He felt her concern and he gentled her, ‘Doesn’t Isaiah tells us that we must not hide from suffering?’
She made a gaze into his eyes and poured out all the strength of her Temple education and intelligence into it, to convince him of her words, ‘Isaiah was speaking of the Messiah, Jesus, the Messiah, whom Israel awaits…we, ordinary people, should not run towards suffering like a thirsty camel runs towards a water hole!’ When she had said it, a sudden remorse moved over her brow and she squared her shoulders and bent to her work to hide it.
‘The world thirsts,’ he told her.
‘Yes…yes…and you thirst also…’ she said, without looking up.
‘I am the thirst and I am also the water that quenches it.’
She paused in her work again and into her unhappy face there entered a trace of a smile. ‘Oh! So now you are two things?’ She gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Where will you go to, this time?’
He broached it gently, ‘To Engaddi.’
She stared down at her dough – it was sticky. She nodded to herself as if she now knew two things: she had not added enough flour, and she had guessed at Engaddi; both did not appear to sit well with her.
‘To the Essenes…well!’ she said, ‘Now I know why they have been at our door like bees hovering over a bush in flower! Engaddi is a desolate place, Jesus!’ She looked up at him. ‘Why must you go there? With all your learning you would be welcomed any time at the Temple as a rabbi. Must I lose two sons to the ascetics and have nothing to show for my life?’
Jesus was reaching into the great earthenware pot wherein was kept the flour. He took up a cupful and brought it to the dough. ‘This camel must quench his thirst,’ he said, and sprinkled the flour.
She turned her dough over and over to take up it up. ‘That’s your mother in you talking! She always knew how much flour was enough, and yet she did not seem to live with her feet on the ground! For my part, I have always felt the ground keenly beneath my feet and that is why I treasured your mother.’ She sighed. ‘You may not know it, but my comfort has always been that I see her in you, in the fairness of your skin and the love of your heart. But Jesus, I also see something else in you! Yes…something more than joy and calmness. There are times when a flame rises up in you that seems not your own. I worry then for you...and when it comes, the moment I recognize that fire, I look away!’ She halted, searching for additional words, ‘What overcomes me? I don’t know! Sometimes I fear that if I were to look too deep into your eyes…I would not meet Jesus bar Joseph at all…but some other man!’ She made a nervous laugh and said, ‘Is this not a remarkable madness?’
He looked at this and words came to him without a thought, ‘What is an eye, mother? Is God not capable of fashioning an eye in place of an eye and a hand in place of hand?’
This surprised her and she didn’t seem to know what to say. ‘God is capable of anything, Jesus. That is what we are told...’
But Jesus did not hear her, for he was taken by his own words. His heart grew wide with recollections half forgotten and half remembered; of two boys sitting in a field or walking arm in arm; two boys sharing meals or laughing together. He had not thought on Yeshua in some time but he had always felt him in his thoughts. Yeshua was the one who would have said such words. A realisation came to him then, an understanding of why his stepmother loved him and yet held him remotely from her; why she seemed close to him one moment and distant the next.
What lived within him, that part of him that was like Yeshua, said to her, ‘God can make two into one if it serves his design. He can make the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and the male like a female and the female like a male, one and the same…’
She stopped kneading her bread, to look at this with a frown.
‘How can he do this?’
‘Perhaps,’ he told her, ‘it is like a woman who conceals leaven in her dough and though she can make two loaves from it makes only one. Perhaps if you were to recognise the son in front of you, the Lord would make the son hidden from you plain to you!’
Her breathing near stopped. Jesus saw something flicker in her eyes and she stifled a gasp.
‘Praise the Lord our God!’ she said, and tears welled up. She opened her mouth to say something else, but her lips would not utter the words.
‡
‘It was only a moment, pairé, spent this way, while the afternoon crept through the shadows of other rooms. Afterwards, having acknowledged it, they both returned to their duties–he to his workshop and she to her dough.’