The Testament of Mariam

by Ann Swinfen

  She shifts a little closer to Mariam’s chair and leans her shoulder companionably against her legs. Mariam does not speak, but Julia feels her hand come down lightly to rest on her head.

  She is a good child, not inclined to indulge me with condescension as a mild eccentric. She may amount to something one day. But I have learned not to invest too much hope in children. And her innocence is precious. Let her sit peacefully eating her stolen grapes and I will spare her the world of my childhood. Gaul has suffered its own bloody times, its massacres, but they are a practical people, able to accept the inevitable, adapt, make new and perhaps better lives. Intransigence may sometimes be commendable. Noble, even. But does it lead to happiness? Not amongst the Israelites. Not in my experience.

  I am a walking history—Herodotus or Thucydides on legs. I know things, I remember things. When I fled here, empty-handed, I carried within myself a scroll of memory, a library of scrolls. I could tell you things that would make the hair of your head rise up like the hackles of a dog, I could make you weep for the despair of it, and rejoice for the joy. Mariam’s testament. But perhaps it would all be better left unsaid. Let them invent their myths and miracles. Perhaps that is better. Perhaps I am simply too tired.

  Daniel, my youngest brother, was born a few weeks after Melkha’s wedding, at the beginning of what would prove to be one of the coldest winters I ever knew in the village. My mother had a long labour, which is unexpected with a tenth lying-in. Our house being one of the largest in the village, my parents had their own room, unlike some of our poorer neighbours, and it was to this room that she retired, attended by several older women, who stepped out of the room from time to time during the hours that followed, with looks of concern on their faces.

  I was too young, of course, to take part in this birthing ritual, and was exiled, like my father, brothers, and small sister, to other parts of the house. It fell to me, however, to prepare the meals, which I did without much skill, while the drama of my brother’s birth went on and on under the same roof. Nearly two days, it lasted. With my mother’s screams splitting the air, I fled to the roof, then to the goat shed, finally to the midbar above the village. It was already too cold to pasture the goats out here, and I wandered alone amongst the tumbled rocks and thin winter grass, clutching a blanket I had caught up to use as a cloak. Eskha had been deposited with Judith’s mother, the potter’s wife, and the men of the family took themselves off to the workshop.

  The sound of those screams seemed to echo in my head even out on the hillside, and I swore that if ever I gave birth, I would not scream like that, whatever it cost me. I would not be so shamed. A vow I kept when my sons were born. Not by biting on a leather strap, as some women will do, but by forcing my mind to recall a scene where the pain was unbelievably greater. Remembering, I was shamed into biting my lips to hold back my own cries of pain.

  He was born at last, Daniel, at about midnight on the second day. I was taken to see him, where my mother lay, her shift and bedclothes stained with sweat and blood. Her face was grey, pinched, and she looked suddenly old. I had never thought her old before. Her cheeks were sunken and her hair straggled around her shoulders. She looked ugly. And I made a berâkâ of apology, for I should have pitied her, though I could not bear to look at her. Instead, I turned to look at the baby. He was small and wizened, and lay flaccid in the basket where the women had laid him. He was tightly bound, with nothing but his head showing, a tuft of black hair. His eyes, heavy-lidded and swollen, were tight shut.

  ‘Is he alive?’ I asked one of the women. He was so still, he looked as though he had been wound in his shroud for burial.

  She nodded. ‘For the moment. But he had a hard passage into the world and he is small and weakly. He may not survive.’

  ‘But why did it take so long, if he is small?’ I was not so young that I did not understand some of the facts about birth.

  She looked at me speculatively, as if weighing up how much I should be told, then she shrugged.

  ‘He came the wrong way into the world, feet first. For a long time there was nothing but one leg showing. Your mother has had a bad time of it. You must help her all you can.’

  I crept away, feeling ashamed.

  My mother was ill for a long time afterwards. When it came to the ceremony of the purification, when she was to be cleansed of the defilement of childbirth, she had to be carried to the kenîshtâ in a chair by her two eldest sons. Then she took to her bed again. It was as though she had given up on life. I did what I could, cooking, washing, cleaning; I could not have managed without the kindness of neighbours, who baked bread for us and brought us pots of hot food. And I realised for the first time what a heavy burden my mother carried every day. I think at that time we became the closest we were ever to be. One day, I remember, she put her arms around me and held me close. She never said a word, but pressed her cheek against the top of my head, and afterwards I felt my hair damp with her tears.

  Despite her weakness, my mother did her best to feed the baby, but he had little appetite, or else her milk failed, and he grew thinner and smaller before our eyes. He slept a great deal and cried little, except in the dark of night. It was not loud enough to wake my brothers, for it sounded like the thin cry of a newborn kitten, but my ears were sharp and it always woke me.

  I shall never forget the first time Daniel opened his eyes wide and looked at me. I had carried him into the main room of the house to let my mother rest and was changing his dirty clouts. One of his legs turned out at an awkward angle and he whimpered if it was touched, so I was handling him as carefully as I could. Usually his eyes were screwed shut, as if in pain, but that day, without warning, he opened them and looked straight up into mine. I had not been told, at that age, that very young babies cannot see properly, so I was not surprised that his look held intelligence and recognition. What did surprise me was the eyes themselves. They were large and wide-set, and their colour was a deep blue, almost purple, the colour of the darkest mountain gentians, much darker than my father’s blue eyes. I wondered whether my eyes were the same. Yeshûa had told me my eyes were blue, but I had never seen them myself. Mirrors were unknown in my village.

  After that, I felt there was a special bond between us. Without asking permission, I decided that I would try to persuade Daniel to drink some of the goat’s milk, as my mother seemed unable to feed him enough to make him strong. Each day, after I had milked the goats, I would set a bowl of the fresh milk beside me, soak a clean cloth in it, and push it into Daniel’s mouth for him to suck. At first, more of the milk landed on my clothes, on him, and on the floor than went down his throat, but within a few days he grasped what to do and would open his mouth eagerly for the cloth. After two or three weeks, other members of the family began to notice the change in him and I no longer hid what I was doing. My father patted my shoulder and told me I was a clever girl, my mother accepted it wearily and even started to improve a little in health. Daniel began to grow plumper, more like a normal baby and less like a changeling. Even after my mother finally left her bed and began slowly to take up her household tasks again, it came to be accepted that I would take charge of the rearing of my small brother.

  By the time he learned to stand and take a few steps, it was clear that his leg would not straighten and he would always walk with a limp. I shall never know whether he would have been born damaged anyway, or whether the women who attended my mother, wanting to end her pain, had dragged on his leg and somehow twisted it for ever at the hip. Ya’aqôb, as might be expected, saw Daniel’s handicap as a judgement of Yahweh for some sin committed by the family, though he was unable to say what it was. By this time Melkha had given birth to her first son, a strong healthy boy with a decided look of Adamas about him. Although he was eight months younger than Daniel, he walked at about the same time, and could soon outrun him when my sister brought him to visit us.

  It was after one of these visits that I overheard my two eldest brothers arguing outside the goat
shed when I was milking.

  ‘It is a judgement,’ Ya’aqôb said, I could have sworn almost with satisfaction. ‘We have not kept the Law closely enough. We have failed to say the correct prayers, or we have not washed before food, or failed to fast.’

  ‘Are you embracing the ways of the Pharisees?’ Yeshûa asked, pleasantly enough.

  ‘You condemn the Pharisees?’

  ‘Not at all. They are good men, good in their intentions. But too strict and unbending in their ways. Surely it is more important in Yahweh’s sight that we should love one another, that we should be kind to strangers and succour the poor, than that we should always use the right dish or wear the correct garment, or follow any of these new “traditions” they have invented, which are no part of the ancient Law?’

  ‘You may believe that, Yeshûa, but I do not. I believe that each man must start with disciplining himself, make himself as pure as possible in the sight of the Lord.’

  ‘Then I fear we must part company in our understanding of what is right.’

  They moved away, and I heard no more.

  Not long after this I had taken Daniel for a walk around the village. I believed that if I encouraged him to walk as much as possible, his leg would grow stronger, even if it would never grow straight. Left to himself, he would often abandon walking and resort instead to sitting on the ground and shuffling around like a baby just learning to crawl. At two and a half he was already talking well and it shamed me to see him doing this. The walks seemed to help, though they often tired him, and that day I had given way to his pleas and carried him the last few steps home.

  Yeshûa was just coming out of the workshop when we crossed the courtyard. As the men often did when it was hot, he had slipped his arms out of his tunic and let it fall in folds round his belt, so that his upper body was bare. He must have been sawing, for he was sprinkled all over with sawdust, which billowed around him in a cloud. Daniel began to strain in my arms, calling for Yeshûa and reaching out to him, thrusting his heels so hard into my stomach to push away from me that it hurt.

  Yeshûa laughed and lifted Daniel from my arms, and my precious baby went to him crowing with delight, turning his back on me and forgetting me at once. I was suddenly, bitterly, blackly jealous. Jealous!

  When my own sons were born, Manilius and then three years later Sergius, I searched for Daniel in their eyes, but could not find him. Their eyes were blue, but that cold northern blue, like their father’s. They make me think of cool skies, winter skies foretelling frost, or the blue shadows on snow high in the Alpine mountains. I made a journey once with Petradix, when we were first married and before our children were born, along the coast road and then by sea as far as Cisalpine Gaul and northern Italy. He had thoughts at the time of trying his hand at some trade with Italy and Rome, but decided in the end that the venture was too risky. He was never one to take risks. From the ship that we had boarded for the short sea journey, we could look back at the mountains and see, on their towering peaks, fields of perpetual snow, which glittered white and blue, immeasurably high against the sky.

  Not that my husband’s eyes, or my sons’, showed a cold nature. Though cautious, they are kind. When I first saw little Julia’s eyes, they reminded me of Daniel, but she did not recognise me, or reach out to me, mind to mind, as he did.

  It was a cruel winter, that year he was born, such as we rarely saw in the Galilee, even in the mountain villages. The harvest had not been poor, but not abundant either, and many went hungry, though we shared, neighbour with neighbour. None starved, but we were all weakened by lack. Animals which should have been over-wintered were slaughtered for food. Many fell ill, and my mother was still not fully recovered from her lying-in. We ran short of firewood and took to sharing a hearth with our neighbours around the courtyard, turn about, four families crowding into one house and cooking over one fire to eke out our fuel. We wore many layers of clothes to keep out the cold, and for the first time in my life I suffered from chapped and split lips, and red swellings on the joints of my hands and feet, that itched and ached and kept me awake at night.

  Julia pads softly along to Mariam’s room with a tray. When the hypocaust is lit during the winter months, she likes to run about the house barefoot, feeling the warmth of the tiled floor beneath her feet. Her mother does not approve. A well-brought up Roman girl should not go shoeless, like a common peasant. Julia does not understand her mother’s objections, for the family is not rich. Her mother cannot sit elegantly, posing with her spindle like an exemplary Roman matron of the Republic, while she receives her visitors in the atrium. Julia has been taught morally uplifting tales of the ancient Republic, but is also familiar with the social behaviour of their richer neighbours. Her own mother has little time for making or receiving visits, and is nearer to those ancient matrons than the modern ones. Some of these neighbours cultivate the pretence of simple housewifely virtues. If Fulvia spins, she spins. It is not a pose for a portrait painter.

  You can feel the difference in the floor, depending how close you are to the furnace, which is maintained by one of the farm slaves during the winter, when there is little work in the fields. The heating chamber is under the modest bath-house, adjacent to a little room, which has the next hottest floor. This is where Julia’s mother retreats, on the rare occasions when she has time to herself. She calls it her cenatiuncula. Then comes Father’s tablinium, where he struggles over his accounts, and the triclinium, for formal meals. These rooms are separated from the bedrooms, the cubicula, by the main atrium with its central garden, its impluvium and fountain. The hypocaust runs along either side of the atrium, the floors growing cooler the further you go. The warmth in the cubicula relieves the chill nights in winter, but Julia would not want to spend all day in hers, as Mariam does.

  She taps softly on the door and goes in.

  Mariam is sitting in the one chair, huddled over the brazier that Father has put in here for her. She does not appear to be doing anything, merely staring ahead of her with that vague look that Julia finds disconcerting. Julia sets her tray down on the bed, moves a small table close to her grandmother’s chair, and lays out the dishes within easy reach. Maia, the cook and general household slave, has made a thick and warming leek soup. Julia sniffs the steamy aroma appreciatively. There is a fresh barley bap, a dish of roasted vegetables, some smoked fish, and even a small cake made with dried apples and dates.

  ‘I’ve brought your dinner, Grandmother,’ says Julia.

  Mariam looks at her, apparently with incomprehension. She says something that Julia does not understand. She repeats it. It sounds like a question, but the words are meaningless.

  Mariam searches her mind for the Latin words, but they have fled. All she can fish from her memory is the Aramaic.

  ‘I cannot eat all this. Will you stay and share it with me?’

  Julia stares at her.

  ‘I don’t understand. What are you saying, Grandmother?’

  To Mariam, Julia’s Latin words sound as though they ought to hold some significance for her, but they have become twisted, a plait of vowels and consonants she cannot unravel to find the meaning.

  Julia and Mariam stare at each other in consternation. Then Julia leans forward and kisses her grandmother’s cheek. She tiptoes to the door and closes it softly behind her. Once she has passed the door of her parents’ bedroom, which is next to Mariam’s, she takes to her heels and runs. She is unaware that she is crying and that Mariam can hear the slap, slap of her bare feet fading into the distance.

  This winter is proving a bitter one also. I no longer go to market, and even Manilius has made only one trip into town in the last three weeks. I cannot sit outside, for the wind is piercing, blowing down from the north, and I can feel snow on the way. All my bones ache and I feel perpetually cold, even crouched over a brazier and swathed in shawls and blankets. My hands are blue and stiff. The rest of the family are chilled, but do not seem to feel it as I do. Never until this year have I felt so old.
Now, when my hands shake, I do not know whether it is from the cold or from the strange uncontrollable shaking which seized me before.

  For some reason, the harsh winter has made me unsociable. I retire to my room like a hibernating animal, only sometimes emerging for meals. Fulvia humours me, and sends in food on a tray. Once or twice Julia has come to keep me company, but I can see that she finds me trying, so I send her away to more cheerful parts of the house. The cold forces me to keep the shutters closed on my window, so that my room becomes more and more like a cave, and I an ill-tempered, brooding she-bear hibernating within it.

  Yet I do not sleep, as I did often in the days of late autumn. I do not know whether the cold will not let my body rest, or whether the severe weather has sharpened my mind, so that images, ideas, memories race through it in a wild torrent, like the river Rhodanus after northern rains have swollen its waters and sent it, swift as a galloping horse, to fling itself on its course to the Middle Sea.

  I am living on a spiral of time. I look up or down, and all time is present, here and now. Past is not divided from present, nor present from future. I am myself as a young woman, sitting in Capernaum. Or four years old, weeping in the straw of the goat shed. Or betrothed to a lover pledged to celibacy. Or hiding amidst an alien marsh, where white horses shimmer out of the mist and dissolve again.

  And I am living the time before-me, the wandering of my homeless people, the dispossessed Israelites, in Egypt and in Babylon, in slavery and in the wilderness, in a world full of wonders—water from bitter rock and bushes afire and alive; staffs turned to serpents and slithering away dry-bellied across the stony ground; seas parting and joining; the voice of Yahweh from the mountain tops and the thunderous heavens, His voice rising from the flood waters with promises, always promises, of milk and honey, or threats of punishment and damnation. Why could He never leave us alone? Just leave us to get on with our lives?