According to Mary Magdalene by Marianne Fredriksson Read Free Book Online Page A

inexplicable way bound to his destiny.
    Leonidas slept uncomfortably and spasmodically, but he was used to that, so it did not trouble him. When they woke toward dawn, he winked at her and said, “Now we'll have something to eat, just you and me. Then we'll go out into the garden and talk about Miriam.”
    She was frightened and at the same time pleased, and she whispered that they must also talk about God.
    They crept down to the kitchen, where Leonidas took out bread and yogurt, cheese and salted mutton. Mary watched with wonder as this handsome officer arranged the food.
    After they had eaten, they went down to the shore where the great red sun was just appearing behind the hills in the east, its slanting rays coloring the lake and the morning mist slowly rising from the water up toward the town and the mountains.
    “Why did she kill herself?”
    The brutal question worked just as he had hoped. The words came pouring out of Mary. “Because she had committed so many sins that God would never forgive her, for she had lived among heathens who worshipped terrible idols and because I came to love Demeter.”
    “Demeter?”
    Mary told him how she had read the story and how captivated she had been, and how frightened she had been when Miriam had said that the girl who made the spring flowers open and close on the slopes was a heathen goddess, like Isis or Venus, who wallowed in sin among the stars in the heavens.
    Leonidas was surprised. “But Demeter is an image or a saga of the miracle of spring.”
    Mary shook her head without understanding. “Why do you believe it's a woman who makes the earth green? When it's God who does that?”
    “It's women who carry life on. If the women weren't fertile and didn't bear children, we would disappear from the face of the earth.”
    “Do you believe in many gods?”
    “I don't think we should have definite perceptions of what is invisible and immeasurable. But the unknown power in nature and within ourselves may need many images, many expressions. The story of Demeter describes what is incomprehensible in the return of spring and the renewal of life.”
    Mary thought hard about what Erigones had said which she had not understood. “A symbol?”
    “Yes.”
    “But it says in the scriptures…”
    “Mary, have you read the scriptures?”
    The girl closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they were hard with anger. “You know nothing about the laws of the Jews,” she said, thinking about the school in Magdala, where her brothers had been allowed to go to once they were five, while she had no right even to ask them what they had learned.
    “I don't know whether I've read the laws,” Leonidas said. “But I've read your Holy Writ.”
    “You've read…?”
    She was so surprised, she was at a loss for words. She kept shaking her head, but after a while asked him a question. “You know Hebrew?”
    “There's a translation into Greek.”
    Leonidas told her about Septuagint, the book seventy wise men had worked on for centuries. But Mary was not interested in the labors of old Jews in distant Alexandria. She wanted to know what Leonidas thought of the Holy Writ.
    “It's full of beauty and ancient wisdom,” he said. “What I liked best was the idea that you serve God by being merciful to your fellow men.”
    The child drew a deep sigh of relief.
    “Just as in the ancient Greek scripts, there are lots of heroic sagas and amazing adventures. I remember a man who blew a horn so that the walls of Jericho fell. Another hero whose strength was in his hair and who lost it all when a treacherous woman cut it off…Do you know these tales?”
    Mary nodded. She wanted to say that they were not tales, but what happened when God's strength came into the possession of man. But she said nothing.
    Finally, he said: “I don't think you can put the whole of your destiny into the hands of God. I think everyone bears the responsibility for his or her own decisions. Miriam decided to die. It's