her grandmother take one ring off after the other, or apply the cold creams that removed make up and softened the skin. “And such is your power. If you should use it.”
Of course these skills extended to the kitchen and, yes, her grandmother assured her, the bedroom as well, though these were lessons for before the wedding and not to be spoken of to little girls. Marta was an apt pupil, the flower of Bethany and well on her way to being wed to a member of one of the other priestly houses, Abijah, by the time she was fourteen.
Tonight, Marta left the series of roof rooms and walked the top of the house, looking over the land. To the west, on the other side of the Mount of Olives, stretched the Great City itself. It was always there, always a comfort, and all around it rose, like a ring, the constant hills of Judea, all of them dotted with olives and cypresses and the moving white cloudlets of sheep and, above all, towns, nets of towns with stone and plaster houses: Bethphage, Ain Karem, some high up as if lifting their skirts from the rabble of Jerusalem, and some spreading all the way to the valley, nearly touching the City. And in between all of these places, and even chasing up the gentle summit of Mount Olivet, that place which the prophet said would be cleft in two, were clumps of houses, farms, small villages. Here, one was never alone, and yet, privacy was easy to be found. For a moment Marta had the profound hope that nothing would ever change.
She had been fated to marry a man named Yochanon, and in the days before the marriage, Marta’s dreams had been filled with fire and wind. When asked to describe the young priest, all of her thoughts were fire. Handsome, he was too wild eyed to be truly beautiful to her. Kind, his thoughts seemed to be away from her, as if he was looking somewhere else. Still he was in a passion for her. His breath was always hot. As a boy. he had been like a furnace, and she glowed under his care. The night of the wedding he’d had several cousins from the north visit, and she’d had family from Egypt and Babalon. After they had drunk and ate all through the day, her grandmother and mother led her to Hismarian’s wedding chamber where she had first lain with their grandfather years before. The dark night seemed lit with his passion as Yochanon fucked her. Long into the morning the fucking had lasted, and she had cried out, first with burning pain, and then with a pleasure she had never known.
Under the heat of Yochanon’s love, she had glowed four years. But in the third year the dreams came to both of them, and he wept long into the night. Then, one morning, he left. He went into the desert and she seemed unaffected, not like a woman who had been rejected, but perfectly serene.
“He said he would. We agreed to it.”
“Find him!” her father had raged at last, after he’d seen how calm his daughter was, how, apparently an arrangement had been made, and John’s strange family would take care of her.
“At least get a bill of divorce so you can marry again.”
“But I am wed,” Marta had said with firmness. “And I will marry no more.”
However angry her father had been about it, he was dead within the year, and then in a few more years, Mother and Grandmother were gone as well. By the time she was twenty-five, Marta was the mistress of the House in Bethany, and though her brother Eliezar on paper and in law controlled their mercantile business, he had always been in Father’s shadow, and merchants, Jewish, Greek and Arab, learned to do business with the veiled and ringed Widow of Bethany who spoke to them from behind a grille in the company of her brother. The Widow they called her, for what else could you be when your husband had died and gone into the desert to become something else, but you were still in the flesh, and still here?
Presently, all across the valley, little lights began to burn, lamps in the windows and on the rooftops calling to the evening, torches blooming out in the fields where shepherds kept their sheep, and lines of torches in the distance where traveling trains of camels and onagers came, at last, to an end or at least a rest in Jerusalem. She lifted her hands and chanted the evening psalm
Many, Lord, are asking,
“Who will bring us prosperity?”
Let the light of your face shine on us.
Fill my heart with joy
when their grain and new wine abound.
In peace I will lie down and sleep,
for you alone, Lord,
make me dwell in safety.”
“Mistress,” Sara said, coming up the steps, “it’s time for the evening meal.”
Marta nodded.
“Thank you, Sara.”
The girl’s footsteps faded, and Marta looked again at what she thought she had just barely seen below. A traveler, all in white, rapidly approaching the gate out of the outer courtyard. She frowned, then wrapping her mantle about her, set down the stairs to tell Sara to set another place.
“It’s good of you to finally make an appearance,” Marta said, as she pushed the silver tray stacked high with breads across the carpet to Magdalene. She ladled soup from the tureen and passed her a cup of that as well.
“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not,” her sister said.
“Neither can I,” Marta admitted, and raised her cup of wine.
“The important thing is that our Mary is back,” Lazaros said. “And truthfully, I’ve only just gotten back myself.”
“Nonsense,” Marta said to her younger brother. “You’ve been back for weeks.”
“I am only here a little while myself,” Magdalene said. “I could not stay gone and not let you know where I was. But I must go back.”
“Go back where?” Marta tried to keep the impatience from her voice.
“Sister,” Mary said, “when I heard of what was happening by the Jordan, the baptisms, the… all of it. I had to see it.”
“Yochanon,” Marta said, flatly.
“Yes,” Mary said.
There was a long silence and Sara, who sat down last, looked to Lazaros, but he only ducked his eyes.
“I told him I was coming to see you,” Mary said.
Marta said nothing.
“He wished you well.”
“That is….” Marta searched for a word, “something.”
After he had left, Yochanon’s family, had continued to pay her allowance as if she were a rich wife, for she was not divorced from him, and they were not poor. His parents had lived well, but strangely, divorced from their wealth with threadbare furniture and bare feet, visionaries and dreamers, and it had been the other members of Zechariah’s family who had advised Marta to remarry. But Elizabeth, who always had the final word, said “leave her alone. She is his wife. His wife she shall remain.”
“And you have gone out there?” Lazarus said, trying to hide his curiosity.
“John and I. And there are others.”
“Oh… What a life it must be!”
“It’s a whole other world,” Mary said.
“It’s less than a day away,” Marta murmured.
“One doesn’t preclude the other,” said her sister.
Oh, Mary was nothing like her, or like their grandmother. Mary took after Isca, their own mother, who had been raised in the girl’s Temple school during the time of Herod. She had been one of those girls who had woven the great purple veil over the Holy of Holies, and though her family was of some priestly rank, it was low and her main claim was descent from the ancient House of David. Their father had loved Isca, but Hismarian was confounded by the girl who ran about barefoot, wore shapeless shifts and barely combed her long hair. Jewelry was lost on her, and her laughter was loud. She was from a trading family too, and had taken the children as far as the south of Gaul when they were young. She could find little in common with Marta because—and Marta admitted this now—she had rejected her mother, but she and Mary had been so alike, and the day Isca had been buried, Mary—Marta’s strange younger sister—had set her face for the north and traveled to Galilee.
“I blame that whole strange family for this,” Marta said to Sara as they cleaned the dishes and Magdalene and Lazaros sat laughing in the great room.
Sara said nothing. These things were not her concern.
“Had she never met them, she would not be like this.”
Sara could not imagine the Lady Magdalene being like anything else, but that was not for her to say.
Recall that Yochanon, that husband of hers whom she was now quite happy to distance herself from, had a strange family and a most strange mother. Elizabeth and Isca, though years apart, were well met, for Elizabeth was also of one of those lines, part priestly, part descended from David. Of such folk the very pious declared the Messiah would be born. At any rate, Elizabeth’s bizarre family had been there. Well, not bizarre, but the women were. Isca had been friends with one of them, another Mary, and she was very much like her mother. They’d woven the tapestry and been girls together. This Mary looked like the queen of May. She had little jewelry and was strangely girl like despite her troop of children and a very handsome husband.
But there had been something else about her, almost witchlike, or like a prophetess of old, and it had been about her son as well. The boy called…. She had forgotten his name. Even at her wedding, Marta had found this Mary of Nazareth maddeningly out of place. She’d had the nerve to insist that Isca put her younger daughter in the Temple school. During the years of the marriage, those cousins had come down and Mary had declared, “Isca, she is like a tower, see how tall and straight she is, like something out of the old songs!”
And so they had called her Migdola or Magdala, Magdalene. And the name had stuck.
Grandmother had gifted her with the major upstairs room on her wedding night, and until her death, Hismarian had slept downbelow. Tonight Marta rose and went out onto the roof. The evening was warm and she could hear the the trumpets, faint from over Mount Olivet and across the valley, blowing from the Temple.
“Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; And the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice,” she maurmured, and wrapping a dressing gown about herself, she went downstairs, thick dark hair hanging behind her.
In the little curio room she found her sister walking about, contemplating the old treasures of the house.
Magdalene turned to her sister and smiled, wistfully, lifting a a white stone box. A jar was in it and their grandmother had treasured it, full of spikenard from Egypt. She’d had an old bottle just like it, and whenever it was opened the smell filled the entire house. Beside it was a white stone cup with a deep red stone in it, and Magdalene said, “I always loved these.”
“They’re yours, you know?” Marta said. “Everything here is yours.”
“These were for my wedding day.”
“I think we can count on neither of us having any more wedding days,” Marta said.
“You will think me so foolish—doubtless you think me foolish now—if I say that I would save both of these things, this cup, this box, whatever was for me—for my wedding day, because I believe it is coming. Only… I will be wed to no man.”
“You say the strangest things,” Marta marveled.
“Yes, yes I know,” Mary the Magdalene said.
“And what if I were to tell you,” for a moment she lifted the white stone cup, “that my wedding day will not be for me alone?”
Marta nodded, and she felt the weight of her hair, of her own beauty. Here, at this moment, she and Mary were not unalike, unadorned, beautiful, married to something that could not be touched, alone, virgins not virgins. She wanted to say, quite suddenly, “I need you Mary. Sister, I need you here.”
She said, “Will you be gone terribly long?”
Mary was not lacking in perception. She put down the cup, gently, and came to her sister, kissing her.
“As you said, the river is less than a day away.”
In the absence of her sister, Marta had other things to think about. The house of Eliezar was one of those few houses respected if not loved by everyone. Like most priestly families had once been, they were Saducees, of that old ruling class who frowned about what were considered to be the additions, the superstitions and the high handed teachings of the Pharisess. A hundred years ago the Pharisees had been a group just barely worthy of notice, then the Hasmonean kings had ruthlessly put them down. It was in this time that the House of Jannaeus became Pharisees, Great-Great Grandfather changing his very Greek name of Jason to Iannai, and staying up all night with rabbis, reading the secret books of Enoch, fasting and praying for vision.
Because of this, the House of Jannaeus had a foot in both the world of the lawyers and Pharisees and that of the priests and Levites and only a few nights ago, Simon had paid a visit along with Joseph from Arimathea and a younger fellow called Nicodemus whom Marta considered, thinking, if I weren’t past marriage, then maybe… At any road, they were all reclining on couches arguing back and forth about John, and Nicodemus said, “Well, Caiaphas wants us to listen to him and report back.”
“I don’t see why that silly man—”
“He’s the High Priest.”
“He’s the High Priest appointed by Rome, not by God, and not with half the wit of his father-in-law.”
“I will not argue the wits or the merits of Joseph Caiaphas,” Joseph of Arimathea said, “but we have been ordered by the Sanhedrin to see what this man is about, so on the morrow, let us be off.”
“Friend Lazaros, you should come as well,” Nicodemos said, but Lazaros said: “No, I will stay. The three of you seem enough.”
“Very well,” said Simon, the oldest of them said, joints creaking a little as he prepared to rise.
Behind the grille, in her listening room, Martha knew Lazaros did not go because Lazarus did not want to bring his family to attention. Few remembered Marta was married to the Baptist, and if Caiaphas was sending men to have Yochanon investigated, then he was close to being in danger.
The friends stayed at Simon’s house that night, and when Simon woke in the morning he was most unduly surprised to see Shammai, Joshua, Lev and other black robed and humorless men from Jerusalem surrounding them.
“Are you ready?” they demanded.
“Ready for what?”
“To inquire of the Baptist.”
Simon did not need to be told Caiaphas did not trust the Pharisees. He needed his own loyal Saducees to report. Simon briefly considered hitting them with his wife’s rolling pin, and then decided against it, and they made their stony way to the Jordan.
It was this woebegone line Marta of Bethany, daughter of Emil and Isca, watched depart east, over the valley of tombs, shaking her head.
In these last difficult days I am humbled and overwhelmed by your kindness and your well wishes and encouragement. I promise you, as you have supported me, I will continue to provide, as best I can, the little relief and pleasure I can give through this, my life's work, of telling stories. God bless.
