Authors: Angella Graff
I’d been with the family of Yosef for almost half a year when it happened. It was the middle of the night, and we were sleeping soundly until I woke at the sounds of hushed, frantic voices.
“You think they mean to come for him?” came the fierce whisper of Maryam. She and Yosef were in another room, but through the silence of the night, their voices carried.
“I can only suspect yes,” Yosef replied in the same hushed manner.
Yehuda, who lay beside me, shifted, and in the dark, I could just make out one of his eyes open. “What’s going on?” he whispered almost inaudibly.
“I don’t know,” I hissed back. “I think your parents are arguing.”
We both rolled over onto our stomachs to listen. Our whispers had caused us to miss some of the conversation, but my stomach sank when I heard, “We have no other choice but to go.” That was Yosef, and he sounded absolute. “We need to leave now, Maryam, if we want to make it before they can reach the city and find where we’ve gone. They found him as an infant, they’ll find him again.”
“They must be talking about the men coming for your brother,” I whispered.
The noise of footsteps caused Yehuda and I to throw ourselves back down and we both quickly tried to even our breaths, pretending to be asleep. Sounds of shuffling items filled the room, and after a few minutes, we were shaken awake.
“What’s going on?” Yehuda asked, attempting to sound like he’d been fast asleep.
“I have no time to explain. I need you to get your brothers up, and we need to pack the home,” Yosef said, not bothering to cover his voice much. “We have to leave.”
“Where are we going?” Yeshua asked, now awake and attentive.
“Back home. To Galilee,” Yosef said, his voice heavy and deep with regret.
I wasn’t sure what that meant for me as I sat there while the sons of Yosef began to scramble to put their most valuable things in sacks. After a few moments, Yosef fixed me with a firm eye. “Are you not intending to help, Makabi?”
“I wasn’t sure…” I said, trailing off. “What does this mean for me?”
“You asked me to take you in as one of my own, and I’ve done so. If we leave, you will come with us. Now get to work,” he snapped, but the edge was absent from his voice.
Flooded with pride and relief, I jumped up and began to grab and pack everything that Yosef pointed to. I wasn’t sure how we were going to carry it all, or how we were going to get to Galilee from Alexandria, but I was ready to go. Armed with packs of items from the home, and my small meager belongings, we started out on the road.
Yosef had three donkeys to help with carrying the pack, and one to bear Maryam, as she was very swollen with child. The young ones rode from time to time, but it was apparent as the sun beat down on us as we crossed the land, we were walking.
Some of the land had Roman roads and places to stop along the way. Other times we marched through the desert, hot, thirsting, exhausted, sleeping under the stars, and praying we’d make it alive. I can’t tell you how long it took, only that when Yosef announced that Galilee was in sight, I felt years older, and decades wiser.
The city we approached was nothing like the place I had called home, and as we passed into the area, I realized that this was nothing short of a slave colony ruled by the Romans. I was nervous, nervous that someone might recognize me, or question me. I was nervous that I didn’t look like a Hebrew, that I was too different from the family who took me in.
As we approached the city, our pace quickened. Yosef was anxious, staring around at the people watching us behind dreary, exhausted eyes as we trudged through the streets. The youngest was crying now, sitting on the back of the donkey. We were all hungry, tired, and ready to be settled.
Never had I experienced anything like this journey, crossing the desert, my skin was baked and eyes blurred from the constant barrage of sunlight. The soles of my feet were calloused, thick and cracked, and I had never known hunger or thirst the way I knew it on this journey.
We were to be staying with the brother of Yosef, a metal smith by the name of Zecharya and his wife Elishiva. They had one son, as we were told, the cousin to Yeshua and Yehuda, by the name of Yochanan who was in Jerusalem, a student learning to become a scribe.
Yosef explained the life of a Hebrew, the religion and rules to which I was rather unaccustomed. I had never paid much attention to the gods, and the idea of just one taking care of everything in the world was perplexing. The idea that one god determined our fate, our lives, and our deaths, didn’t make sense. But I nodded to him, desperate to show that I could understand and fit in, because for the first time I felt like I belonged, and I needed them. I needed this family.
As we neared the house of Zecharya, we neared the massive sea, which Yosef said was the sea of Galilee. It was the only way most of the Hebrews here could make their money, through fishing, and it was likely his carpentry business would not bring him the wealth it had in Alexandria.
“Life will be different here,” Yosef said to Yehuda, Yeshua and me as Maryam ushered the youngest ones into the house. “You are too young to remember what life was like before we left, but it wasn’t easy. Things are not carefree here. The Roman Legion is strict and angry. This is a place where we mourn the loss of our freedom, not celebrate our diversity. Be cautious, my sons, be brave and above all, be quiet.”
I was absolutely petrified. We settled in while Yosef and Zecharya arranged where we would live, and their start up. The house was far too small for us, but luckily there was a place we could go soon after we arrived. While Yosef did his best to get life started, Yehuda, Yeshua and I learned to adapt.
There was a man called Cephas there, young but his eyes were dark, wise and scared. He was a kind man, though, learned through the schools at Jerusalem. He was a fisherman, and accepted coins in exchange for teaching Yehuda, Yeshua and I how to fish.
We learned quickly that he was a good man, Cephas. He had a full belly laugh, told us jokes and taught us well. Before the week was out, the three of us were hauling in nets of fish and steering the boat, something I never thought I would do.
I felt older here, in Galilee. I was more tired, I worked harder, and it was by my eleventh birthday that I realized everything I had ever known was gone. No longer was I the young Roman lord. No one was searching for me, my mother was dead, and my brothers had forgotten my name. I was Makabi now, without meaning, without a background or culture. I was floating between worlds, hiding with my beloved Hebrews but not part of them.
Cephas found me one evening sitting on the shores of the sea, my sandaled feet soaking in the warm, gentle waves that rocked back and forth across the sand. The sun was setting, and the boys were helping their father set up shop. I’d been given a reprieve from work, likely from Yosef who had seen how melancholy I’d become, and he allowed me the evening by the water.
“How old are you?” he asked, the first real personal question anyone had ever asked me.
“Eleven,” I said. “My birthday just passed.”
“You’re an Alexandria boy,” he said, pushing a lock of rich, black hair from his eyes.
“I miss it,” I said to him with a slow nod. “It’s different here. It’s heavier, and more tired, and I miss home.”
“When I was young,” he said after a long moment of silence, “I went to the east. My head was so big, full of dreams, floating me across the land. I saw many things, many cultures. I saw people worshipping their golden gods, laying fruits to their fat, idols and elephants with four arms. I talked with men of peace and love, and of life and death. When I came back home here to live, to make my family and come back to my people, I felt like you. I felt tired and dark and angry. I missed the richness of the world outside of this little village. I missed the freedom, freedom from the end of the Roman Sword, and the threat of being nailed to a stake, left to die. But there is beauty here, Makabi. Beauty among these people. There is peace and love, and the promise of something amazing, if you only give it the time. These are our people, above all.”
“But what if these are not my people?” I whispered, terrified that I might let out the secret, but unable to hold it in anymore.
He looked at me, a glint in his eye from the setting sun, and then he smiled. Leaning in close to me, he gave me a wink and a nod. “Makabi, I know your secret, but let me tell you this. From the moment I met you, I knew that these were your people.”
It felt like cold water rushing into my face, those words, but by the time I came out of my shock, Cephas had gone, and I was again alone by the water. He knew my secret… but how? How could he know? And how could he assume that I belonged here. I was frightened, but something woke in me that night, a brave sort of something that fueled my body and my breath and from that moment on I worked hard, I studied, I prayed to Yahweh. I stopped thinking of myself as a Roman boy lost in a Hebrew world and I gave myself fully to them. By the time Pesach came and the trip to Jerusalem that would forever change us, I was one of them. I was Makabi, the Hebrew boy and my destiny was sealed.
Chapter Eleven
Ben was drunk. Really drunk. The kind of drunk that he really wanted to be in that moment, with the strange girl possessed by Thor, of all ancient gods out there. Thor, the big famous one who, in myth, was the hammer wielding hero, and now self-described president of an ad agency who loved humans.
Every time Ben thought about that conversation he took a swig from the wine bottle. They’d replenished their bottle stock three times before Ben finally felt like he could deal with the situation in front of him. He was still having trouble wrapping his mind around Thor being in that petite woman’s body, but secretly he was enjoying the little show the god was putting on of making objects dance around the room, his cigarettes light themselves, and at one point her body actually floated up to sit cross-legged on the ceiling, but that only lasted a moment.
“This human body is a little too drunk to sustain that kind of energy,” she giggled, rubbing her backside which was sure to have a violent bruise the next morning. She stretched, kicked her legs out into the air a little, and grinned at Ben.
“So are you going to tell me how that’s even possible?” Ben asked, trying to keep his words together coherently. So far he was doing okay, but he was only a few drinks away from taking his shirt off and wearing a lamp-shade for a hat.
“Oh it’s simple,” Alex said, waving her hand in the air. She jumped on top of the bed and crossed her legs. “I mean, humans have always called it magic, or powers, or whatever, but it’s not really that. There’s science behind everything, you know.”
“Everything,” Ben challenged. “So being able to reach inside my brain and snatch out a cancerous tumor by sheer will was science?”
“I don’t know how Judas’s powers work, why they work that way, and how they got started,” Alex said. “Believe me, I’d love nothing more than to strap him to a table and dissect his brain and find out what makes him tick. But in answer to your question, Benny boy, yes, it can be explained with science.”
“So these crazy anti-science, anti-evolution nutjobs are wrong?” Ben asked. He eyed the nearly empty pack of cigarettes on the table but stopped himself. His throat was already sore from his chain-smoking, and the last thing he needed was another brush with cancer. He grabbed a bottle of water instead.
“They are very wrong,” Alex said. She laid back and wiggled her body around until her feet were kicked up on the headboard, her head turned to stare at Ben with her wide, questioning eyes. “I was there for it, you know. When the first cells of bacteria puffed their methane into the developing atmosphere, setting the wheel spinning to introduce oxygen and carbon dioxide, paving the way for beautiful creatures like this pretty little girl here to come around and steal your heart.”
“I’ve got a girlfriend,” Ben said absently, not really thinking of Stella at all right then, but it was a sort of automatic response. “So what’s the science of being able to make a champagne bottle float around the room?”