Читать книгу Jairus's Daughter - Patti Rutka - Страница 10

Aviel let go and slid down into floating, restful dark. Peace enveloped her. Others, many others, were nearby, also at peace, a multitude surrounding her in ceaseless shadow, gliding over and around one another. She had held on tenaciously, not wanting to release her soul from her body, but now, here—wherever here was—she knew she could float forever, blessedly free of the sweat and torque, the grinding pain slicing like shattered glass inside her body in the last hours of her life. Finally, the last sinew was cut. It was all she desired. The relief was a bliss enduring, unending, a final freedom. Eternity.

But then she felt the oddest of sensations: she was sinking up, into a transparent vessel of water, daylight at the top, her body pulling her back to the light and to the pain, as if to die again. A loud pop! and again she felt the crushing in her abdomen, along with a burning in her hand. Her hand was on fire as the light grew brighter. She twisted around towards it, then heard a resounding command in the center of her chest—a man’s voice:

“Little girl, get up!”

She gasped, jolted into her body, and arched on the pallet. In the radiance of the healer’s presence, and the heat of the day, she perspired. A strand of her hair stuck to her face. His fingers moved to pull the hair from her mouth; he wiped the spit from her cheek and cradled one side of her face in his warm hand. Then he touched her abdomen. Pain seared through her body cavity again but began to subside rapidly. Miraculously. She blinked, her eyes crusted with tears, and she looked hazily toward the figure holding her hand. He was so bright!

Yeshua took her hand and placed it over her heart, pressing it to her. As he let go, she struggled up toward him, not wanting him to release her, not wanting to come back to the pain of existence. But he did, and his brilliance dimmed. Before her stood a man in a plain wool robe covered with dust, smelling lightly of sweat and earth and fish. There were others around, men she did not know, different from the beings in the floating space from which she had just returned. She recognized her father and mother, her Abba and Eemah.

Rivka crushed Jairus’s hand in hers, tears swelling her eyelids again. Jairus looked at Yeshua, but devoid of shock; he was simply and strangely vacuous, because his entire underpinning had shifted. It was as if his house had slid off to one side in an earthquake, and it was unclear if the house would remain standing with this new knowledge of belief and faith. He let go Rivka’s hand, slid down the wall to squat on the floor, and stared at his daughter in the darkened room.

Outside, the commotion of wailing and ridicule that had greeted Yeshua before he went into the house had muted, and the crowd of family and friends convened, talking about the miracle worker Jairus had gone to seek. A sweetness of figs filled the warmth of the day, and the dust under foot was somnolent, heavy with heat. The shroud of haze from the lake had receded.

Back inside, Yeshua directed Aviel, “Go cleanse yourself at the mikvah when you’ve gained more strength, and present yourself to the priests.” Then he turned also to Jairus and Rivka so that they were drawn into reminding their daughter about her obligations.

Weak, Aviel turned on her side and pushed herself up off the pallet, her lightweight woolen robe clinging to her shape from her sweat. She swallowed, and swung her feet cautiously onto the floor to test her weight on her legs. Putting her arms behind her on the bed she pushed herself up to rise, and Yeshua and John moved as one to help her, Yeshua’s hand under her arm, John’s hands awkwardly and a little too familiarly at her waist. Did they know she had dried blood sticking her legs together, pulling her skin? These men should not be touching her; she was unclean for them, she worried.

Rivka rushed to her to take over, supporting her daughter’s weight, pushing her hair off her forehead, kissing her. “Aviel! Aviel, Aviel.”

Standing alongside Rivka, John had not let go.

Yeshua spoke. “If one is forced to choose between the law and saving a life, wouldn’t you agree that it is more important to save the life?” The healer smiled at Rivka and John, then turned to Jairus. “Feed her. If your girl is to become a woman, she needs to keep up her weight, and she is to do the ritual cleansing once she is restored. Remember what I told you: do not fear. Only believe. She will find her life through words more than childbearing.”

Jairus looked at him blankly, and before he could expound his gratitude, Yeshua left with a blessing. Feeling conspicuous, John relinquished his hold on the young woman and followed Yeshua, his eyes trailing to Rivka and Jairus as he went out.

Rivka turned to watch them go, but could not release her daughter; she began laughing and crying at the same time. But Aviel wriggled out of her mother’s arms and stumbled to the door, gripping it with her hands. As she looked fuzzily out into the clearing day and towards the men departing with Yeshua, she saw John, tall, moving gracefully.

Sensing her gaze, John stopped, turned, and met her eyes. In each other they recognized a depth. While they entered each other’s souls mutually, Aviel was still in the weaker state. The intensity of his penetration spiraled up in him, moving from a spiritual depth to a hunger for human love. But Aviel was so close to her humanness, having just regained it, and at the same time so close to that world of spirit she had touched, that she did not have the strength to continue bearing his gaze. She looked down. When she looked back up, wanting more, she saw his eyes had just left hers.

He had turned back to follow Yeshua and Peter and James. She watched him go, then sank to her knees, still holding the doorway for support. Too much life flooded back into her all at once, and Rivka came over to her, frowning up into the street.

Aviel stared down at her left hand. It was tingling and burning.

He’d done it again. Peter wondered what the reaction would be this time. Would he go to the mikvah after touching that girl? The crowd outside the house had informed Peter of the girl’s —woman’s—condition. He knew he worried about too many things for Yeshua’s sake, but really, there needed to be no controversy about this, about whether or not she was a full woman, in her unclean state. Yeshua had already caused enough consternation healing a man’s hand on the Sabbath, and now this had happened at the house of a Pharisee! If his Lord kept doing these healings there would be trouble with the authorities. He turned to see John behind him, looking back at the house. What he saw was Yeshua’s favorite exchanging looks with that girl.

John, however, trailed like a straying and distracted sheep. He glanced up at the hard blue sky, feeling the dryness of the last several weeks in his mouth. He looked again at the group of three moving away from him, then glanced again at the house. Aviel’s house was quiet, impressed upon his mind. He came along tighter to the others, falling in and listening as Yeshua talked.

As the four of them walked back out of the town, a young man in a robe covering caved-in shoulders skulked near by, hovered, and when Yeshua passed nearby he spat at the healer, turned, and ran. A neighborhood boy cried out and chased the man, throwing a few stones at him, while some other villagers standing in doorways as Yeshua moved past said out loud, “Don’t mind him.” “We know the good works you come to do—we see! Never mind the crazies.” James came a little closer as they walked and spoke in low tones into Yeshua’s ear. Yeshua’s mouth turned up at the corner, and he looked sideways at his brother as they padded through the dust. They needed rain.

When Yeshua spoke again, his words swam over John, seining in the disciple’s loose ends, pulling his heart back to the feel of the group. John’s elation rose, filling like a balloon made of papyrus sheaf and filled with hot air from a delicate light lit underneath. It floated up into the deepening Galilean dusk. Still, he couldn’t forget the young woman he had just seen. Coming up close beside Peter he found comfort in his large presence. Not wanting to betray the light of interest in Aviel that flickered in him, he nonetheless felt compelled to get any information he could about her.

“Did Yeshua know Jairus from before that Sabbath we came through Capernaum?”

Peter looked sideways at him.

“I don’t know—but I don’t think so. Does he interest you?”

“I am still stunned by some of the things Yeshua says and does,” John hedged. “I wonder about the family. I wonder how what Yeshua does affects them later. Especially the women. The young woman—what was her name?”

“Aviel, he told me.”

“Yes, Aviel, that’s right, I heard her mother. Aviel—what will her life be after what Yeshua has done for her? What becomes of these people whom Yeshua touches in the ways he does?”

Peter only shook his head. His concern was less with the people Yeshua healed than with how the healings had an impact on Yeshua’s message and mission. As a whole, the disciples had become as accustomed to the miracles as any human being could, but still, doubt would ripple through them on occasion. Apparently John had been more affected by this one than some of the others. At least, that was what he hoped was the cause for John’s interest.

They had come to a stopping place for the evening near the lake once again, and the followers that had adhered to them once they left Capernaum began to find places in small groups to lie down for the night. This time lack of rain was in their favor, so they had decided not to go all the way to Nazareth that day; they would have enough time to arrive by sundown for the next day.

The disciples placed their blankets on the dry ground and began to pull out the wine and water skins and the bread that had been patted flat by women’s hands and baked on the large inverted metal ovals used for baking. Having said the blessings for wine and bread, and only sprinkling droplets of water in lieu of fully washing their hands because water was so scarce, they tore off and chewed the thin, crusty pieces, added a few olives, and washed it all down with the wine. Once the simple meal was concluded they began to chant the Hebrew thanksgiving prayers, and this easily continued for an hour. Their song carried out across the water on the dying wind as the stars began to appear in a crystalline cool sky.

Reclining on his blanket, John looked up at the evening star and laid his head on James’ shoulder. He felt his brother’s breathing, his chest rising and falling, and he wondered if the young woman to whom he had been so drawn was rejoicing in seeing the stars again after so nearly dying.

That night, John dreamed of blood washing up on the shore of the lake as a wind whipped the blood-water into a pink froth. Fish beached by the thousands, and scores of lepers, demoniacs, cripples, people with every kind of disease, came to gather the fish, throwing them in the air and catching them with their mouths, then eating them. Yeshua and Aviel loomed large together, coming down out of black billowing clouds, Aviel clothed only from the waist down in exotic foreign yellow silk, and her long hair. Yeshua disappeared; Aviel settled near John, stars all around her, as he lay like stone, unable to move, on the beach. Then, feeling himself between his legs, he woke throbbing in the early dawn. The sense of her in the dream stayed close with him throughout the morning as the group continued moving and talking alternately of the old prophets and the political situation on the way to Yeshua’s home town.