The Book of Longings

by Sue Monk Kidd

From behind us, someone shouted, “If you’re the King of the Jews, save yourself.”

  “He helped others—can’t he help himself?” cried another.

  Salome slid her arm around Mary’s waist and drew her mother to her side. “May God take him quickly,” she said.

  And where is God, I wanted to scream. Wasn’t he supposed to establish his kingdom now? And the people—why didn’t they revolt as Judas had expected? Instead, they jeered at Jesus.

  “If you’re the Messiah, come down from the cross and save yourself,” a man yelled.

  Indignant, I whirled about to rebuke the rabble and glimpsed my brother standing alone on the edge of the hill. Seeing that I’d caught sight of him, he stretched out his hands to me, pleading, it seemed, for mercy. Ana, forgive me. I stared, astonished by the sight of him, by how misguided he’d been, by how callous his zeal and sense of righteousness had become.

  I searched myself for the fury I’d felt toward him earlier, but it had left me. I tried to summon it, but it had retreated at the sight of him standing there so lost and bereft. A premonition swept through me that I would not see Judas again. I crossed my hands over my chest and nodded at him. It was not forgiveness I sent. It was pity.

  As I drew my eyes back to Jesus, he struggled to lift himself up in order to take a breath. The sight nearly broke me. After that all sense of time left me. I didn’t know whether minutes passed or hours. Jesus went on heaving himself up and gasping for air.

  Thunder rumbled on and off over the Mount of Olives. Salome and the three Marys knelt on the dirt and intoned the psalms, while I watched Jesus from the dark, sorrowful doorway of my heart, and uttered not a word. From time to time, Jesus muttered something, but I couldn’t hear what he said. He seemed far away and alone. Twice I tried to go to him and both times the soldiers forced me back. A man also attempted to approach Jesus, calling, “Jesus, master,” and he, too, was turned away. I looked back once for Judas. He was gone.

  At midafternoon the soldiers, bored with the slowness of his dying, left their posts and squatted some distance from the cross, where they began to throw dice. I did not hesitate. I broke into a run. As I stood beneath the cross, the closeness of him shocked me. His breath rasped and raked through his chest. His legs rippled with spasms. Heat and sweat were streaming from his body. I reached for the timber, then drew back my hand, repulsed by it.

  I took a deep breath and gazed up at him. “Jesus.” His head slumped toward his shoulder and I saw he was looking at me. He didn’t speak, nor did I, but I told myself later that everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering.

  Mary rushed to him, followed by the others. She wrapped her hands about her son’s feet like she was holding a tiny bird that had fallen from its nest. I wrapped my hands about hers and then the other three women did the same, our hands like the petals of a lotus. Not one of us wept. We stood there mute and full and held up that flower for him.

  The soldiers did not tear themselves from their game of knucklebones to chase us away.

  They no longer seemed to care we were there. We watched Jesus’s eyes grow glassy and distant. I felt the moment come, the severing. It was gentle, like a touch on the shoulder.

  “It is finished,” Jesus said.

  There was a sound like a rush of wings in the blackish clouds, and I knew his spirit had left him. I imagined it like a great flock of birds, soaring, scattering, coming to rest everywhere.

  v.

  We prepared Jesus for burial by the flicker of two oil lamps. Kneeling on the cave floor beside his body, I felt oddly numb. How could this be my husband?

  I looked at the other women in the tomb as if observing them from a corner of the sky. Mary, his mother, was cleansing his feet and legs while the others sang the songs of lament. Their faces were smeared and wet, their voices bounding and rebounding off the cave walls. A towel and a ewer of water sat beside me, waiting for me to join them in readying him for burial. Pick up the towel. Pick it up. But gazing at it, I was seized with panic. I understood that if I took hold of the towel, if I touched Jesus, I would fall from my niche in the sky. His dying would become real. Grief would swallow me.

  My eyes wandered to the stacks of bones at the back of the cave neatly separated into skulls, ribs, long bones, short bones, fingers, toes—countless dead people mingled together in a morbid communion. No one who’d been buried here, it seemed, had the means to purchase an ossuary to hold their bones. This was a pauper’s tomb.

  We were fortunate to have any tomb at all. Rome’s custom was to leave a crucified man hanging on the cross for weeks, then toss his body into a pit to finish decaying. Jesus would’ve suffered that abomination except for the goodness of a stranger.

  He’d been no older than Jesus and adorned in an expensive robe and finely dyed blue hat. He’d approached us moments after a soldier thrust a spear into Jesus’s side to ensure his death. The act had sickened and appalled me, and I swung away, turning my back on the gruesome scene, almost careening into the man. His eyes were red and weighted.

  He said, “I’ve located a tomb not far from here. If I can convince the centurion to turn over Jesus’s body, my servants will take him there.”

  I eyed him. “Who are you, sir?”

  “I’m one of Jesus’s followers. My name is Joseph. I come from Arimathea. You women must be his family.”

  Mary stepped forward. “I’m his mother.”

  “And I’m his wife,” I told him. “Your kindness is welcome.”

  He bowed slightly and strode off, tugging a money bag from his sash. He placed a denarius in the centurion’s palm. I watched it grow into a column of silver.

  When he returned to us, he held out more denarii. “Go into the city and purchase what you need to prepare the body. But you must hurry. The centurion wishes to hand over the body quickly.” He glanced up into the half-light. “And he has to be buried before sunset. The Sabbath will be upon us soon.”

  Salome scooped the coins from his hand, and grabbing Mary of Bethany by the hand, she pulled her down the hillside. “We’ll wait for you here. Be quick!” he called after them.

  Now, in the cave, the lamp flames darted. Light spattered across Jesus’s skin. His skin. His. I reached out and touched it. I let my fingers brush the inside of his elbow. Then I dampened the towel and wiped the dirt and blood from his hands, arms, chest, and face, from the coils of his ears and the creases in his neck, all the while falling and falling, slamming into myself, into the boundless pain.

  We rubbed his skin with olive oil, then anointed him with nothing but myrrh. It had been the only sweet spice Salome had been able to obtain in the city at the late hour, and this had dismayed Mary. “When the Sabbath ends,” she said, “we’ll return to the tomb and anoint him more properly with cloves and aloe and mint.”

  I watched Salome draw a broken wooden comb through his hair. I’d witnessed his slaughter and not a tear had crossed my cheeks, but I cried in silence now at the comb passing through his locks.

  Mary of Magdala grasped the edges of the shroud and drew it slowly down the length of him, but in that last instant before his face was gone from me, I bent and kissed both his cheeks.

  “I will meet you in the place called Deathless,” I whispered.

  vi.

  That evening Martha turned the Sabbath meal into the funeral feast, but no one cared to eat. We were sitting on the damp courtyard tiles, huddled beneath a canopy. All around us were the coming dark and the plop of rain drizzle . . . and silence, a great stunned silence. No one had spoken of Jesus since we’d left the tomb. We had squeezed through the cave opening, where Lavi waited for us, heaved the stone across it, and left our voices inside. Then we’d walked slowly to Bethany, shocked, weary, mute with horror—I, still barefoot, and Lavi, carrying my sandals.

  I looked at them now—Mary and Sa
lome; Lazarus, Mary, and Martha; Mary of Magdala, Tabitha, and Lavi. They stared back with solemn, devastated faces.

  Jesus is dead.

  I wished for Yaltha. For Diodora and Skepsis. I forced myself to picture them beneath the tamarisk tree beside the little stone hut. I tried to see the bright, white cliffs at the top of the hill, and Lake Mareotis shining at the foot of it like a piece of fallen sky. I managed to hold all of this in my mind for several moments before the ghastly memories pushed their way back in. I didn’t know how the rubble inside me could ever be put back together.

  As the night drew around us, Martha lit three lamps and set them in our midst. All of their faces shone suddenly, cheeks and chins the color of honey. The rain finally stopped. Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.

  I broke the silence. I told them about the letter Judas had sent summoning me home. “He wrote to me that Jesus was in danger from the authorities, but I know now that most of that danger came from Judas himself.” I hesitated, feeling a mix of disgust and shame. “It was my brother who led the Temple guard to arrest Jesus.”

  “How do you know this?” exclaimed Lazarus.

  “I encountered him this morning in the Garden of Gethsemane. He confessed it to me.”

  “May God strike him down,” Martha said with fierceness. No one refuted her. Not even I.

  I watched their sharp, appalled expressions, how they struggled to comprehend. Mary of Magdala gave her head a shake, the amber light catching in her hair. She lifted her face to me, and I wondered if she knew why I’d not traveled with my husband through the villages and towns around Galilee as she’d done. Were the circumstances of my exile known among his followers? Was I known among them?

  “It’s impossible that Judas would betray Jesus,” the Magdalene said. “He loved him. I traveled with the disciples for months. Judas was devoted to Jesus.”

  I bristled. I may not have been there for Jesus’s ministry, but I knew my brother. I responded tersely. “I know very well that Judas loved Jesus; he loved him like a brother. But he hated Rome far more.”

  A look crossed her face, something crestfallen, and my annoyance vanished. Even then I knew I’d snapped at her out of envy, resentful of the freedom she’d had to follow Jesus around the countryside, while I’d been trapped in Haran’s house.

  “I shouldn’t have spoken harshly,” I told her. She smiled and the skin wrinkled around her eyes in that way that makes a woman beautiful.

  There came another silence. My mother-in-law placed her hand on my arm, her fingers brushing past the bloodstain on the sleeve of Jesus’s cloak. She had aged deeply in the two years I’d been gone. Her hair was silvering and her face had begun to change into an old woman’s—the plump, sagging cheeks, eyelids slumped onto her lashes.

  She rubbed my arm, meant to comfort, but her fingers woke the smells inside the cloak’s fabric. Sweat, cook smoke, wine, spikenard. The scents, so sudden and alive, unleashed a bitter pain inside me, and I understood that I’d spoken to them about Judas because I couldn’t bear to speak about Jesus. I feared it. I feared the power it had to unlock pain from common places.

  There was so much, though, to be said, to be understood. I shifted, straightened. “I was on my way to the palace this morning when I came upon Jesus in the street carrying the crossbeam. I know nothing about how he came to be condemned or why he wore those dreadful thorns on his head.” I looked at the women who’d climbed Golgotha with me. “Were any of you there when he was brought before Pilate?”

  Mary of Magdala leaned toward me. “We were all there. When I arrived, a large crowd had already gathered on the pavement and Jesus was standing above us on the porch where the Roman governor pronounces his judgments. Pilate was questioning him, but from where I stood, it was impossible to hear what was said.”

  “We could not hear him either,” said Salome. “Though for most of it Jesus remained silent, refusing to answer Pilate’s questions. You could tell this aggravated Pilate. Eventually he shouted for Jesus to be taken to Herod Antipas.”

  At the mention of Antipas’s name, fear, then hate blazed up in me. Jesus and I had been forced apart for two years because of him. “Why would Pilate send Jesus to Antipas?” I asked.

  Mary of Magdala said, “I heard some in the crowd say Pilate would prefer Antipas to pronounce the verdict and save him from blame in case people revolted and blood was shed. He could be recalled to Rome over an outcome like that. Better to wash his hands of it and let the tetrarch do it. We waited on the pavement to see what would happen, and sometime later, Jesus returned with the thorn crown on his head and a purple cape about his shoulders.”

  Salome said, “It was awful, Ana. Antipas had costumed Jesus like that to mock him as King of the Jews. Pilate’s soldiers were bowing to him and laughing. I could see that he’d been flogged—he could hardly stand, but he kept his head lifted the whole time and didn’t flinch at their ridicule.” Her face was radiant with the urge to cry.

  “Who condemned him to die—Antipas or Pilate?” asked Lazarus, clasping and unclasping his hands.

  “It was Pilate,” said Mary of Magdala. “He addressed the crowd saying it was the custom during Passover to release one prisoner. I cannot tell you how my hope leapt at this. I thought he intended to set Jesus free. Instead he asked the crowd who it should be, Jesus or someone else. We women had arrived at the palace separately, but by this time, we’d found one another and we shouted Jesus’s name as loudly as we could. But there were many followers present of a man named Barabbas, a Zealot held in Antonia’s Tower for insurrection. They screamed his name until that was all that could be heard.”

  The knowledge that Jesus might’ve been saved at the end, but wasn’t, staggered me. If I’d been there . . . if I’d left my bed earlier . . . if I’d not delayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, I would’ve been there to fill the air with his name.

  “It happened so fast,” Mary said, turning to me. “Pilate pointed his finger at Jesus and said, ‘Crucify him.’”

  I closed my eyes to keep out the picture that tortured me most, but the image could move through walls and eyelids and every conceivable barrier, and I saw my beloved nailed to the Roman timbers, trying to lift himself up to take a sip of air.

  Was this what it was like to grieve a husband?

  A memory came to me, a small one, a foolish one. “Mary, do you remember when Judith traded Delilah for a bolt of cloth?”

  “I remember it well,” said Mary. “I’d never seen you so distressed.”

  I looked at the others, wanting them to understand. “You see, I had charge of the animals and Delilah was more than a goat; she was my pet.”

  “Now she’s become my pet,” said Mary.

  I felt a momentary elation—Delilah was still there and being pampered. “Judith hated the goat,” I said.

  “I think what she hated was how much you loved it,” Salome added.

  “It’s true Judith liked me only slightly better than Delilah, but for her to take the goat to Sepphoris and trade her without telling me—I’d not expected it. When I confronted her, she argued that the cloth she’d acquired was fine linen, better than she could weave, and that James had recently brought home a new, younger goat, making Delilah unnecessary.”

  Everyone must have wondered why I was telling them this. They listened and nodded in an indulgent way. The aftermath of tragedy is strange, their expressions said. Her husband has just been crucified—let her say whatever peculiar thing she needs to say.

  I continued, “Jesus arrived home the same day Judith traded the goat, after a long, exhausting trek from Capernaum, where he’d worked all week. He found me distraught. It was late afternoon and he’d not eaten, but he turned around and walked all the way to Sepphoris and bought Delilah back wit
h the coins he’d earned that week.”

  Mary’s eyes glittered. “He came through the gate carrying Delilah on his shoulders.”

  “Yes, he did!” I exclaimed. “He brought her back to me.”

  I could still see him, grinning as he strode toward me across the compound, Delilah bleating wildly, and the picture was as vivid to me as the one of him crucified. Leaning my head back, I breathed as deeply as I could. Overhead, a ragged blanket of clouds. The moon somewhere, hidden. The owl had flown away.

  Mary said, “Tell them the rest of it.”

  I hadn’t intended to say anything further, but I was glad to do as she said. “The following week, Judith dyed her new, fine linen and hung it in the courtyard to dry. I often allowed Delilah to leave the cramped animal pen and wander free in the courtyard as long as the compound gate was locked. I never dreamed she would eat Judith’s cloth. Delilah, however, ate every bit of it.”

  Mary laughed. Then we all laughed. There was a vast relief in it, as if the air had grown more spacious. Was laughter grieving, too?

  Martha poured the last of the wine into our cups. We were exhausted, devastated, wishing for the numbness of sleep, but we went on sitting there, reluctant to part, our togetherness like a refuge.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WAS NEARING the midnight watch when a voice called from the gate. “It’s John, a disciple of Jesus.”

  “John!” cried Mary of Magdala, leaping up to accompany Lazarus to the gate.

  “What urgency could bring him here so late at night and on the Sabbath?” said Martha.

  John stepped into the glow of our lamps and peered around the circle of faces, his eyes lingering on me, and I realized I’d seen him before. He’d been one of the four fishermen who’d traveled home with Jesus from Capernaum all those years ago and talked in the courtyard late into the night. Young, gangly, and beardless then, now he was a broad-shouldered man with thoughtful, deep-set eyes and a beard that curled under his chin.