“I am so sorry for your loss, Nicodemus. Hannah was a generous woman.”
“All flesh is grass,” he sighed: I could hear that he still mourned. “I would ask you to marry me,” he added after a moment. “I remember you as an extraordinarily handsome and spirited woman. But I know my friend Joseph, who had a much a better suit, has already been refused.”
I felt his remark as a rebuke and an invitation to reveal more.
“How is Joseph?” I asked. “Have you seen him recently?”
“I don’t see,” he reminded me. “But last time I was with him, he seemed hale enough. He still travels much of the time. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know why he does it. No, that’s not honest. I do. He’s still hoping he’ll find you somewhere.”
I did not know what to say so I said nothing for a time.
“Why have you come back?” Nicodemus broke the silence.
I noticed that he did not ask me where I had been or why I had left.
“I had a child—” I began and found myself unable to go on.
“I know,” he said. “Mary of Bethany told me. She told me you weren’t willing to marry James or to let the ecclesia have anything to do with the child.”
“They would have taken her from me,” I said sharply. “Surely Mary knows that. How could she not? Peter camped outside the gates of Temple Magdalen for weeks.”
“But she does not know how you got away or where you went.”
“No one does,” I said. “That was the idea. To disappear.”
“They say you kidnapped the Lord’s mother,” he put in mildly with a touch of amusement.
I snorted. “What else do they say?”
“Very little, Mary of Magdala, very little. The new converts don’t know much about you at all. They have never heard you were married to Jesus.”
I made no comment. I had struck a deal with Peter, and that was that.
“You are looking for the child,” Nicodemus stated. “Why else would you be here in Jerusalem. No,” he added gently. “I haven’t seen her.”
You don’t see, I did not say. But of course, he did. He did see, all too clearly.
“Do you know where Mary is?” I asked. “I heard she went away suddenly.”
“No one knows where Mary is, except maybe her sister in Bethany,” he said. “What is it with you Marys, disappearing, reappearing, causing trouble wherever you go. No wonder people get you confused.”
“But we are nothing alike,” I objected.
“Nevertheless, you will be mistaken for each other for millennia.”
Old, sightless, he was becoming a seer. I could feel it my bones, in my goose flesh, in the hairs rising on my neck.
“Does anyone remember him?” Nicodemus asked suddenly. “Sometimes I can’t remember his face, but a feeling will come over me—something fresh, when the grain first sprouts, when the wind carries a soft rain, when the sun shines so brightly on my eyelids I can remember the color gold, I see the Beautiful Gates again. What happened to him? This ecclesia, they are building in his name…it’s all very well, but where’s that boy, that smart aleck I remember who talked back to us all?”
You could have said he was an old man rambling, but I understood, and I wept.
“I remember him, Nicodemus,” I said, and I wet my fingers with my tears and touched his eyelids.
“Have we talked all night?” asked Nicodemus. “Is the sun rising?”
“Open your eyes, Nicodemus.”
He did. You might think he would have been shocked, jubilant, or disoriented to find himself suddenly sighted again, but he had lived too long and suffered too much. Perhaps it helped that the courtyard was dusky. He pushed back my veil, and then he raised his hand and touched my cheek.
“My dear,” he said. “I see. I see.”
I walked Nicodemus back to his house, but refused his offer of hospitality and just before the gates of the city closed for the night, I struck out across the Kedron Valley for Bethany.
Night fell suddenly, as it does in that part of the world, and the stars blazed forth in the blackness, the waning moon not yet risen. It is amazing how much light stars give on a clear night. Also my feet remembered every step of the way between Jerusalem and Bethany, so I did not stumble. When I got to the fig tree Jesus had blasted and I had restored, I reached up and found figs, ripe out of season. The spring was still there, too, dark and clear as the sky. I ate and drank and rested, almost too tired to wonder at the suspension of time in this place, when so much else had changed.
I closed my eyes and in that half-waking half-dreaming state, memory felt like air flowing over my skin, permeating my body inside and out. I saw Mary B and me racing across the valley to Gethsemane to warn Jesus that the soldiers and Temple guards were looking for him. I retraced our agonizing journey back to Jerusalem, with him bound and stumbling. And more memories flooded in without any particular order: The ride across the Valley in the blazing heat with Jesus on the donkey and all of us singing Hosanna. The last days we spent together, sleeping in a cave near the olive grove. And more distant memories, sitting with Mary B and watching dawn turn the Beautiful Gates golden while in my vision the valley filled with scenes of battle and horror. At last I saw Jesus again walking toward the gates, disappearing.
Where did you go? Where did you go?
“He is here; there is nowhere else,” I heard myself speaking aloud and I came all the way awake. I got to my feet again. “Come on then. Let’s go.”
When I arrived at the house in Bethany, it was so quiet and dark I thought the household must be in bed already, even though it was not late. I went round to the kitchen courtyard and stood hesitantly before the back door, unsure of whether to knock or curl up in the yard and wait till morning.
Then I heard someone approaching. In a moment, Martha appeared, greyer and heavier as if more than flesh weighed her down, but unmistakably Martha. I pushed back my cloak and let her see my face.
“Martha,” was all I could say.
She did not answer for a moment, looking at me with such mixed emotions that they cancelled each other out.
“I told her you would come,” Martha said at last, “but she wouldn’t listen. Well, now you’re here, you might as well come in.”
Which was about as much of a welcome as I could expect from Martha.
A little while later I was sitting on a low stool in the kitchen, drinking mulled wine—Martha had decided that I was chilled from my night journey—and eating bread, cheese and olives. No matter what she felt about a guest, Martha was a thorough hostess.
“If you don’t mind, I won’t wake Lazarus,” she said when she sat down with me—something she rarely did. “Sleep is his only comfort since Susanna and the baby died. I sometimes wonder why Jesus called him forth.”
Susanna dead? Scrappy, loyal, tenacious Susanna who had finally found a good man to love? My face must have registered my dismay.
“Oh, of course. You couldn’t know. How stupid of me. It’s years ago now, but you’ve been gone a long time. She died in childbirth.”
Martha stopped abruptly, and I could tell it still pained her, that someone in her care should come to grief, bewildered her that there should be so much grief in the wake of the Bridegroom’s brief exhilarating feast. I reached out and laid my hand over hers, and she did not pull away.
“All right, then.” She neatly folded away whatever she had felt. “It is not you who should comfort me.”
I suddenly felt afraid.
“What do you mean? Martha, tell me. You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”
“Your daughter.”
She spoke those two beautiful searing words.
“Where is she, Martha? You have to tell me,” I pleaded anticipating resistance. “I am begging you in Jesus’s name.”
“Calm yourself,” she said unreasonably. “As far as we know, she’s perfectly safe and well cared for.”
“As far as you know? What do you mean?”
&
nbsp; “I am trying to tell you, if you will give me a chance. They took her, far from Jerusalem, we assume. They won’t harm her. I’m sure they won’t harm her.”
“They?” I repeated. “Who?”
“James, or not James himself, but we suspect he gave the orders and made the arrangements.”
I sat there trying to take it in: my daughter had just been kidnapped by the ecclesia. What I had always dreaded had come to pass.
“Is Mary away looking for her, then?” I clung to my last shred of hope. Mary was an elder. She would be able to guess where they had taken her.
Martha snorted. “Mary is the last person they’ll trust or tell anything. I am sure all the houses have strict orders to turn her away. She quarreled with everyone over the child. In fact, she’s been excommunicated once and for all. Mary is on her way to Galatia to find you and Miriam. I told her to wait, but she was beside herself.”
I sat stunned for a moment, unable to sift through all the shards of information. Something had shattered; that was all I knew.
“Martha, tell me everything that happened. From the beginning.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
TELL ME THE TRUTH!
HERE IS THE GIST of what I learned from Martha without all Martha’s hesitations and my outbursts, and with my own imagination making everything more vivid than Martha could or would.
Mary found Sarah in the Temple Porticoes, for she had gone to the Temple as soon as she got to Jerusalem. She was searching for her father, wanting to retrace his steps for herself, and so there she was, like him, a runaway at about the same age. But Jesus had been visiting the Temple since he was a baby. Sarah, like me, had grown up in a wild place, unaccustomed to crowds or man-made splendor. Yet she had heard about the Temple in stories, my stories. The story of her father astonishing the elders until a panicked dove settled on his head; the story of his starting a riot on behalf of the poorer Galileans who were forced to pay the jacked up prices for sacrificial animals. (I had not told her the story of her mother hurling figs at her father while he preached, or of her father saving her mother’s life when she stood before him accused of adultery. There was so much I had left unsaid.) Now she was there alone, no mother or father to protect her—or to explain anything, least of all themselves.
Much of the Jerusalem ecclesia had gathered that day, listening to James teach his version of purity and how it would lead to the fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecies. Mary’s attention was distracted by an unusual number of doves that seemed to be hovering and fluttering by one particular pillar. She looked and saw a slight boy with dark, curly hair, uncovered, and dark skin. He was so intent, so still that a dove had perched on his shoulder. She couldn’t fathom why his stillness should be so commanding, but as she gazed at him, she lost all awareness of the sound and commotion of the crowd. Then, perhaps feeling her stare, the boy turned and looked straight at her. For a moment, she could not see anything but his eyes, golden, gold itself, as if the air was changed and charged, as if she had fallen into a sea of gold.
The boy looked away and Mary came to herself again, but she resolved to follow him. When the teaching was over, and the crowd dispersed, she kept the boy in sight and realized that he in turn was keeping James in sight, but he did not approach the elder directly. At the door of the house, the boy hesitated as the others went in and Mary caught up with him.
“Are you looking for someone here?” she asked him.
He turned his gaze on her again, and some powerful memory stirred that she could not place.
“I am looking for the people who can tell me the truth about Christ Jesus.” The boy answered, simply, directly, yet something about the way he spoke took Mary’s breath away. The truth, the word struck her, the truth.
“Do your parents know you are here?” Mary asked.
“I have a heavenly father,” he said mildly.
“And what about your mother?” Mary asked.
The boy looked at her, and then looked away before she could read his face.
“I see you are not going to tell me. Well, you don’t even know who I am. Why should you trust me? Will you come inside with me all the same? My name is Mary, and Jesus was a friend of mine. Is, for he is risen, and is with us always.”
“Mary?” the boy repeated as they entered the house. “The sister of Lazarus?”
“I am,” she said slowly. “Will you tell me your name at least? And where you come from?”
“My name is Saul,” he answered. “I come from far away. I’m hungry,” he added almost in a whisper, and Mary realized the child might be about to faint.
“Of course you are. You shall have food right away.”
So Mary took Saul under her wing, fed him, found him clean clothes, and a bed in the dormitory for boys and single men. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt a reluctance to introduce him to James and the other elders. Let him find his feet first. James, however, had already noticed the newcomer and questioned Mary about him the same night.
“Who is that young boy you have welcomed into the house?” he asked after the evening meal. “And have taken into your keeping.”
Speaking with the rhythms and repetitions of the psalms was still James’s preferred style of speech.
“He says his name is Saul. He wouldn’t tell me where he came from or who his parents are. I suspect he might be in some sort of trouble, but when have the followers of the Way ever refused to welcome someone in need? You know what Jesus taught.”
Mary stopped herself, realizing that she sounded defensive on the boy’s behalf.
“Saul,” said James. “With that name I would suppose him to be a Jew and of the tribes of Abraham, although we must consider that Saul may not be his real name, if it is even so that he is in trouble. Does he indicate whether he has he received the baptism of Jesus or has he come unto this house seeking to repent and so receive?”
Mary hesitated for a moment before answering.
“He says he is seeking the people who can tell him the truth about Christ Jesus.”
“The truth?” James said with unusual brevity and both his eyebrows rose slowly. “Jesus is the life, the truth, and the way. I will speak with the boy myself tomorrow; suffer him to come unto me after morning prayers.”
“I will see what I can do,” said Mary, careful not to promise; she still felt wary and strangely protective of the boy.
She found out why the next morning when she came upon Saul with a group of other boys playing marbles in the back courtyard after breakfast.
“The Master never did have a wife!” one of the younger boys refuted Saul pugnaciously. “Who told you that?”
“Some of the elders have wives,” reasoned Saul. “They have children. Rabbis have wives. Why not Christ Jesus?”
“Because he’s different. He’s special. He’s the anointed one of the Most High. He’s not like regular boring old people. He rose from the dead, didn’t you know?”
“Of course I know that,” said Saul. “I also heard Mary of Magdala was with him when he rose.”
“Mary? You mean that old biddy who’s always trying to teach us Torah?”
Mary held back, more detached than most people would have been to this unflattering description of herself.
“The other Mary. The one with red hair. The one they call the Magdalen.”
“Never heard of her,” said the younger boy.
“Oh, wait. I know who you mean,” said an older boy. “The crazy Mary. Christ Jesus cast seven demons out of her, but they kept coming back, just as he warned about demons. Everyone knows she was a foul loud-mouth whore. No wonder the apostles—”
The boy didn’t know what hit him, the punch came so fast. He was down on the ground with Saul on top of him, still landing blows. Mary rushed in and somehow managed to pull Saul off the boy, wrapping her arms around his chest as he flailed.
“He’s demon-possessed,” screamed the boy, getting to his feet, his nose bleeding, his dignity injured. “Do you see what he
just did? I’m telling the elders. He needs to be seriously exorcised.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Mary said firmly, and keeping a grip on Saul, she led him away, his fury spent for the moment.
“You want the truth?” she hissed to Saul in a low voice. “I’m going to tell it to you. But first you’re going to tell me the truth, only not here.”
Mary held on tight to Saul, whose actual identity she was beginning to suspect. He—or as I will now say, she—must have sensed Mary’s fierceness and respected it, for she did not resist or even speak till it became apparent that Mary was heading out of Jerusalem.
“Where are we going?” Sarah asked.
“Bethany,” said Mary.
Neither one spoke again until they reached the fig tree and the spring halfway across the Kedron Valley. I had never told Sarah the story about her father blasting the fig tree and the almost fatal rift between us. But she must have sensed the strong magic in the place. She became very still, as if listening to the tree and the water. Then Sarah looked up, directing her golden gaze to the beautiful gates that were still shining in the morning sun. Mary’s last doubts vanished.
“Sarah,” said Mary, and Sarah turned to look at her. “Eat of this tree, drink of this spring, as your father and mother did before you.”
Sarah did not speak but tears welled and flowed silently down her cheeks, a gift she had inherited from Ma. Still weeping, she ate a fig, then lay down and drank for a long time from the spring.
“How did you know me?” Sarah asked when they began to walk again.
“I held you once when you were a baby,” said Mary. “Your eyes haven’t changed. Also I knew your father and your mother very well. Now you need to answer some questions. What are you doing here alone in Jerusalem? What has become of your mother and your grandmother?”
Sarah kept silent.
“If I am to help you, you must answer me,” Mary insisted. “And for mercy’s sake, child, I need to know if they’re all right, if they’re alive.”
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