The Virgin Mother
The sun was like a peach in her
window on the morning her mother had roused her from sleep, whispering, “Mary…
Mary…” until her eyelids opened to the warmth. “Mary, you’re betrothed.” It was
a muted joy that glowed in the woman’s eyes – the happiness of a match for her
daughter eroded by the passing stages of her child’s life. They had arranged
for the girl to marry a man she’d known only in passing. An acquaintance of her
father’s, a good-hearted carpenter.
As she brushed invisible cobwebs
from her cheeks, a thought alighted on the girl, one that was neither
comforting nor chilling but sitting somewhere in-between: that there was always
something around the corner in your life, that there were days marked along
your personal path. The day you are born; the day you speak your first words;
the day your grandmother dies; the day you fall from the roof of the stables
and twist your ankle, so that the pain haunts your foot for the rest of your
life; the day you marry…
It was not something she could
put into words, but she could feel it in her marrow. This impending union was laden with importance. It made her veins run cold. Something was on its
way. Slowly, the girl dragged her body up, and went to the cistern for a
handful of water.
Mary wished to see the man to
whom she was promised. She took her father’s donkey with her to the market, and
kept her hand on its neck as they tramped side-by-side. When the carpenter’s
workshop approached – the sound of sawing and the dust it released filling her
body – she slowed her steps until the beast’s head was shielding hers. The
carpenter, Joseph, was older than she. He had a beard of short chestnut curls,
and a sharp straight nose. But the heavy lids of his eyes softened him, as did
the crow’s feet at their sides, and his overall effect was more fatherly than
fearful. Amongst a pile of wooden planks, which together formed two benches, he
crafted his trade. His long, harmless fingers shooed the dust from the wood.
They slid along the thing he was making, and tenderly rubbed, and moulded,
until chunks of tree began to take the shape of furniture. Passing men greeted
him and he smiled back, squinting in the sunlight. His workshop was open to the
street, as though to welcome friends and neighbours’ chatter rather than
custom.
Then, in a flicker of Mary’s
eyelashes, the scent of basil and sawdust gave way to the tang of leather. She
heard their sandals on the stones before she saw them: the Romans.
The girl thought it best to move,
not to appear a target for the soldiers’ wandering eyes. As she passed the two
men, wishing the donkey were blocking them rather than Joseph, one of the
soldiers met her glance. She started, and he turned promptly to his comrade.
She had noticed that soldier on previous occasions. His upright stance marked him out, proud as he was of the uniform that should have worn him down. All faces became familiar
in this town, this bowl out of which few ever thought to climb. Some who had tried
had only slid back down into it. This soldier, with his upturned chin, beheld
the Nazarenes as though he knew what their fates were. In a way, Mary supposed,
perhaps he did.
Maybe she would leave. Maybe
Joseph would take her out of Nazareth. Her parents had betrothed her to a man
who would treat her kindly. She was sure of it. It was but one step in the path
of life written for her to follow. But although his glance was brief, and
unthreatening, Mary knew in the instant their eyes met that the Roman would
prove the biggest turn in her life.
That night she imagined him as
she tried to sleep. She turned her head to the window, where his hand gripped
the stone. One by one, his limbs took shape in the ether. His arm, pulling up
his head, and his shoulders, then his chest, and his waist… The soldier who had
been trained to tear men apart, strip them into nothing more than meat. His
arms could break Joseph’s in half. His legs could shatter Joseph’s skull. The
carpenter’s heavy-lidded eyes, obliterated.
Those eyes had looked at her only
once that evening. Her parents had invited their future son-in-law to dinner.
They were eating the bread Mary had made, and he congratulated her on her
blessed fingers, which only brought thoughts of his own to her silent tongue,
before he turned away again and spoke with her father about the livestock and
the harvest.
Joseph would make a peaceful
husband. He would glance at her once, once in a while, and though his eyes were
of a grey as shocking as a thunderclap, his temperament was mellow as a stream.
The hazy soldier had made it over
her windowsill, and was advancing to her bed. Mary felt the moisture drain from
her mouth, the droplets of sweat gather at her hairline, her temples, and roll
down to the sheets where her legs shivered but her hands were numb. She inhaled
the invisible leather, the night, the starlight. Her body turned to gold.
“Go and fetch some water,” her
mother demanded one morning, “we’ll be needing it soon.” She could see the
light changing, she said; a sandstorm was on its way. Mary would have spoken,
but her mother had been proved right on several past occasions. The woman,
though godless, had formed a system of belief based on the notion that if she
felt something, it was sure to be. So Mary trudged to the well with her
father’s donkey, swaddled in thoughts of Joseph and his piety. She wondered if
the sight of a sandstorm would instil in him the fear of G-d; if it was, to the
humble carpenter, to her future husband, the equivalent of a flood or a swarm
of locusts.
But her thoughts were shot with
arrows for there, at the well, was the Roman soldier. He drank water from his
palm. Mary thought how much sweeter it tasted, water drunk from your own skin
as opposed to a cup.
A heartbeat later he saw her, and
straightened his back. It was a response that amused her, given that he tended
to carry himself taller than his height. There was a defiance in his chin and
puffed-out chest that only highlighted his stature; here was a grown man who
could not disguise the fact that he was barely taller than a young maiden.
Mary was aware of his lingering
gaze while she filled her jug with water. Flies swarmed around them, and she could
hear their buzzing, and the donkey shaking his head to rid himself of them, but
she could see nothing. Without her knowing it, the stones of the well had been
dyed a single shade of orange. The scent of the olive trees evanesced.
Sand-filled air had poured into the bowl of Nazareth to bury the creatures
great and small within it. The mountains around them had struggled to keep it
at bay.
A sandal on stone. The soldier’s
eyes were green.
The sky behind him had turned to
turmeric, and the mountains had eroded to dust. His lips had found their way
through the sand to her neck. His hands fought their way through her robe,
until both their dying skins pressed together in a shock of warmth. He pinned
her to the well, and all she could hear was his short breath, the slap of his
leather tassels, her gasp as he grabbed her feeble ankle, her sinful self
beneath this gauze of dirt, through which it seemed even G-d’s eyes could not
travel.
Mary went home with no water and
a broken jug. “I shouldn’t have sent you!” her mother cried. “Anything could
have happened.”
The next morning, panic swept
through the town like a surge of blood. A woman was being stoned. She had
managed to drag herself to the well, screaming for mercy to a deaf L-rd,
beneath a shower of cries – “Whore! Whore!” – with stones thumping against her
back and shoulders, and finally, against her head. Her fingers twitched as the
Nazarenes continued to dole out their punishment. It wasn’t enough that the
sinner die. She had to be ground to ashes.
Twelve days had passed before
Mary understood what was happening to her. There was no sign of her monthly
bleeding, and when she confided in her mother, drenched in the fear of trouble
to come, a flicker in the woman’s eyes confirmed it. “You’re with child, my child.”
Her mother said this as plainly as she might have said the sun was hot, and she
smiled that smile of hers – the one that hinted at further wickedness yet to
arise in the girl, whether Mary was aware of it or not.
Mary’s father, a descendant of
King David, was flushed with shame upon hearing of his daughter’s own. But he
was a soft-hearted man, and it only took a quiver in Mary’s voice to provoke
his tears. He embraced the girl, then suggested she be sent to her cousin
Elizabeth in Jerusalem, so that her time away might inspire in them an
explanation for Joseph. “What explanation? She was attacked!” her mother
insisted, and Mary listened. The story mushroomed in the air around her head,
glimmering, a memory of a story of a thing that had happened to a different
girl named Mary.
So clouded by her thoughts was
she that even Jerusalem, a place ten times the town Nazareth was, in the
company of her beloved relatives, was an event she only half-lived. For three
months, Mary swept, gathered olives and made bread. She obeyed Elizabeth’s
gentle instructions and greeted Zechariah in the same way every evening when he
returned from temple. Elizabeth was lit from within, and was beautiful despite
her age and crooked teeth. Zechariah moved as though his head were weighted
with coins, and although she wasn’t sure what she believed, Mary found his
words of G-d and angels comforting, if only because it was his raspy sweet
voice that spoke them. When she looked in her relatives’ eyes, however, she
found them to be mirrors; they cast back her abominable sin. But Elizabeth said
nothing. She patted her own growing belly, and spoke of the unborn children
that would grow up to be as close cousins as Mary and she.
On arriving back in Nazareth,
with no explanation for Joseph other than the truth – that she had lost her
senses in the sandstorm and the Roman had taken advantage of a weak young
virgin – Mary felt a sense of loss. A piece was missing, a piece of herself
that she could never recover. She tried not to look in the direction of the
well, and focussed instead on the activity of the market. Traders from other
towns and lands vied for attention. Their voices, their pottery, their
pomegranates, their bulgur, their sandalwood, their frankincense, their
blankets, all intermingled with the earthy odour of donkeys, and of camel hair
and dung.
She found Joseph in his workshop,
piecing together a table. She willed herself invisible for a while and simply
watched him, he oblivious and totally absorbed in his cause: the fitting together
of separate parts, cut from the same tree, reshaped to form a whole new entity.
“Joseph,” she croaked. And the
grey shock of his eyes was upon her.
With a hand on her stomach she confessed. The more of the
story she told, the more distant and unreal it felt. The soldier became less a
human being than a shadow. Although they whispered, shielded from view by the
stack of furniture Joseph had built for a wealthy client, Mary couldn’t help
flicking glances at the street. His attention, however, remained fixed on her.
He had never looked at her so much and, she knew, never would again.
When Mary finished her story,
Joseph leant against the damp wall, his hand resting on a table. “So in six
months,” he calculated.
“Yes.” It wasn’t a word but a
breath.
“That’s too little time to…”
He did not finish. The memory of
the woman at the well, with stones crushing her body, possessed Mary’s head
like a demon. It had ensnared Joseph as well, for he breathed deeply and spoke:
“The governor has requested I
register in Bethlehem. Tax collectors…”
But a man did not discuss
economics with his betrothed, so his words faded. Mary remained silent, knowing
this, and looked nowhere but at his sandal. One of his toenails was broken,
like the cracked surface of parched ground.
“We will go together,” Joseph
continued, “soon, and return after the baby is born. It’s the only solution.”
She wanted to thank him. She
wanted to spill the tears of her brimming heart at his feet, but she didn’t
dare.
“You have been blessed, Mary.”
That calm storm of his eyes. “G-d has smiled upon you.”
And, because it seemed the right
thing to say, she responded: “Glory be to G-d.”
On their way out of Nazareth,
Mary’s husband greeted every Roman soldier with narrowed eyes. The girl felt a
twinge of love at his protectiveness. But when Joseph absentmindedly placed his
hand on the donkey’s neck, unknowing that Mary’s hand was also there, and
flinched at the touch of her skin, the girl understood that only a miracle
could unite them as a family. Perhaps it would be different when the baby was
born. She prayed it would be a son; that she might in some way compensate
Joseph for the sacrifice he had made in marrying this virgin mother. And that
in time, her one moment’s mistake would be diminished.
She tried not to think about the
stoning, or the sinner’s family burying the pummelled and pulpy body. It
stirred the queasiness that grew beneath her robes. Yet she could almost hear
those mournful sobs, mingling with the whispers and the myrrh. She saw the back
of her husband’s head, his thin neck, and the space between his ribs and his
arm where she wished she could belong.
By nightfall, both Joseph and the
donkey struggled to walk. Nazareth was far behind them. Its surrounding
mountains had been cleared as though in a dream, several years in the distance
of the past. All she recalled of the solider now was the colour of his eyes.
Nothing more.
Her baby would be born in
Bethlehem. How could she have foreseen it? But there it was, written before she
had ever existed.
All around them now was desert,
and the multitude of stars in the sky. Mary looked for the brightest among
them, and prayed to it as though it were G-d Himself. May He know her sins and
forgive them. May He, in His infinite grace, turn a wayward girl into an honest,
compassionate woman. May all ages call her blessed. When they reach Bethlehem,
and the baby is born, may she cease to be Mary of Nazareth, and simply be this
good man’s wife, and this baby’s mother.
*But in case it does, © Polis Loizou, 2011
