Song of the Magdalene

by Donna Jo Napoli

  I scrambled to my knees and leaned over Abraham, hardly daring to believe what he’d just said. “Would you?” He had scrolls with all the songs I yearned to know. He could do what he said. “Would you teach me?”

  He smiled. “I’ll do more than that. I’ll teach you to read. Then you can read the songs whenever you like. You won’t have to memorize them.”

  I sat back on my heels, stunned, my mouth open, my whole body tense. No women in our village read, not even the richest. There was no need to. The educated men kept the Torah and all the holy scriptures. They told the laborers and the servants and the women all that was necessary to know.

  But I had heard of women elsewhere reading. Once I listened when Father came back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He told Abraham of a woman scholar and teacher, whom people flocked to, just like they used to flock to the woman Huldah of centuries before. I had listened with wonder, but nothing more. I had never even dreamed of reading.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Yes,” I breathed. “Oh, yes.”

  “Then we will come here every day to this very valley and you will introduce me to the plants of every season, each of them by name, and I will teach you to read.”

  As we went home, I didn’t speak. My head spun. The world kept changing. A few months ago, I was one person, the person I had always been, the person I felt sure I would always be. Then the fit came, and I became the person who hid in the valley all day alone. And now I was different again — now I was going to learn to read.

  Me. Miriam. A girl child from Magdala. A girl child who would read.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I learned quickly. Partly because I was eager, but mostly because Abraham was a good teacher. Where I wanted immediate results and grew quickly frustrated, he was patient and ever encouraging, saying it would all come in good time. No one could have been a better teacher than Abraham.

  I called him peh rabboni — teaching mouth — an unlovely and odd name, but one that suited him, for he was like the mouth of a rabbi, my own rabbi, my teacher and master. He liked it when I called him that.

  We read together daily, always the songs, and always in private. Abraham said our reading wasn’t secret, only private, just between us. He offered to help me read the Torah. We were the only family I knew of that had a Torah at home. I never held it. Indeed, I had touched it on occasion, when I’d unroll it a bit for Abraham. But I never bore it in my hands. The idea made me anxious. Hannah never carried it either. It was always Father who placed the Torah before Abraham’s hungry eyes.

  So when Abraham spoke of the Torah, when he offered to teach me directly from the holy words, I shook my head and held out the scroll of songs instead. Not the Song of Miriam or the Song of Deborah, songs of women who were distant from me, whose words didn’t stir the life within me, but the open passion of the Song of Solomon, the song called rightly the Song of Songs. Songs were what had made me dance when I was innocent, before my first fit. Songs were what made me still feel alive now. I could almost believe my breath was pure when it was transformed in a song.

  As time went on, I knew I could unroll the Song of Songs whenever I wanted and read it at will. Yet I still worked to memorize the songs. If I knew a song with my eyes closed, it lived inside me. When I was at home, I padded in bare feet around the room, repeating the glorious words in a whisper to the bowls and table and stools, to the pillows and bed mats.

  Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?

  Who asked this question? And of whom was it asked? Hannah had begun to say that I was turning beautiful. She echoed Father. I wondered if anyone would ever consider me the fairest among women.

  How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!

  I wore shoes — at least, in the presence of all but our household I did — and sometimes, when I thought of how much Father and I had and how little Hannah and Abraham had, I did feel like a prince’s daughter. Hannah promised that soon, very soon, she would weave me proper dresses. Hannah was as skilled a weaver as anyone. No shop in town carried better than Hannah could make herself. I fingered the soft, familiar cloth of my shift, which by now had faded to peachy pink. Shifts were for peasants and children. I was not a peasant and soon I would no longer be a child.

  I sang even in my dreams and in those dreams I wore the womanly dresses Hannah had made for me and basked in the light of love from my beloved. But I never saw my beloved in my dreams. I never touched his hand. I never breathed his scent. I only heard his voice. A thin, keen voice that sang whatever I sang.

  And, thus, my reading lessons and my knowledge of the canticles progressed, just as Abraham’s knowledge of nature progressed. My only regret in these months was that Abraham was tone-deaf. He had heard all the canticles sung many times. Daniel used to take him regularly to the house of prayer, never failing to be there when the lesser clergy, the Levites, passed through town and sang. Abraham told me all about it. And Abraham had even heard the songs that belonged in the taverns. Someone had apparently taken him there, too. Abraham wouldn’t tell me who. No one could ever accuse Abraham of being indiscreet. It was funny to me now that I had ever worried that Abraham might tell people if he saw me have a fit. He didn’t talk to most people. He said they didn’t care what he had to say, that most of them thought he was an idiot. I knew there was no idiocy in Abraham. And I knew, just as well, that there was not one note of musicality in him. Abraham had definitely heard all these songs, yet he couldn’t teach me a single tune. And I desperately wanted to sing the songs the way they were meant to be sung. There were a couple I had heard at wedding festivities. But weddings were infrequent in a town so small as Magdala, and my memory didn’t serve me well.

  I tried guessing, singing first one way, then another, asking Abraham which sounded most right to him. But he laughed away my questions. Soon I stopped guessing because I knew his stone ear embarrassed him. Perhaps he wondered, as I did, whether it was connected to his paralysis.

  So we passed the long, hot, dry months in songs, coming home to dine on the fruits and nuts we gathered. Abraham had always loved fruits and nuts. When he felt poorly and ate little, Hannah had the habit of coaxing his flickering appetite with fruits and nuts and, oh yes, honey — he sucked it right from the comb. But now his hunger for those foods was even stronger, augmented by the joy of seeing them growing, of telling me which to harvest for him.

  One late afternoon as we were coming home from the valley, Abraham called out, “Pomegranates, Miriam.”

  I pushed on. There were no pomegranate trees around here. Shouldn’t I have known? I was the one Mother taught to collect the bark for dye, after all.

  “Stop.”

  I stopped the cart unwillingly. Father would be home soon, and we needed to beat him there. I walked around the cart and faced Abraham, ready to talk sense into him, when I saw the sure light in his eyes. I followed their gaze past the familiar bushes to a tree I hadn’t noticed before, laden with fruit, the first pomegranates of the year. I pushed the cart hurriedly to it, then reached for a ripe one. It fell into my hand with the slightest tap.

  “It’s trying to jump to you, Abraham.” I laughed. “It can’t wait for me to take it home and peel it.”

  “Here.” Abraham opened and closed the fingers of his right hand rapidly. “Let me hold it.”

  I put the smooth, thick-skinned ball in his hand and he turned it over and over. It was the perfect size for his fist. He turned it over so many times that it glistened with the oils of his skin. “Do you want me to peel it,” I asked, “or do you intend to wear it away to the flesh?”

  Abraham grinned. “Let’s go home. Fast.”

  When we passed through the door, Hannah was out. I washed my hands and Abraham’s, and we offered our thanks to the Creator. Then I fed him pomegranate, seed by seed. The juices ran down his pointed chin. I patted them away with a soft cloth.

  “Stop.” Abraham smiled with reddened teeth. “There won’t be a
ny left for you.”

  “We can pick more tomorrow.” I pressed my lips together in satisfaction. “It’s more fun to see how much you enjoy them.”

  “They’re too wonderful to miss. I insist.”

  I loosened a seed and held it ready before my mouth. Plump, translucent. Abraham was right: They were too good to miss.

  Suddenly Abraham jerked out his hand, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me toward him. He took the seed from my hand. “Come to me, Miriam.” One by one, slowly and with great effort, he fed me the rest of the pomegranate.

  His fingers were stained red for days afterward, as were mine.

  Winter passed in whispered words and songs. A new spring came, and between tending the kitchen garden and reading with Abraham, I was almost entirely happy. Almost entirely satisfied. We wandered away the spring and summer and fall, the wheels of the cart growing thin, the soles of my feet growing calloused. We were as one.

  It was well into the next winter before I had my second fit. I was close to twelve at that point and I felt older and wiser. The fit more than a year and a half before seemed so distant that sometimes I wondered if it had been the product of my child’s imagination. The young woman I was now wouldn’t have such flights of fancy. The young woman I was now walked the solid earth and parted the little clouds of breath that preceded her down the street. She knew she was full of life.

  I was with Abraham when it came. Naturally. We had not gone to the valley that day because of the qadim, the cutting dry east wind. It had come overnight and left the air clear as crystal and made the temperature plummet. The frozen bushes glittered; the trees reached toward the earth with icicle fingers.

  Hannah was out when the fit came. At the well, of course, for there was nowhere else she ever went without Abraham other than the house of prayer, unless he was off with me in the valley. We were sitting by the fire. I loved the sort of day that justified a fire. Many of our neighbors had no fireplace inside their homes, but instead contented themselves with sitting around an open-air fire in their cooking lean-to. I was grateful for the luxury of our fireplace. The air smelled nutty, for we were burning the dead branches of pistachio trees.

  I threw a log on, cheerful and unwary. Perhaps as cheerful as I had been that day in the valley when I sang of fawns, though never as light-hearted. Still, my body was infused with the intoxicating breath of the fire.

  As the log left my hand, the bright light came; the flame of the fire split into a thousand sparks. The sweet smell of pistachio turned foul. A piercing scream cut the air. I wanted to shout. But no words came. It was as though a sheepskin had been placed over my face and I’d never breathe free again. Pain seared through my hand. My body was rock. Then I was pushed on my side.

  In the instant that these things happened, my thoughts raced. My last fit had been no product of a child’s feckless mind. A second demon had joined the first and I knew I was lost as the room went out of focus and I moved into a state of not knowing anything.

  • • •

  The water was icy on my cheeks.

  I opened my eyes and cried out.

  “Hush, child.” Hannah cradled me in her arms. I struggled a moment, then settled against her cloak. The wool was rough and smelled of lanolin. I wondered irrelevantly why Hannah wore her cloak in the house, why she hadn’t hung it on the peg by the door, but I was too tired to ask. Every muscle in my body was sore. I blinked my eyes. We were both on the floor by the fireplace. “You’re safe now,” Hannah crooned. “You’re safe.”

  As the light in the room replaced the blackness that had filled my mind, I realized that I had fainted away, just as I had in my first fit. My right hand throbbed terribly. I held it up before my eyes. The blisters shone.

  Hannah took my right wrist gently and dunked my hand into a bowl of water in which icicles floated. She held it there against my will till it grew numb and blue. Then she placed my hand on my stomach. “It will heal.”

  I twisted around and saw my friend pressed against the nearby wall, his eyes on my face. Worried eyes. “What happened?” I asked.

  My words were directed at Abraham, but Hannah answered. “You leaned over and hit your head on the fireplace. Don’t you remember?”

  I kept my eyes on Abraham as Hannah spoke. I hadn’t hit my head at all. Abraham knew that.

  Hannah stroked my cheek. “You fell into the fire and Abraham pushed you clear of danger. My Abraham.” Hannah’s voice trembled with pride. “Only your hand got burned. Only your hand.”

  Abraham had rescued me. It was he who pushed me on my side at the start of the fit.

  Hannah put a cushion under my head and stood. “Your father should be told. If you feel well enough for me to leave now, I’ll go for him.” She reached for Abraham’s poncho on the hook.

  “Go,” I said. “But leave Abraham here.” I looked at Hannah. “I need him.”

  Hannah’s eyes widened. “You need him?”

  I had to talk to him alone. But I wouldn’t explain to Hannah. Not now. “Leave him,” I said with force. “I want him here.”

  My order seemed to relieve her. Wanting was more understandable than needing. “Yes, Miriam.” She patted my shoulder gently and left.

  I turned and faced Abraham. “Why did you lie?”

  Abraham looked at me.

  I got up, holding my wounded hand to my chest. I walked over slowly and sat beside him.

  “It wasn’t your first fit, was it?”

  “My second.”

  Abraham’s eyes wandered from my face. “I saw a boy have a fit once. Years ago. I was with your father. He took me to visit a healer who lived in a hut on the plain of Genezareth.” Abraham paused. “It was hot and oppressive.” He stopped, almost as though the memory made him tired. Then he turned his eyes back to me. “But the land was rich, farming land, and the green helped to make the heat bearable. I was breathing that heat. And so was the boy who came to be healed. Just like me. And he went rigid, thrashing stiff arms and legs. And he shook fast.” Abraham’s eyes were unmoving. He licked his lips. “Just like you.”

  I sidled closer. I hadn’t known that I thrashed and shook, but of course that’s what made me feel so exhausted. “What happened to him?”

  “He opened his mouth wide.”

  I put my hands to the corners of my mouth, which still ached from stretching. I had opened my mouth wide like a snake. There were many poisonous snakes in our land, the asp, the horned viper, the adder. Was I full of toxins, or was I merely a harmless colubrine that sneaked through the rocks and grasses? “What happened to him?”

  “He spit and drooled. After that he made no more noise. His face turned blue, then dark purple. He stopped shaking.” Abraham looked toward the fire. “He was dead.”

  I held my right hand, the burned hand, cupped in my left and rocked back and forth over it, my eyes closed. “Unclean.”

  “Nonsense.”

  I snapped my head up. “The boy was unclean. Unclean before death and unclean after.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Why?” Was Abraham daft after all? “Everyone says that.”

  “Not everyone, only the stupid and thoughtless.”

  I stared at Abraham. “Where do you think illness comes from if not a lack of purity?”

  “Are babies unclean, Miriam?”

  “Babies? Of course not.”

  “I was born like this, Miriam. I was born with paralysis. I committed no sin.”

  But Abraham’s father might have committed a sin and the sins of a father can be visited upon his child. Still, I couldn’t say that to Abraham. In our household no one ever spoke of Abraham’s father. “Job,” I said slowly. “Maybe you are like Job. Maybe the Creator tests you.”

  “I have never questioned the Creator. I am not like Job.” Abraham jerked his right hand out. “Look.”

  I took his hand and turned it over. “Teeth marks.”

  “Your teeth marks.”

  The marks were red and raw. I w
as mortified. “I bit you?”

  “You foamed at the mouth and your teeth clenched. I remembered how the boy died years ago in Genezareth. I was afraid you’d stop breathing, like him. I was afraid you’d drown in your saliva. I pushed you until your head was sideways so that when your mouth opened again, the spit could pass. But my hand wasn’t quick enough getting out of the way when you closed your jaws again. I believe I am lucky to have a hand at all.”

  I ran my fingers over the grooves in Abraham’s hand. His words slowly began to make sense. “You helped me breathe.”

  “And you bit me.” Abraham laughed. “Fine reward.”

  I dropped his hand and drew myself away from his laughter. What if I had really bitten his hand off — his right hand which was the only limb he controlled? These demons within me, these demons that could have stolen Abraham’s one hold on the physical world, made me want to vomit — vomit and vomit until my retching turned me inside out and I was free of their evil. I was dangerous. And here Abraham was laughing. “But weren’t you afraid of me? Weren’t you afraid of the demons within me?”

  Abraham laughed louder. “Demons. Is that who you’re blaming for biting me?”

  I shook my head hard. My eyes burned with the need to cry. “Don’t you believe I’m a sinner? You may be one, too.”

  “Sinners?” Abraham sighed. “Oh, Miriam, I wish I could sin. But all I can do is watch.”

  I stared at him. “Envy,” I said slowly.

  “Yes.” Abraham’s voice was heavy and sad. “Envy is a sin. Coveting is a sin.” His eyes wandered once more. “Yes, I’m a sinner. But you’re not, Miriam.”

  “I went into the valley alone. Women don’t go alone.”

  “You didn’t sin, Miriam. You broke no law of Moses and Israel. You’re not sick because you sinned, Miriam. I’m not sick because I sinned. If there’s anything I’ve figured out in my life, it’s that invalids aren’t any more sinners than anyone else.”

  Abraham’s words sounded heretical. I was glad no one else was around to hear them. Yet I was equally glad that I had heard them. If the Torah didn’t say that invalids were evil, then it didn’t have to be so. And surely babies were not evil. Abraham might be right. How I wanted him to be right.