Bright Dark Madonna

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  “But why are they all out there now? What do they want!” Then Paulina suddenly understood. “Oh! Oh, no!”

  She turned Sarah around and cradled her, as if she was about to whip out one of her breasts and nurse Sarah herself. It was not such a strange idea; all eight of my mothers had nursed me. But I didn’t want to share Sarah. I reached out my arms for her. A bit reluctantly, Paulina relinquished her.

  “There now. She’ll probably drop off if you give her a little suck.” Paulina couldn’t help instructing me. “Anyway, what are you going to do about that outrageous encampment outside your gates?”

  “I don’t know what to do, Paulina,” I admitted. “We already told them Sarah is a girl—not the son and heir they wanted—and that I am not giving her up. What else can we do? We’ll just have to wait till they get bored and go away.”

  “We will do no such thing!” Paulina countered. “It’s bad for business for one thing, and I’m an investor, don’t forget. I won’t have it. I hate to tear myself away so soon, but I am going home right now and send a message to the Centurion. We simply can’t have this sort of thing. No offense to your dear late husband, but his people can be such extremists.”

  “Paulina, no.” I mustered more force than I had before. “You are absolutely not calling in Roman troops to disperse the crowd. I forbid it.”

  “You forbid it! You forbid it.”

  “Yes, I, founding priestess of the Temple of Isis at Magdalen, forbid it! For goddess’ sake, Paulina, Jesus was killed by Roman soldiers, and his followers have already suffered persecutions at their hands and at the hands of the Temple authorities. I may be a whore and an adulteress; I may keep questionable company.” I paused to look at her meaningfully, but she didn’t get it. “But I am not going to run to the Roman army to sort out my problems with my husband’s friends.”

  “Sort out your problems.” Now she gave me a look, and its meaning was plain. “We are talking about your daughter. They are threatening your daughter.”

  I looked down at Sarah who had found peace again at my breast. She gave little quivering sighs as her body relaxed and her eyes began to close. Was there anything I wouldn’t do to protect her? Would I call out an army, if I had to? Could I kill someone with my bare hands? I thought I could. But would I give her up to save her, as the true mother had when Solomon proposed to settle the dispute by cutting the baby in half?

  I couldn’t bear to think about that.

  “There’s got to be another way, Paulina,” I heard myself saying. “She’s…she’s his daughter, too. They’re his friends, his followers….”

  “They’re fanatics.” Paulina said bluntly.

  “They won’t take her by force,” I said with more conviction than I felt. “They’ll give up eventually.”

  “You’re a prisoner here until they do.”

  “I’m in my own place. Where else would I be?” I said, and then felt cold as I remembered Miriam’s maddeningly incomplete prophecy that Sarah would not grow up here. “Anyway, they’re not blockading us.”

  “They could,” said Paulina grimly.

  I felt tired and chilled as the light waned and the evening came on. Still holding Sarah at my breast, I reached for Paulina’s hand to help me stand up.

  “Well, I see there’s no reasoning with you right now,” she sighed. “I’ve got the carriage waiting, so I’ll go home, but I’ll be back. Oh, Red! Can’t I threaten them at least? It would give me such pleasure.”

  “Not yet, Paulina. Please. Give me a chance to work things out my way.”

  Paulina harrumphed. “Well, at the very least I am going to inform Lucius. You can’t prevent pillow talk.”

  “Very well,” I tried to hide my relief and make it sound like a concession. “Tell Lucius, if you must.”

  Paulina’s husband at least had some sense—and sensitivity. His marriage to the freshly widowed and adulterously pregnant Paulina was as miraculous as loaves multiplying and paraplegics rising up to walk. I regularly thanked the gods for him.

  “Goodbye, sweeties.” Paulina kissed Sarah and me on our cheeks, and again she warned, “I’ll be back.”

  The weeks wore on, and Paulina was proving to be right. The encampment showed no signs of breaking up. The leaders did spell each other, but there were always a few of the original twelve in the forefront as the crowds waxed and waned, coming to join in the singing and prayer or to hear the preaching or to be baptized in Jesus’s name, the lake serving as a handy source of cleansing water. The holy hubbub was indeed bad for our business. People didn’t like to be exhorted or prayed over when they came seeking a whore-priestess, and our Jewish customers (yes, we used to have some) stayed away altogether. Other local merchants didn’t mind the encampment so much; they set up the first century equivalent of concession stands along the shore. And if there had been such things then, no doubt Save-the Savior’s-Scion T-shirts would have been on sale, too.

  Winter began to give way to spring, the festivals Navigium Isidis and Purim fast approached; the grape vines and fig trees sprouted their tender new leaves, and the voice of the turtledove was heard in the land. And so was the voice of our Colomen Du who babbled and cooed conversationally. She had a fetching habit of stopping in the middle of nursing to have a serious talk with my breast.

  I was so absorbed in my daughter that sometimes I was able to shut out the menace at the gates. But all of us were worried. We had quite a bit of food inside the Temple, and so far no one had stopped Judith and Timothy from going to the market or out to our fields. One day one of our intrepid regulars reported that he had overheard debates about tactics among the Followers of the Way.

  “Of course, we don’t want to starve them,” one man had said. “Just bring them to their senses. Force them to hand over the babe.”

  Another man, with more authority, Peter by the sound of it, had quashed the suggestion.

  “That was not our Master’s way. He fed people. His last instruction to me was: Feed my Sheep.”

  “Those aren’t sheep in there,” another had objected. “They’re a brood of vipers!”

  “Peter’s right!” I said to my friends when we discussed the information later. “Feed people is exactly what Jesus did. That’s what we should do. We should invite them all to Shabbat dinner.”

  My friends looked at me as if I were completely off my head.

  “But, liebling, I thought you didn’t want them anywhere near the baby. What if one of them snatched her?”

  “I didn’t say Sarah would be there. One of us will keep her hidden in the caves.”

  “Red, we invited them in before,” Dido reminded me. “In the beginning. They refused.”

  “This whole place is unclean,” said Judith. “And you are the most unclean of all.”

  The Most Unclean of All. Now there’s a title, I thought.

  “At least for another,” Judith paused and counted, “another twenty days or so.”

  Then a horrible thought struck me: They were just waiting for the time of my ritual uncleanness to pass and then they would storm the place and…I stopped myself and shook off the fear. All the more reason to disarm them now.

  “Well, we have never invited them to our Shabbat feast. How can they hate us and persecute us if invite them to be our guests?”

  “Our Roman Patroness will have a cow,” Reginus predicted. “She will call in a legion and have everyone crucified for breakfast. Don’t make Lucius’s life any more difficult.”

  We all knew Paulina had been badgering Lucius to Do Something, but he, too, was, at a loss.

  “It’s worth a try,” I decided. “I’m going out to issue the invitation now.”

  “No!” There was a collective roar, and my friends all stood up to block my way.

  In the end, Judith went out and spoke to Peter herself. He got very red and tongue-tied. James had to intervene. He went on at great length, quoting the Law and citing famous legal debates and their conclusions until Judith could stand it no longe
r and cut him short.

  “I get it, already. You don’t eat with gentiles. Funny thing. Your brother did.”

  And with that, she flounced off.

  “Face it, Mary,” she said afterwards. “They’re not going to negotiate with us. We haven’t seen even Priscilla since the baby was born. There’s a line. No one’s crossing it.”

  And then, at last, someone did.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY

  “YOU HAVE A VISITOR, liebling,” Berta announced.

  “Who?” I was in the midst of nursing Sarah after our afternoon nap in the caves.

  “Come and see. Here, let me take the little dove for now.”

  When I entered the courtyard, I recognized Mary B by the stiffness of her back. She stood beside the spring, and if I didn’t know her better, I would have said she was gazing into the water, seeking a vision. When I touched her lightly on the arm, she whirled around, and stopped still, torn, I sensed, between opposing impulses to slap me and embrace me.

  “What I want to say to you, I can’t say,” was her only greeting.

  I waited for a moment, out of respect for her intensity.

  “Mary, after what we have been through together, you can say anything to me.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and I knew she was back in the Garden of Gethsemane with me, restraining me from crying out. We had been together every step of that terrible way to the cross and beyond.

  “You left.”

  Me. She did not say it, but I heard the third silent word.

  “Yes.”

  All the reasons why, whether they were right or wrong, didn’t matter. There was only that truth between us—a bridge, a chasm.

  “I don’t think I can mend it.”

  “Mend what?” I prompted; we needed more words now. “Sit down, Mary. Talk to me.”

  Her arm was so rigid, but she yielded just a little as I drew her down beside me.

  “You, Peter, the enmity between the two people our Rabbi loved best, what the rift between you is doing to the ecclesia.”

  There was more than mere fact here. A former bard-in-training, I recognized a story beginning to take shape, and I didn’t like the plotline so far.

  “Mary,” I said sharply. “Listen to me. I am not Peter’s enemy. I am not a rival leader in the ecclesia causing a rift.”

  Finally she turned to look at me, and I realized that she had been avoiding my eyes till now, maybe to spare me their naked fury.

  “You are not a leader. That much is true. You ran away. You gave up the fight. Do you deny it?”

  “I do not deny it.” I bore her gaze. “I am sorry that I left without saying goodbye to you.”

  She waited for me to say more, but I resisted the temptation to justify myself.

  “But you are not sorry you left,” she stated more than asked.

  I looked around at Temple Magdalen, the whores beginning to wake from their naps and freshen themselves for the evening. The cats snoozed or stretched in the last patches of sun, and the old one did the same. Children ran about at games or chores. Hens and doves made their broody noises.

  “You know I belong here, Mary.” And again I felt that involuntary shiver of fear.

  “Do you?” she challenged me. “You left your home behind to follow him, the same as the rest of us. Now you’ve turned back.”

  “Turned back. Isn’t that what repent means?” I said lightly.

  “This is not a joke,” she bristled, her eyebrows coming together in one fierce line. “We are the Companions of the Way. His way. Your feet were on the path. It’s as if…it’s as if you’ve reversed your steps and gone back to Egypt after crossing the Red Sea.”

  At least she hadn’t said back to the fleshpots of Egypt, though she may have wanted to.

  “Mary, I never left Egypt, that is, I’ve never even been there,” I floundered. “What I mean to say is, I never renounced Temple Magdalen. You know that. I never became a proselyte. I just loved him; love him. If my going home to raise my child is creating a rift, I don’t know how to mend it, either.”

  “I think you do,” she stated.

  “No,” I was beginning to feel both balky and desperate. “You think I do. You’d better tell me what you mean, Mary.”

  “You could convert. You could come back to the ecclesia, help build the ecclesia. If you think it should be different, then you have an obligation to him, to yourself, to all of us to do something about it—”

  “Mary, we’ve been over and over this.”

  “And if you cannot, or will not, then think of the child. It deserves to know—

  “It?” With relief I realized I was getting angry. “Did you say it? Mary, this child is not an idea, not some passage of scripture to be debated or interpreted, this child—”

  “Is Jesus’s only child,” she cut me off. “He or she must not be exiled from Israel, from the ecclesia, from the Way her father taught us all.”

  “She’s a girl, Mary. She’s my daughter.”

  “No one is certain the child is female. No one has seen the child.”

  “Who do you mean by no one?” I demanded. “No one camped out on the other side of the wall? Would you like to change her swaddling and bring back a report to the ecclesia? Oh, but I forgot, your testimony is no good, either, unless you’ve become an honorary male.”

  That was a low blow to Mary’s sore spot, and I immediately regretted it. How was it that all of us who loved Jesus so passionately had turned on each other so swiftly. Or was it only me? Was I the only discordant note?

  “Oh, Mary, forgive me.”

  I reached over and placed my hand over hers. She did not pull away, just sat motionless for a time, her head bent so I could not see her face.

  “I suppose I must,” she sighed. “It’s nowhere near seventy times seven yet.”

  She looked at me, and we both managed a pained smile over that little bit of shared memory.

  “I did not come here to inspect the child and report back,” she said after a time. “I want you to know that. No one asked me to talk to you.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  “I needed to see you,” she said simply. “And…and I want to see his child, your child. If you’ll let me.”

  “Of course.” I stood up, and reached for Mary’s hand. “Let’s go find her.”

  We didn’t have to look far. At that moment, Ma emerged from the kitchens, holding Sarah in her favorite position, high enough so she could see everything. Surrounded by children and whores, Ma sat or should I say enthroned herself near the statue of Isis with Sarah on her lap. The two of them seemed to have made some arrangement with the sun for the light to fall on them just so. The doves began calling and the afternoon breeze picked up, washing us all in the smell of roses. Mary B and I stood with the rest of the throng and gazed at the dark luminous faces of the pair.

  “Mother of God,” Mary B was helpless to prevent that exclamation.

  “Grandmother,” I corrected. “Of goddess.”

  Then the evening hymn to Isis began. I joined in the singing, while Mary stood by awkwardly.

  It was the goddess who protected the god,

  who searched for him without tiring,

  who traveled the world lamenting,

  who did not rest until she found him,

  who made shade for him with her bright wings,

  who revived his passion, who received his seed,

  who bore the child, who raised the child,

  the goddess, alone, did all this.

  “This is much worse than I thought,” she said in such a low voice. I didn’t know if she spoke only to herself or intended me to hear.

  Suddenly she turned on her heel and bolted for the gates. I ran after her, catching hold of her arm just as she reached them.

  “Don’t, Mary,” I held onto her. “Don’t run away from me.”

  She stopped and turned slowly and deliberately to face me.
/>   “You dare to say that to me!”

  “Well, I just did say it, didn’t I? Mary, listen, it doesn’t have to be this way.”

  “What way?”

  “There doesn’t have to be enmity between us, between your god, my goddess, between the people on one side of the wall and the other. Why else do you think Jesus and I were lovers? Why do you think we got married and everyone, everyone danced at our wedding? We were all lovers then, all of us. Don’t you remember, Mary? Remember!”

  As we stood there I let my hand slip down her arm till we were holding hands, as tightly as we had on the night of Jesus’s arrest. Finally the tears overflowed her fierce angry eyes, and we held each other and wept.

  “Come and meet Colomen Du,” I said when we drew apart again.

  “Colomen who?” The Celtic name confounded her as it did everyone else.

  “Sarah,” I relented. “It’s her fussy time of day, but if you don’t mind a little squawking, you’re welcome to hold her.”

  But Sarah did not fuss in Mary’s arms, despite how stiffly Mary held her. She gazed at Mary with a grave sweetness that reminded me so much of her father, I had to look away for a moment. But Mary looked right back at Sarah, and all at once her whole face broke open into a huge helpless smile.

  Won over by Sarah, Mary B stayed to supper, and lingered late into the night, relaxed enough with food and wine to talk about something besides theology. Lazarus and Susanna still had no children, but Susanna was an excellent stepmother to the other children and had managed to become part of the household without disturbing Martha’s preeminence. Salome, the mother of the Thunder Brothers, once of Galilee and once a wandering companion, had married Simon the beekeeper and former leper (healed by Jesus; who else?) who had sheltered us all during the uproar after Lazarus’ return from the dead. All the women who had loved or followed Jesus were in Bethany now, except for Mary B and me. And of course Ma.