Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

And then the final discovery was the big mikvah that had been cut into the stone beneath the house many many years ago.

Now the mikvah was a pool for purification, which I hadn’t seen in Egypt, and it had steps leading down to its very bottom so that a man could walk all the way under the surface of the water and come back up again without ever bowing his head. It had only half as much water as it ought to have had, this pool, and there were many places where its walls were flaking or blackened and needed work. Joseph said we would bail out the water, and replaster the entire bath. The water from this pool was piped from one of the cisterns. And thanks to the heavy rains, the cisterns were full.

It was Old Sarah’s grandfather who had built this pool, we were told, when he settled in Nazareth. This had been his house for him and his seven sons, and Joseph knew their names, every one, but I couldn’t remember them, or all those who came down from them—only that my mother’s father was descended from them, and also Joseph’s mother’s father, and so on it went with these stories. I was eager for us to get to work.

Brooms were at work everywhere by late afternoon; the women were beating the dust from rugs; and Cleopas went with the women to market to buy fresh food for supper, and the oven in the courtyard was working all day.

Bruria sat in the courtyard crying for her son who’d gone off with the rebels to Sepphoris. She believed that he was probably dead. We all knew this meant perhaps that he’d been nailed to one of the crosses on the road, but we didn’t talk about this. No one was going to go down to Sepphoris, not yet. We worked in quiet.

By nightfall, the house had been divided up amongst the families: Alphaeus and his wife, and his two sons to one set of rooms, and Cleopas and Aunt Mary to their rooms with their little ones, and Joseph, my mother and James and I to others, though our rooms ran into Aunt Mary’s rooms, and we had Old Sarah and Old Justus as well. Uncle Simon and Aunt Esther and Baby Esther had their rooms near the stable in the middle of the house.

Bruria and her slave Riba had their own room.

Then there was an old serving woman, a thin silent woman, named Ide, whom I hadn’t seen the day before. She took care of Old Justus and Old Sarah, and she slept on the floor in their room. I didn’t know for sure whether this woman could talk.

Again, our supper was very rich with the stew from the night before, and the hot bread from the oven and more of the sweet figs and dates. Everyone was talking at once about what had to be done to the house and to the courtyard, and how eager they were to get out to the garden beyond the town, and see how it was there, and to see others, whom they had not yet seen.

We were lying back, taking our ease, not talking much, doing nothing, when a man came into the room from the courtyard. Joseph was on his feet at once. When he came back from the door, shutting it against the chill, he said:

“The Roman legions are gone out of Galilee. Only a small number of men are left with Herod’s men to keep the peace until Archelaus comes home.”

“Thanks be to the Lord on High,” Cleopas said, and then everyone was saying it in one way or another. “And those who were crucified? Have they all been taken down?”

Everyone knew it could take two days or more for a man to die on a cross.

“I don’t know,” said Joseph.

Old Sarah bowed her head from her stool and chanted in Hebrew.

“The last of the soldiers passed on the main road over an hour ago,” said Joseph.

“Pray they never have to come back,” my mother said.

“A crucified man should be taken down before sunset!” said Cleopas. “It is a shameful thing, and it’s been days since these men—.”

“Cleopas, leave it,” said Alphaeus. “We are here and we are alive!”

Cleopas was about to speak when my mother reached out and laid her hand on his knee.

“Please, brother,” she said. “There are Jews in Sepphoris who know their duty. Leave it alone.”

No one spoke after that. I didn’t want to be sleepy, but I was.

When we went to bed, it was very strange to me to be in a room alone without Symeon and Joses, and the babies as well.

I’d always been with the women and the little ones. But the little ones were with their mothers. And my mother was with Old Sarah, and Old Justus, and Bruria and her slave, even though they had a separate room. I missed Little Salome. I even missed Baby Esther who woke up to start crying and only stopped when she went to sleep.

I felt very grown-up to be with Joseph and James, but I still asked Joseph if I could snuggle against him, and he said yes, that I could.

“If I wake up crying,” I asked, “will you put me with my mother?”

“Is that what you want me to do,” he asked, “to put you with your mother? You are little to be in here with us, but you’re seven years old and you understand things. You will be eight years old soon. What do you want? You can be with your mother if you want.”

I didn’t answer. I turned over and closed my eyes.

I slept through the night.

Chapter 14

It wasn’t until the third day that we were allowed to roam far and wide. By that time Cleopas had been down the road a piece, and come back, and said that all the bodies were taken down, and that the city was in order again, the market was open, and with a laugh, he said, too, they needed carpenters to rebuild what was burnt.

“We have enough here to do,” said Joseph. “They’ll be building in Sepphoris from now until years from now after we’re all laid to rest.” And we did have a great deal to do, bailing out the mikvah first of all which took us children to get down into the cold water, and to hand up the jars to the men. And then the replastering had to be done, and when that was finished, we would do the walls of the house.

I was happy because we could go outside the village, and I went as soon as I could out into the woods. I saw children, lots of them, and I wanted to talk to them, but first I wanted to walk in the open and climb the slopes under the trees.

Alexandria had been a city of great wonders as everyone was always saying, with its festivals and its processions and its splendid temples and palaces, and houses such as Philo’s house with its marble floors. But here was the green grass.

It smelled good to me, better than any perfume, and when I passed under the branches of the trees, the ground became soft. A little wind was coming from down in the valley that I could see, and it caught the trees almost one at a time. I loved the rustling of the leaves above me. I walked on up the slope until I was out in the grass again, where the grass was thick, and there I lay down. It was damp there, because it had rained in the night, but it was good. I looked off towards the village. I could see men and women working in the vegetable gardens, and beyond that the farmers in the fields. People were picking weeds out of the earth. That’s what it looked like to me.

But my mind was on the groves of trees here and there, and far away, and the blue of the sky.

I lost myself. I felt loose. I felt my skin. It was as if I was humming and the humming filled my ears, but I wasn’t humming. And it was so sweet. It was the way I felt sometimes before I went to sleep. I wasn’t drowsy. I wasn’t sleeping. I lay still on the grass and I heard little tiny creatures around me in the grass. I even saw the flutter of little wings. I looked right before me, and there was a world of them, these tiny creatures, so very tiny, tumbling over the pieces of grass.

I let my eyes move slowly towards the trees. They had the wind in them again and were dancing back and forth. The leaves of the trees looked silver in the sunlight, and they never stopped moving even when the breeze died away.