Страница 43 из 63
The father of the bride sometimes did the wildest dance of joy, rocking and throwing up his arms, and turning fast in his brightly trimmed robes, and some of the people drank themselves drunk and their brothers or sons picked them up and took them into their houses without a whisper as was expected.
There was good food to eat, roasted lamb, and thick porridge of meat and lentils, and tears shed, and we little ones played out in the fields late, ru
More things happened that year than I can possibly tell.
There was one wedding of the rich farmer’s daughter, Alexandra, a beauty, everyone said, and what a bride she was in her gold-threaded veils. When the canopy and the torches came to her door, everyone sang at the sight of her.
People came from other villages to share that feast, and when the Pharisees gathered to wish everyone well, and would not eat, the mother of Alexandra the beauty went and bowed to the ground to Rabbi Sherebiah and told him the food had been slaughtered and prepared as was perfect and clean, and if he would not partake of her food for this wedding of her daughter, she herself would not eat or drink at this wedding though it was her only daughter.
Rabbi Sherebiah called for his servant to bring him the water to wash his hands, as Pharisees always did that, washed their fingers right before they ate, even though they were clean, and then he ate from the banquet, holding up the morsel for all to see, and everyone cheered, and all the Pharisees did as he did, even Rabbi Jacimus, though Pharisees almost never dined with anyone but each other.
Then Rabbi Sherebiah danced in spite of his wooden leg, and all the men danced.
Our beloved Rabbi Berekhaiah came forward and danced a slow and wondrous dance that delighted all of us little ones who were his pupils. Moreover, after that his father-in-law, not to be outdone, had to dance, as did every old man in the village.
The mother of Alexandra went off to sit with the bride and the women and they were drinking happily that the Pharisees had come to the banquet.
Work went on.
Buildings went up in Sepphoris as if they were plants growing wild in a marsh. The burnt places were healed the way bruises are healed. The marketplace grew larger all the time, with more and more merchants there to sell to those furnishing their new houses. And there were laborers aplenty for us to hire for our work. And everyone called us the Egyptian Gang.
No one complained of our prices, and as Alphaeus and Simon directed the building of foundations and floors and new walls, Cleopas and Joseph were making the pretty banquet tables, and bookshelves, and Roman chairs we’d made in Alexandria.
I did learn to paint borders more cleverly than before. And even to paint some of the flowers and leaves, though pretty much I filled in what the skilled painters had outlined for us.
When we did stonework, it was of the richest kind, when matching the marble pavers took patience, and the plan took careful layout. We went to the village of Cana to do a floor there for a man who had come back from the Greek islands and wanted his library to be beautiful.
People came to hire us from other places as well. A merchant from Capernaum asked us to come there, and I really did want us to go because we would be near the Sea of Galilee if we went, but Joseph said those journeys were yet to come when the building stopped in Sepphoris.
And we took a lot of jobs home with us to Nazareth to be finished, especially the job of making couches or inlaid tables, and we learned of the best silversmiths and enamelers in Sepphoris and went to them for their finishing of the pieces.
If there was any bad thing, other than the talk of the soldiers chasing the rebels in Judea—which did go on without cease—it was that Little Salome and I couldn’t be together much anymore at all.
She was busy all the time now with the women, much more so than she’d been in Alexandria, and it seemed to me that for all the work we had, and the money coming into our purses, that the women had a harder lot.
Food they had bought aplenty in Alexandria, but here they grew the vegetables, and had to pick them from the garden; and whereas one could always buy hot bread in Alexandria in the bakers’ street, they baked all their bread here, after grinding the wheat themselves very early every morning.
Whenever I tried to talk to Little Salome, she put me off, and more and more she used the same voice to me that the women used to the children. She had grown up overnight, and was always tending to a baby. It was either Baby Esther who was begi
I missed her.
Now what the women liked to do, however, was weaving, and when they set up their looms in the courtyard in the warm months, it caused talk from one end of Nazareth to the other.
It seemed that the women of this place used a loom with one pole to it, and one crosspiece at which they had to stand. But we had brought back from Alexandria bigger looms, with two sliding crosspieces, at which the woman could sit, and the women of the village all came to see this.
A woman could sit at this loom, as I said, which indeed, my mother did, and a woman could go much faster with her work, as my mother did, and make cloth to be sold in the marketplace, which my mother did—when she had time, that is, from Little Symeon and Little Judas with the help of Little Salome.
But my mother loved weaving. Her days of weaving the temple veils with the eighty-four young girls chosen for this, housed in Jerusalem, had given her great speed and skill, and she turned out cloth that was of the quality of the best in the marketplace, and she knew how to dye cloth as well, even to work in purple.
Now it was explained to us that those girls had been chosen to make the Temple veils because all things for the Temple had to be made by those in a state of purity. And only girls beneath the age of twelve were certain to be pure, and those chosen had a tradition, and my mother’s family was part of it. But my mother didn’t talk much of those days in Jerusalem. Only to say the veil had been very big and very elaborate, and two a year had to be made.
It was this veil that covered the entrance to the Holy of Holies: the place where the Lord himself was present.
No woman ever went to the Holy of Holies: only the High Priest. And so my mother had loved her work on the veil, and that the work of her hands had gone there.
Many women of the village came to talk to my mother and watch her with this loom. It was different after she began weaving in the open courtyard. She had more friends. Our kindred who had not come to talk were now coming often.
And ever after that summer they would call on her, and some of the young girls who did not have little ones underfoot would come to hold the babies on their knees. This was good for my mother because she was fearful.
In a village like Nazareth, all the women know everything. How ca