Secret Magdalene by Ki Longfellow Read Free Book Online Page B

demand, or we complain, until one day she rounds on us, saying, “By all the salt in all the sea, how thoughtless are the young! If there is that which does not feel, save furies of the body, and the spirit caught up solely in the self, it is you two!” And then she tugs her skirts from our hands and walks away. We do not see her again for two whole days. It surprises us, even quells us for an hour or so, but it does not stop us. We remain insufferable.
    The merchant Ananias comes and goes on his travels. Addai spends much time in Jerusalem working on the construction of the dead Herod’s Temple, a task that has lasted his kind for more than forty years. But Salome and Tata and I never go anywhere at all.
    We see no reason to climb down more than once through any of the deeply cut nahals just to find ourselves on the shores of a sea that stinks of sulfur and bitumen. There is nothing there, not even a wharf, though boats go by below us daily.
    Addai tells us we are fortunate to arrive in the season of the rains. He swears that all through summer, day and night, one can bake bread on the flat clay roofs, but for now the winter sun shines off the smooth lime-stoned walls in light as white as linen. It takes days before my eyes grow used to this, and to the lack of color. There are only the pale yellows of the dry cliffs above and below us, the pale yellows of the high flat shelf where the settlement stands, the pale dusty green of the palms, and the lapis lazuli blue of the pools. There seem more pools here than in the whole of Jerusalem, and from each to each, sweet blue water flows through canals cut in the yellow rocks.
    As for the buildings within the yellow walls, some are as high as three stories. The tower is higher than this and, oddly, has no entrance on the ground floor. But no building is a house. It is either a meeting hall or an eating hall or a workshop or a flour mill, or it is full of storage rooms, but never a sleeping chamber. People sleep in tents north of the outer walls. Addai tells us many more sleep in the caves that are all around us in the high and dusty cliffs. I shudder at the thought—no matter how hot the night, I would not sleep in a cave for my life. There are sand rats in caves. There are vipers in caves.
    We have come to know the handsome young man with the bent nose, Seth of Damascus. When he finds us idle, he produces books from somewhere, and we devour them…we would read anything, and we gaze on Seth’s books as a drunkard might gaze on a vat of wine. For example, the Book of Enoch. In Genesis it says that a thousand generations ago Noah and Enoch walked with God, but only Enoch vanished because God took him. But the Book of Enoch says more. “And I looked and saw a lofty throne. Its appearance was transparent hailstone, its wheels like the sun, and then the sight of the cherubim. From underneath the throne came streams of fire so that I could not look directly at it. The Great Glory sat there. His raiment shone more brightly than sun and was brighter than snow.”
    Though I have never spoken of it, I know what Enoch saw, for I too looked and saw a Great Glory as I lay ill, and I tremble in my skin to read another try to describe it.
    Though he is young himself, Seth seems always at a distance, always watching, always weighing. Sometimes it seems he is become our shadow. He also becomes our uncle. If anyone asks, and many do, they are told I am John, and Salome is Simon, and that we are kin to Seth. This silences them immediately. Seth explained the need to remain male like this. “If you are female, you will be treated as females.” That was all that Salome needed to hear. Young Simon and younger John have appeared as prophets in the wilderness, and we are both respected and avoided.
    Tata has had a great deal to say on the subject of our being males, much more than when we merely went to Heli’s house. Here we must learn how to stand, how to sit, how to make this gesture or that.