The Testament of Mary (11 page)

There are times in these days before death comes with my name in whispers, calling me towards darkness, lulling me towards rest, when I know that I want more from the world. Not much, but more. It is simple. If water can be changed into wine and the dead can be brought back, then I want time pushed back. I want to live again before my son’s death happened, or before he left home, when he was a baby and his father was alive and there was ease in the world. I want one of those golden Sabbath days, days without wind when there were prayers on our lips, when I joined the women and intoned the words, the supplication to God to give justice to the weak and the orphan, maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute, rescue the needy, deliver them from the hands of the wicked. When I said these words to God, it mattered that my husband and son were close by and that soon, when I had walked home alone and sat in the shadows with my hands joined, I would
hear their footsteps returning and I would await my son’s shy smile as the door was opened for him by his father and then we would sit in silence waiting for the sun to disappear when we could talk again and eat together and prepare with ease for the peaceful night after the day when we had renewed ourselves, when our love for each other, for God and the world, had deepened and spread.

This is over now. The boy became a man and left home and became a dying figure hanging on a cross. I want to be able to imagine that what happened to him will not come, it will see us and decide – not now, not them. And we will be left in peace to grow old.

They will return, my minders, my guards. They have me watched in any case. In a few days they will know that I woke in the dawn like this and stood in this room. Somebody will have seen a shadow, something through the window, or heard a sound. I am not alone here. Perhaps they pay Farina to watch me and report on me, or threaten her with something if she does not. Or it could be one of the others whom I pass and do not speak to. It does not matter.

And each time we start again at the beginning and each time they move from being excited by a detail to being exasperated by something that comes soon
afterwards, another detail maybe, a refusal to add what they want me to add, or an opinion I express on their tone or their efforts to make simple sense of things which are not simple.

But maybe they are simple. Maybe when I die, and I will die soon, they will be even simpler. It will be as though what I saw and felt did not happen, or happened in the same way a small flap of a bird’s wing in the high sky happens on a day when there is no wind. They want to make what happened live for ever, they told me. What is being written down, they say, will change the world.

‘The world?’ I asked. ‘All of it?’

‘Yes,’ the man who had been my guide said, ‘all of it.’

I must have looked perplexed.

‘She does not understand,’ he said to his companion, and it was true. I did not understand.

‘He was indeed the Son of God,’ he said.

And then, patiently, he began to explain to me what had happened to me at my son’s conception as the other nodded and encouraged him. I barely listened. I had other things to do. I know what happened. I know that my own happiness in those first months when I was with child felt strange and special, that I lived in a way that was different, that I often stood at the window and looked at the light outside and felt that the new life within me, the second heart beating, fulfilled me beyond anything
I had ever imagined. Later, I learned that this is how we all prepare ourselves to give birth and to nurture, that it comes from the body itself and makes its way into the spirit and it does not seem ordinary. So I smiled when they spoke because they seemed to know something that was true about the light and grace that came at that time and for once I liked how eager and sure they were.

It was when they came to the last part that I stood up from the chair and moved away from them, assaulted by their words.

‘He died to redeem the world,’ the other man said. ‘His death has freed mankind from darkness and from sin. His father sent him into the world that he might suffer on the cross.’

‘His father?’ I asked. ‘His father –?’

‘His suffering was necessary,’ he interrupted, ‘it was how mankind would be saved.’

‘Saved?’ I asked and raised my voice. ‘Who has been saved?’

‘Those who came before him and those who live now and those who are not yet born,’ he said.

‘Saved from death?’ I asked.

‘Saved for eternal life,’ he said. ‘Everyone in the world will know eternal life.’

‘Oh, eternal life!’ I replied. ‘Oh, everyone in the world!’

I looked at both of them, their eyes hooded and something dark appearing in their faces.

‘Is that what it was for?’

They caught one another’s eye and for the first time I felt the enormity of their ambition and the innocence of their belief.

‘Who else knows this?’

‘It will be known,’ one of them said.

‘Through your words?’ I asked.

‘Through our words and the words of others of his disciples.’

‘You mean,’ I asked, ‘the men who followed him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are they still alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘They were hiding when he died,’ I said. ‘They were hiding when he died.’

‘They were there when he rose again,’ one of them said.

‘They saw his grave,’ I said. ‘I never saw his grave, I never washed his body.’

‘You were there,’ my guide said. ‘You held his body when it was taken down from the cross.’

His companion nodded.

‘You watched us as we covered his body in spices and wound his body in linen cloths and buried him in a sepulchre near the place where he was crucified. But you were not with us, you were in a place where you were protected when he came among us three days after his death and spoke to us before he rose to be with his father.’

‘His father,’ I said.

‘He was the Son of God,’ the man said, ‘and he was sent by his father to redeem the world.’

‘By his death, he gave us life,’ the other said. ‘By his death, he redeemed the world.’

I turned towards them then and whatever it was in the expression on my face, the rage against them, the grief, the fear, they both looked up at me alarmed and one of them began to move towards me to stop me saying what it was I now wanted to say. I edged back from them and stood in the corner. I whispered it at first and then I said it louder, and as he moved away from me and almost cowered in the corner I whispered it again, slowly, carefully, giving it all my breath, all my life, the little that is left in me.

‘I was there,’ I said. ‘I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.’

They departed that night on a caravan that was making its way towards the islands and there was in their tone and manner a new distance from me, something close to fear but maybe even closer to pure exasperation and disgust. But they left me money and provisions and they left me a sense that I was still under their protection. It was easy to be polite to them. They are not fools. I admire how deliberate they are, how exact their plans, how dedicated
they are, how different from the group of unshaven brutes and twitchers, men who could not look at women, who came to my house after my husband’s death and sat with my son, talking nonsense through the night. They will thrive and prevail and I will die.

I do not go to the Synagogue now. All of that is gone. I would be noticed; my strangeness would stand out. But I go with Farina to the other Temple and sometimes I go alone in the morning when I wake or later when there are shadows coming over the world, presaging night. I move quietly. I speak to her in whispers, the great goddess Artemis, bountiful with her arms outstretched and her many breasts waiting to nurture those who come towards her. I tell her how much I long now to sleep in the dry earth, to go to dust peacefully with my eyes shut in a place near here where there are trees. In the meantime, when I wake in the night, I want more. I want what happened not to have happened, to have taken another course. How easily it might not have happened! How easily we could have been spared! It would not have taken much. Even the thought of its possibility comes into my body now like a new freedom. It lifts the darkness and pushes away the grief. It is as if a traveller, weary after days of walking in a dry desert, a place void of shade, were to come to a hilltop and see below a city, an opal set in emerald, filled with plenty, a city filled
with wells and trees, with a marketplace laden with fish and fowl and the fruits of the earth, a place redolent with the smell of cooking and spices.

I begin to walk down towards it along a soft path. I am being led into this strange place of souls, along great narrow bridges spanning gurgling, steaming water, like lava in the dying glow, with island meadows filled with vital growth below. Being led by no one. All around there is silence and soothing, dwindling light. The world has loosened, like a woman preparing for bed who lets her hair flow free. And I am whispering the words, knowing that words matter, and smiling as I say them to the shadows of the gods of this place who linger in the air to watch me and hear me.