Читать книгу Bright Dark Madonna - Elizabeth Cunningham - Страница 23

CHAPTER ELEVEN

COUNTING DOWN

FOR A TIME after Ma and I arrived at Temple Magdalen, I enjoyed a kind of edgy peace. At first I hourly expected Peter or James to show up and stand belligerently at the gates of Temple Magdalen; then I expected them daily. When two Shabbats had passed without so much as a word from the ecclesia at Jerusalem, I warily began to relax. I experimented with hopeful explanations: The apostles had decided the baby couldn’t possibly be Jesus’s since I was such a notorious slut. Or perhaps it had dawned upon them that the best hiding place for a scion of the House of David and the heir of the Jewish Messiah (upon whose existence the Romans would surely frown), might be a pagan whorehouse. Beats bulrushes, if you ask me. But no one was asking me, and after a while I did not find my own speculations reassuring. They tended to engender counter theories in the middle of the night. Jesus was right: there was enough trouble for each day and I was better off as a blooming lily of the field, so to speak.

So I gave myself over to blooming, or ripening might be a better analogy. I got rounder and rounder as the weeks passed. Grapes squished under my weight as I helped with the winemaking; I also lent my bulk to pressing olive oil. I did my part at the clinic, too, but the fire did not flow as freely through my hands. It re-directed itself to my womb where it gently rocked and swirled, more like water than fire.

The only aspect of Temple Magdalen life I did not resume was serving as a whore, receiving the god-bearing stranger, which omission felt strange to me, despite my advanced pregnancy. If you want to know the truth, it was not my idea to refrain, but Dido and Berta’s. They decided it would upset Miriam if I returned to fornication, however holy, while her son was not yet cold in his grave, (which he wasn’t in anyway), and while I was carrying his baby. They probably had a point, although as you may have noticed Ma didn’t have much concept of conventional morality.

For myself, I had no notions about proper behavior for the widow of a savior. All through the years as a whore, holy and unholy, I had received all men as if they were my beloved in disguise. He himself had said: if you give food to someone who is hungry, you have fed me. How is lovemaking so different?

Maybe you think I should have stumbled upon the principle of transcendence by now? Become more spiritual, less physical, if you insist on making such distinctions. Listen, pregnancy is an intensely embodied state. Inside my body, taking its substance from my body, another body was growing, another soul becoming incarnate. Transcendence was just not on, as far as I was concerned. But I was too languid to make a fuss about the niceties Dido and Berta wanted to preserve.

And if I was not a practicing whore, I was still a priestess, and at times almost an object of veneration. Every morning and evening after the hymns to Isis, the little girls liked to plait flowers in my hair. Instead of vesting me, as we did the statue of the goddess, they would ask me to take off my tunic, so they could see my belly. The whores loved it, too, and massaged my breasts and belly with oil to prevent stretch marks. I enjoyed these ministrations for the most part, but I could never forget how upset the young Esus had been when the other students at druid school paid the same kind of homage during my first pregnancy. “It’s as if they’re worshipping you!” he had protested. And the witch Dwynwyn also had once warned, “Some people will want to worship you. I’d nip that in the bud if I were you.”

But really what everyone worshipped was new life, new possibility, something hidden yet whole, unbroken, mysterious, round. What else is an Easter egg?

I was in just such a posture one morning when a visitor came to see me.

“Priscilla!” I called out to a small, dark woman with a face lined from long squinting out at the changeable lake weather. Peter’s wife—yes, Peter, the rock, the erstwhile Galilean fishermen. You never hear about her in the Gospels, but she existed.

“Don’t get up!” she laughed. “You look like a beetle on its back.”

She came and knelt beside me, giving me a kiss and patting my naked belly herself before the girls could bring me my tunic.

You might think that the wife of the Rock on which the Church was founded would be more reticent with a gentile woman of questionable reputation, even if I had somehow managed to marry a nice Jewish man. But our relationship, while based on discretion, had little to do with reticence.

I have mentioned that many people came to Temple Magdalen for healing. Women, especially, sought us out, including desperate, otherwise respectable wives. We had a reputation for being able to cure infertility, which could be a source not only of sorrow but of ruin in a woman’s life. In Priscilla’s case, my healer’s hands quickly told me that she was healthy, fertile and in need of no herbal tonics. One day I put it to her straight, and told her exactly how we might help her. And so in the name of Yahweh—Isis, I am happy to say, is not a jealous goddess—Priscilla put on the veils of a whore-priestess and received the man the Most High picked out for her. And, lo, a son was born.

And when light dawned—or lightning struck—and Peter figured out that there had been some intervention, divine or otherwise, to his everlasting credit he did not put aside his wife or repudiate the child. If Peter found it helpful to hate me, I didn’t hold it against him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you before,” Priscilla said.

“You knew I’d come back?” I asked. For if she knew, then Peter had to.

“Of course. Everyone on the lake knew within a week,” she said. “Word travels faster on the water than anywhere else.”

“True,” I sighed. “I suppose that’s why Jesus spent so much of his time in a boat. At least at first.”

“Not a boat,” she said a little sharply. “Peter’s boat.”

I looked at her, and noticed that she was not just weathered by wind and sun; she was tired, strained.

“It must be hard, having Peter gone so much.” I patted the ground beside me, inviting her to sit.

“I’m managing,” she said shortly. “Peter sold his share in the boat to one of my brothers. Did you know? He’s made provision for me, but….” She stopped herself.

“But he’s not here,” I finished the sentence. “He hasn’t been for a long time. Not really. It’s Jesus’s fault.”

I stopped wavering between statement and question, wondering if I should apologize for my husband or if it would be absurd and presumptuous. In either case, I knew whatever I said would be inadequate.

“Don’t get me wrong, I loved Jesus, too,” she said quickly. “You know I did. I would have done anything for him. I did, too. In the early days I would put them all up on a moment’s notice, cook for them, deal with the crowds pressing into the yard, pissing everywhere, trampling my kitchen garden. I did it gladly, I tell you.”

“You put up with a lot,” I said. “Remember when I tore apart your roof, so we could lower the paralyzed man?”

“And Peter finally had to fix the leaky roof after that,” Priscilla said wryly. “But I mean it, Mary, I didn’t mind about any of that. What I minded is the leaving. He—I know this is going to sound terrible—he didn’t ask me if he could have my husband. Not that any man ever asks a woman anything, but when I was with him, well, it felt like I wasn’t just a woman, I wasn’t just Peter’s wife. I felt as though I mattered as much as anyone. Do you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“So I think… I think I’m angry with him.”

I didn’t ask her if she meant Jesus or Peter. I knew.

“All those stories he told about not being fit for the kingdom if you turned and looked back over your shoulder, if you so much as went to say goodbye to your family, well, did he ever think what it was like for the people who were left? Or were they just not worthy of the kingdom, because they didn’t drop everything, too? Was I supposed to drop Peter’s mother, leave her to fend for herself, abandon the baby, the animals, the vineyard, the trees, all the things I tend to. What did he say about that?”

I wracked my brain. Jesus had always done the leaving. What did he know about being left? He had repudiated his own family, claiming as kin those who did the will of his father in heaven. In one of his rants he had gone on about bringing not peace but a sword that would set brother against brother, mother against daughter. Really, if you delve into the gospels, there is no mention of “family values.” None. They don’t call Christian theology apologetics for nothing.

“Oh, Mary,” she said before I could answer. “I’m so sorry. Listen to me going on and on. And here you are about to have a baby—and he’s, he’s…”

“Not here,” I finished. “Not so as you’d notice.”

“He left us all,” Priscilla said, sadly. “It’s so confusing. Peter came home after Jesus was, well, killed. He was a broken man, broken to pieces. But he went back out on the boat, and I told myself, he’ll heal. He has me, Gabriel, the boat. Then came that strange time that was like a dream. Was it a dream, Mary? When Jesus was with us again, and we all ate and laughed and danced for days and days. Did it really happen?”

She leaned against me now, and I held her, comforting her.

“It did happen, Priscilla.”

“And then you all traipsed back to Jerusalem. I was so angry, Mary, angry with you, too, going off with them, free as a man. Well, never mind. I don’t pretend to understand anything.” She drew herself apart again. “I don’t know what to think. Now Peter claims that Jesus is coming again, and we must prepare the way. After all this time, of following Jesus wherever he went and leaving me on my own, Peter wants me to come to Jerusalem, bring Gabriel with me, join the ecclesia.”

“And will you?” I asked.

She was silent for a time.

“Mary, do you think that is what he wants? Is he calling me? Peter says he is. If I don’t go, am I denying him, failing him?”

“Oh, Priscilla.” I took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m afraid I’m not a very good person to ask. Haven’t you heard? I mean did Peter send word to you….”

“That you ran away without telling anyone where you were going? Yes, of course he did. That’s the reason I didn’t come see you sooner.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“I didn’t want to have to tell him that I definitely knew you were here. Don’t you see? I figured you must have had your reasons for disappearing.”

I just nodded, not wanting to tell her I had bolted because her husband was striking people dead.

“Yet you’re here now,” I said after a moment of increasingly awkward silence. I was touched yet puzzled by Priscilla’s attempt to protect me. Surely the apostles knew by now where I’d gone, whatever Priscilla said or didn’t say.

“Yes, I’m here now,” she said slowly. “Peter asked me to come. No, he told me to. Peter and Jesus’s brother James and some of the others arrived in Capernaum last night. I’m sorry. I should have said so at once, but I, I just wanted to talk to you first, for myself.”

“So.” I placed a hand on my full-term belly. “They can count. Who knew?”

“Mary, this is serious.” She frowned at my joke, which I admit was a bit tactless.

“If they have something to say to me, why didn’t they come themselves? Not that I’m not happy to see you, Priscilla.”

“You know why.”

Of course I knew, but all at once I was angry.

“Jesus was healed at Temple Magdalen when no one else would touch him. And his mother prefers living here to—”

“So Miriam is with you. They’ve all been worried sick about her.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” I retorted. “She’s been missing three months. If they were so worried about her, why didn’t they send someone here a long time ago?”

“Don’t ask me,” Priscilla said, irritably. “I’m not privy to their counsels. I’m just a messenger. By the way, they told me, if I found her, to bring her back to Capernaum.”

“Good luck,” I snorted. “Tell me the rest, Priscilla. You’re not just here to retrieve Miriam.”

“They want the baby.”

“I already know that, Priscilla, and I believe I’ve made my answer clear.”

We sat for a moment, listening to the sound of the spring welling up and trickling down to the Gennesaret, quietly, calmly, sure of its course, its purpose.

“I haven’t offered you food and drink,” I changed the subject. “When Judith finds out, she’ll be appalled.” I started to roll over unto all fours, so I could get up.

“Don’t, Mary. Let me finish first. It’s so hard to say it.”

“You’re just the messenger,” I said lightly as I could. “Go on.”

“They say there’s danger to the child’s life. You must consider his safety.”

His safety. For men, every child presumed male until proven guilty of being female.

“They’ve hired a wet nurse and they’ve found a safe, remote place for the child to be raised.”

“I’ve heard that argument before, too.” I made my voice sound calm, though I was starting to shake. “I don’t buy it. I don’t see why they’d be any better able to protect the child than me. I have powerful friends—”

“They said you’d say that, and if you did….”

She stopped and looked away from me.

“Spit it out.”

“They asked you to consider what Jesus would want for his son. They ask you to put aside your own selfish desires for the child’s sake, for Jesus’s sake.”

For Jesus’s sake. At the invocation of his name, I felt a tremor that seemed to come right up out of the earth into my body, squeezing me so I lost my breath. And then it passed, and the earth was quiet again.

“Is there any message you want me to take back, Mary?”

Be wily as a serpent, I heard my beloved say, gentle as a dove, my dove.

“Tell them I will pray about the matter.”

And the earth shook again, and the spring gushed warm and easy from inside me.

“Is that the whole message?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s it. Priscilla, I’m sorry. I think I need to rest. Help me up, and we’ll go find Judith and you can talk to Miriam….”

The wind suddenly picked up on the lake; some doves roosting on the walls startled and spiraled into the air. Rain fell down between my legs and spattered dark on the dusty ground.

“Mary,” Priscilla said to me, as if from a long way off, though she was right next to me. Then she called out. “Berta! Dido! Judith!”

From all directions women came toward me. Priscilla gently handed me to them, as if I were a precious gift.

“May it be well with you,” Priscilla whispered in my ear. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell them your time is come. I won’t. I’ll stall them as long as I can.”

And she turned to go.