LITMIR.BIZ

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little ungracefully, I sat up and rearranged my belly so that it rested between my crossed legs. I put my arms around the roundness and balanced it in my hands.

      “Yes,” Reginus acknowledged my centerpiece, “you are just about what I’d call perfectly pregnant. Does he, did he know before he….” Reginus trailed off uncertainly.

      I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I realized, for the first time, that I had never told anyone, anyone in the world, what had happened in the tomb, how the love that is stronger than death had led to new life in the most literal and intimate sense. Nor had I told my beloved, in so many words, what I was beginning to suspect just before he disappeared through the Beautiful Gates.

      “I, I don’t know. I mean I think he does …When he—”

      How to say it? When he talks to me from inside my body, my blood, my bones… I found that I couldn’t go on. I was the daughter of eight mothers, who spun wild, contradictory tales on the slightest provocation, and I suddenly had no story. Or I did not know how to tell it, not this part. No wonder I’d had so much trouble among the disciples. They were all busy telling his story, deciding what it meant, what parts to keep and what to forget, how it fulfilled this or that bit of scripture, and I was still tongue-tied.

      He was dead, and I bathed him with whores’ tears, and then we made love all night all day all night till the earth shook and the stone rolled back, and there we were under the tree of life at the dawn of the world.

      I looked up, dazed.

      “Better get the vial,” Dido, said to one of the younger whores. “It’s on the altar.”

      “Liebling,” Berta had her arm around me. “What happened to you in Jerusalem? We’ve been so worried, and when Joseph sent for Paulina, we knew something must be wrong.”

      I started to shake, and Berta held me closer.

      “She’s too tired to talk,” said Dido across me to Berta. “We ought to get both of them to bed.” She nodded towards Miriam. “Come on, honey.”

      “No,” I said, “not yet. I need to tell all of you something. I ran away.”

      And I registered it, as if for the first time. From the moment I bolted from the Jerusalem house I had been on a mindless trajectory, bent only on coming to safety, a bird tossed into a storm wind, flying blind. Now here I was, finally still, and some truth, some grief that I couldn’t yet name was catching up to me.

      “They want to take the baby from her.”

      Miriam’s voice startled everyone, as if the fire had spoken up, or the spring. A gust of sympathy and outrage went round the circle.

      “Do they know you’ve come here?” asked Timothy, clearly worried.

      “Where else would she go?” Berta demanded. “This is her home, we are her people.”

      My people. All at once I knew what was troubling me, beyond the instinctive fear that had driven me here. I had fled from Jesus’s people without a backward glance, the ones I loved, Mary B, Susanna, Tomas, Lazarus, and the ones I loved who didn’t love me, Peter, Andrew, Matthew, well, to be honest, most of them. Once not so long ago, my people and his people had gotten sublimely drunk together and danced at our wedding feast. I had called Jesus’s disciples my companions, I had shared the pleasures and hardships of the road with them, I had wept with them over his body. And so quickly they had become my enemies. Or I, theirs.

      “She feels guilty,” Miriam announced bluntly. “And yet, Holy Isis, my daughter-in-law thinks she’s not Jewish.”

      No one seemed to know how to respond to that remark, so we left it to Isis.

      “Don’t worry, honey,” Reginus came and knelt behind me, his arms around me. “We’ll protect you.”

      Just then the young whore, who was new to Temple Magdalen, returned carrying the vial in her hands next to her heart, gazing at me with a love and reverence that perplexed me until I remembered what Susanna had told me about Dido and Berta’s training methods. Apparently, they told aspiring whores my story, as I had once told it to them in the whores’ bath in Rome, as that story had unfolded, leading to us all to Temple Magdalen. I smiled at the dark, round-faced young woman as she held out the vial to me.

      Dido and Berta had sent me the vial just before Jesus was arrested. I had poured out every last drop in the tomb, bathing his every cut, washing his mortal wound.

      “Whores’ tears,” Old Nona had said. “Cure anything.”

      When I had returned to Galilee with the disciples, I had brought the vial back to Temple Magdalen. Now I held it in my hand again, gazing at it till I couldn’t see. Then I unstopped it, handed the tiny blade to the young whore and let her harvest my tears.

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      COUNTING DOWN

      FOR A TIME after Ma and I arrived at Temple Magdalen, I enjoyed a kind of edgy peace. At first I hourly expected Peter or James to show up and stand belligerently at the gates of Temple Magdalen; then I expected them daily. When two Shabbats had passed without so much as a word from the ecclesia at Jerusalem, I warily began to relax. I experimented with hopeful explanations: The apostles had decided the baby couldn’t possibly be Jesus’s since I was such a notorious slut. Or perhaps it had dawned upon them that the best hiding place for a scion of the House of David and the heir of the Jewish Messiah (upon whose existence the Romans would surely frown), might be a pagan whorehouse. Beats bulrushes, if you ask me. But no one was asking me, and after a while I did not find my own speculations reassuring. They tended to engender counter theories in the middle of the night. Jesus was right: there was enough trouble for each day and I was better off as a blooming lily of the field, so to speak.

      So I gave myself over to blooming, or ripening might be a better analogy. I got rounder and rounder as the weeks passed. Grapes squished under my weight as I helped with the winemaking; I also lent my bulk to pressing olive oil. I did my part at the clinic, too, but the fire did not flow as freely through my hands. It re-directed itself to my womb where it gently rocked and swirled, more like water than fire.

      The only aspect of Temple Magdalen life I did not resume was serving as a whore, receiving the god-bearing stranger, which omission felt strange to me, despite my advanced pregnancy. If you want to know the truth, it was not my idea to refrain, but Dido and Berta’s. They decided it would upset Miriam if I returned to fornication, however holy, while her son was not yet cold in his grave, (which he wasn’t in anyway), and while I was carrying his baby. They probably had a point, although as you may have noticed Ma didn’t have much concept of conventional morality.

      For myself, I had no notions about proper behavior for the widow of a savior. All through the years as a whore, holy and unholy, I had received all men as if they were my beloved in disguise. He himself had said: if you give food to someone who is hungry, you have fed me. How is lovemaking so different?

      Maybe you think I should have stumbled upon the principle of transcendence by now? Become more spiritual, less physical, if you insist on making such distinctions. Listen, pregnancy is an intensely embodied state. Inside my body, taking its substance from my body, another body was growing, another soul becoming incarnate. Transcendence was just not on, as far as I was concerned. But I was too languid to make a fuss about the niceties Dido and Berta wanted to preserve.

      And if I was not a practicing whore, I was still a priestess, and at times almost an object of veneration. Every morning and evening after the hymns to Isis, the little girls liked to plait flowers in my hair. Instead of vesting me, as we did the statue of the goddess, they would ask me to take off my tunic, so they could see my belly. The whores loved it, too, and massaged my breasts and belly with oil to prevent stretch marks. I enjoyed these ministrations for the most part, but I could never forget how upset the young Esus had been when the other students at druid school paid the same kind of homage during my first pregnancy. “It’s as if they’re worshipping you!” he had protested. And the witch Dwynwyn also had once warned, “Some

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