Poisoned Honey: A Story of Mary Magdalene (2 page)

“Really?” I asked. Forgetting my own sorrow for the moment, I gazed up at her glum face. I was shocked at the idea that no one cared as much for Yael as I cared about my sparrow, but maybe it was true.

“You’re too young to know what a miserable world this is,” said Yael. “But you’ll find out soon enough.”

How could Yael think that about the world? It was glorious. The world was full of wonders, from the artful design of a sparrow’s feathers, to the snug feeling of my sister’s back against mine in our cot at night, to the plump sweetness of an apricot from our orchard. In the synagogue, the Scripture readings often mentioned all the things the Lord created. Sometimes I imagined the One sitting at his heavenly workbench, smiling with pleasure as he turned out sparrows and warm bodies and apricots for us to enjoy. It made me sad that Yael didn’t see this.

The very next morning, while I was feeding the chickens as usual, a sparrow perched on the courtyard wall. “Go away! Shoo!” I told him. I was terrified that my brother would kill this one, too.

Don’t worry. I’ll stay out of range of the slingshot
, said the bird.

I don’t mean that he
seemed
to say it; he spoke just like a person, only in a chirping kind of voice.

Here’s what to do
, the sparrow went on.
Save some of your
bread from breakfast. When no one’s looking, put the crumbs on top of the wall, right here
. He hopped sideways in one direction, then the other, to mark his words.

I knew that sparrows couldn’t talk, so I must have been making this up myself. Still, I did as the sparrow told me. Later, when no one else was watching, I saw him come back to eat the crumbs.

The next time I had a chance to talk to Abba, my father, alone, I told him the whole story of the sparrows. He listened with his arm around me, his eyes serious above his gray-streaked brown beard. When I finished, he kissed the top of my head and said, “That second sparrow is wise beyond its years! It’s true that you shouldn’t give the chickens’ food to wild birds. But if you want to share your own bread with them, that’s your right.” He added, as if to himself, “Alexandros shouldn’t be slinging stones inside the courtyard; someone might get hurt. I’ll talk to him.”

After that, my father began taking Alexandros to work with him every day. I was glad to have him out of the house, although I think my mother missed him. I kept on leaving bread for Tsippor, or Birdie, as I called the sparrow. Whenever I was upset about something, I would sit on the stairs and talk it over with Tsippor while he pecked the crumbs.

One Sabbath, sitting in synagogue, I listened to a psalm that made me think of Tsippor: “For your name’s sake lead
and guide me, take me out of the net which is hidden for me….” Those lines brought such a vivid picture to my mind: of the One tenderly untangling a terrified bird from the hunter’s net. Later, I overheard Alexandros stumbling as he tried to recite the same psalm for Abba. How could he have trouble memorizing such unforgettable words?

I didn’t tell my younger sister, Chloe, about my sparrow friend, but one day she overheard me talking to him. I asked her if she heard the sparrow answer me, but the idea seemed to frighten her, so I said it was just a game. During the next year or so, I talked to Tsippor less and less, although I still fed him.

I suppose I always knew, as girls do, that I’d get married someday. But I didn’t realize it clearly until the year I was eleven and my cousin Susannah was thirteen. Susannah, my uncle Reuben’s daughter and my father’s niece, was my favorite cousin. She had a round, shiny face and merry dark eyes, and although she was older, she was always willing to play a game or sing a song with me.

Then suddenly—it seemed—Susannah was thirteen, and no longer just a girl but a maiden. Soon after she came of age, she was betrothed to a young man named Silas, a cloth dyer. A year later, their wedding took place, and Susannah left our
compound for Silas’s house. She came to visit now and then, but there seemed to be a screen between us: she was a married woman, and I was still a girl.

One day in Tishri, the month of the autumn harvest, Susannah came to help us make date syrup. All the women and girls in the family gathered in our courtyard, taking turns stirring the great pot. The sweet, heavy scent filled the air.

The work wasn’t hard, and since it would take hours for the syrup to boil down, the gathering was like a party. We chatted and sang and played with Susannah’s baby, Kanarit, a girl with a funny toothless smile.

I thought the baby looked like Susannah. Susannah said she looked like me. Our grandmother (we called her Safta) said that I looked like Susannah, only more serious, and the baby looked like both of us.

Next year, I thought, it will be my turn to be betrothed, then married, and then (the Lord willing) have children. I hoped to follow Susannah’s example, rather than my mother’s. Susannah seemed to enjoy everything: her baby, her husband, her house, her neighbors. Imma, on the other hand, treated everything in life as a duty to be borne or a temptation to be avoided.

As I was thinking about my cousin and my mother, Yael entered the courtyard carrying another basket of dates on her
shoulder. “Oh, evil day! Evil, evil day,” she muttered as if to herself, except so loudly that we couldn’t help hearing.

My mother looked up from checking the date syrup. “Say what you’re going to say, Yael.”

Yael looked pleased to have everyone’s attention. “Herod Antipas has done a dreadful thing, Mistress Tabitha. I heard some men telling it in the market, and it’s true, because they’d just come back from Tiberias.” (Tiberias is the capital city of Galilee.)

“Well?” Imma gave the stirring paddle to me and put the other hand on her hip.

Yael gave in and spat out her news. “They say that Herod Antipas has
slain
John the Baptizer. Cut his head right off.” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth, as if saying so made the dreadful thing true.

“The Baptizer?” gasped Susannah. “The holy man from the desert?”

None of us had seen John the Baptizer, because he preached in Judea, several days’ travel down the Jordan River. But everyone had heard about his fiery sermons, and I’d imagined myself among the crowds on the riverbank, listening. Now Yael’s words forced me to see the preacher kneeling as Herod’s soldier swung his sword. Evil! The sense of it smothered me, and I gasped, too.

“The Lord save us!” exclaimed my grandmother. “I wish we were on the other side of the lake from Tiberias. When the Lord’s punishment strikes that wicked city, what will happen to us?”

“Nonsense,” said my mother. “I’m sure the Lord knows it’s not our fault. The heathen Romans rule the world, even our holy city of Jerusalem, and they let Herod Antipas, a so-called Jew worse than the Romans, rule us in Galilee. What can we do? Anyway, this is men’s business, not women’s. Mari, you aren’t letting the syrup scorch, are you?”

With an effort, I pulled my mind back to the courtyard. “No, Imma.” I gave the paddle a good stir.

Chloe, my sister, looked anxious. Maybe she was imagining fire from heaven falling on Tiberias, spilling over onto nearby Magdala. Or no—she was probably thinking about the beheading, because she looked a little green. “Safta,” she begged our grandmother, “tell us a story about something nice.”

“Not something
nice
!” I protested. “Please, Safta, something exciting.”

“Please,” my mother snapped, “a story with an uplifting moral.”

My grandmother seemed relieved to turn from the shocking news. Looking around the courtyard at us women and
children, she smiled. “Nice, exciting, and uplifting? I know just the story.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as she always did before telling a story.

“Long ago—after the Jewish people escaped from slavery in Egypt, but before they reached the Promised Land—they wandered in the desert. Hot wind blew grit into their throats and their eyes. But at the end of each day, when they made camp in the desert, their prophet Miryam found a well for them. No one else could see the well, but Miryam found it with the eyes of her soul.”

I’d heard this story more than once, but each time Safta came to those words, “the eyes of her soul,” a deep thrill went through me. If I could see with such eyes, and be such a blessing to my people!

“Then they drank the pure water, they splashed it over their hot, dusty faces, and they blessed the Lord and his prophet Miryam. And to this day,” my grandmother finished, “Miryam’s Well refreshes our people from its secret source.”

“Where is it, Safta?” asked Chloe.

Susannah laughed. “If we knew, it wouldn’t be a secret, would it?”

“Oh, we know it’s somewhere in the lake,” said my grandmother firmly. “When I was a girl, there was a man of great faith tormented by demons. He prayed for healing, and he was told in a dream to go out on the lake in a boat. He did
so, and Miryam’s Well appeared to him. As he bathed and drank from the well, the demons fled. He was healed.”

“I like that story, Safta,” said Susannah, “but … how could there be a
well
in the lake?” She made a frustrated, squinting face. “I can imagine the wide blue lake, and I can imagine a stone-rimmed well like the one in this neighborhood, where Yael draws water. But when I try to put the well in the lake …” She made a gesture to show the well sinking right to the bottom, and everyone but Chloe laughed.

Before our grandmother could answer Susannah, Chloe asked, “Where did the demons go, after they left the man? Did they go to possess someone else?” She looked anxious.

“These are idle questions,” said Imma. “Chloe, you aren’t skimming off the foam as it rises. You begged to help with the date syrup this year, do you remember?”

Although I’d laughed with Susannah, I had no trouble imagining Miryam’s Well in the lake, and it seemed important to explain to the others. “But Miryam’s Well
isn’t
an ordinary stone well,” I said. “The blessing water would bubble up through the lake, and it would look different from ordinary water. As if it were a different color, like wine.”

Susannah rolled her eyes at me in a teasing way. “Mari can see anything. Why, she saw the whole spirit world in the lake.”

“That’s not what I said,” I protested. Susannah was
reminding me of a remark I made once, when she and Chloe and I were down by the lake. The surface was calm, and the sunlight struck the water just right, so that the town and the mountain behind it were reflected. Only, the reflected town was upside down and wavering.

I’d said that the spirit world, if I could see it, would look like that. The very idea made Chloe squirm, and Susannah hastened to reassure her. “Mari’s talking her usual nonsense.”

Chloe hated to see things in a different way. When we were younger, I’d shown her how to lie on the floor and put her head way, way back until it seemed as if she could walk on the ceiling. I thought she’d be fascinated by the upside-down view, as I was, but Chloe burst into tears and ran to Safta.

Now our grandmother skipped over both Chloe’s question about demons and Susannah’s question about the well. Gazing into the sky above the courtyard wall, she murmured to herself, “It is a special gift, to see what is hidden from others.”

I didn’t think much about Miryam the prophet again until the next spring, at Passover time. In the synagogue, a lector read us the story of how Moses, Aaron, and their sister Miryam led the Jewish people out of Egypt. When they
escaped from the Egyptian army, Miryam and the women danced to celebrate the victory. “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously,” she sang. “The horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”

Right there in the synagogue, I heard her sing. How did I know that the clear, strong voice was Miryam’s? I
knew
it, as well as I knew my grandmother’s voice. I could still hear the lector murmuring underneath, and I knew he was reading to the congregation, but I also knew that Miryam’s words were meant for me. I had seen Miryam’s Well with the eyes of my soul, and now I heard her voice with the ears of my soul.

I was so excited, I could hardly wait until after the meeting to tell someone. But whom should I tell? Not Chloe; it was just the kind of thing that would frighten her. Not Imma; she pooh-poohed anything that wasn’t down to earth. Not Alexandros; I never told
him
anything. I could have told my grandmother, but this was so important, it seemed fitting to tell the most important person in the family.

On the way home, as we turned the corner into our alley, I took my father’s hand. “Abba,” I said quietly. “In the synagogue, I heard Miryam singing her song. She sang it for me.”

My father looked startled, but then he squeezed my hand. “The Scriptures do speak to us, don’t they, my dear? Even to women.”

One day, after a large shipment of sardines had gone out, my father decided to take a holiday. “We’ll ride to Arbel and visit my sister’s family,” he said. “I’ve hired donkeys.”

Abba took along Alexandros, Chloe, and me, as well as Uncle Reuben and his young boys. My grandmother stayed home because the long ride would be painful for her sore joints, and Imma stayed home because she had more important things to do. The rest of us rode across town along the main street, my sister behind me on our donkey.