The Testament of Mary (3 page)

There is one chair in this room in which no one has ever sat. Perhaps in the past the chair was in daily use somewhere, but it came through this door during a time when I needed desperately to remember some years when I knew love. It was to be left unused. It belongs to memory, it belongs to a man who will not return, whose body is dust but who once held sway in the world. He will not come back. I keep the chair in the room because he will not come back. I do not need to keep food for him, or water, or a place in my bed, or whatever news I could gather that might interest him. I keep the
chair empty. It is not much to do, and sometimes I look at it as I pass and that is as much as I can do, maybe it is enough, and maybe there will come a time when I will not need to have such a reminder of him so close by. Maybe the memory of him as I enter my last days will retreat into my heart more profoundly and I will not need help from any object in the room.

I knew, in their roughness, their way of moving in as though they were making a raid on space, that one of them would select this chair, would make it seem casual and thus all the more difficult to oppose. But I was waiting.

‘Do not sit in that chair,’ I said when he had moved the table aside and pulled out the chair, which I had carefully trapped against the wall so that it would not be defiled by my visitors. ‘You can use the one beside it but not that one.’

‘I cannot use a chair?’ he enquired, as though addressing a fool. ‘What else are chairs for? I cannot sit on a chair?’ The tone now was more insolent than menacing, but it had an element of menace.

‘No one sits on that chair,’ I said quietly.

‘No one?’ he asked.

I made my voice even quieter.

‘No one,’ I replied.

My two visitors looked at each other. I was waiting. I did not turn away from them and I tried to seem gentle, someone hardly worth defying, especially
on what might have seemed to them like a whim, a woman’s notion.

‘Why not?’ he asked, with a sort of sweet sarcasm.

‘Why not?’ he asked again as though I were a child.

I could hardly breathe now and I rested my hands on the back of the chair that was nearest me and I realized from the way my breath came and the sudden slowness in my heartbeat that it would not be long before all the life in me, the little left, would go, as a flame goes out on a mild day, easily, needing only the smallest hint of wind, a sudden flicker and then out, gone, as though it had never been alight.

‘Don’t sit there,’ I said quietly.

‘But you must explain,’ he said.

‘The chair,’ I said, ‘is left for someone who will not return.’

‘But he will return,’ he said.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘he will not.’

‘Your son will return,’ he said.

‘The chair is for my husband,’ I replied, as if he this time were the fool. I felt content when I said the name, as though the very saying of the word ‘husband’ had pulled something back into the room, or a shadow of something, enough for me in any case, but not enough for them. And then he went to sit in the chair, he turned it towards himself, he was ready to perch there with his back to me.

I was waiting. Quickly, I found the sharp knife and I held it and touched the blade. I did not point it towards them, but my movement to reach for it had been so swift and sudden that I caught their attention. I glanced at them and then looked down at the blade.

‘I have another one hidden,’ I said, ‘and if either of you touch the chair again, if you so much as touch it, I will wait, I am waiting now, and I will come in the night, I will move as silently as the air itself moves, and you will not have time to make a sound. Do not think for a moment that I will not do this.’

I turned then as though I had work to do. I washed some jugs that did not need to be washed and then I asked them if they would get me water. I knew that they wanted to be alone with each other now and when they had gone out I put the chair back against the wall and then the table against it. I knew that maybe it was time I forgot about the man I married, as I would join him soon enough. Maybe it was time to consign this chair to nothing, but I would do this on a day when it was not important. I would break its spell in my own good time.

I move now between the things of this world that are precise, sharp and close by, and some bitter
imaginings. On those Sabbath days once the prayers were intoned and God was thanked and praised, there was always time to wonder about what was beyond us in the sky or what world lay buried in the hollows of the earth. I had a sense on some of those days, after hours of silence, of my mother struggling to come towards me, reaching out from somewhere very dark, reaching towards me as though looking for food or drink. As darkness fell on those Sabbath days I saw her sinking back into a cavernous place, a huge, wide-mouthed space; over her were things flitting and flying and there was the sound of the rumbling earth beneath her. I do not know why I imagined this, and it would have been easier to imagine her slowly turning to dust in the warm earth close to the places that she loved. And it was always easy to switch from these musings on imagined places under the earth to the absorbing business of now, or the things that happened, or the figures who came in daylight to my door.

Marcus from Cana was not my cousin, although he called me his cousin because our mothers gave birth to us at the same time in adjoining houses. We played together and we grew up together until it was time for us to grow apart. When he came to the house in
Nazareth I was alone. I had not seen him in years. I knew that he had gone to Jerusalem and I knew that he had greater talents than many others who had gone and that he had inherited from his father a mixture of shyness and stability, a way to impress people, fool them maybe if there was a need for that, and an ability to agree with everyone and have no opinions of his own on anything, or opinions of his own that he kept to himself.

Marcus appeared at my door and sat at my table. He did not want water or food and there was something new about him, something I would later notice when my protectors, or my guards, or whatever it is they are, came to this house – a coldness, a determination, an ability to use silence, a hardness around the eyes and the mouth which suggested a hardness in the heart. He told me what he had seen, and he told me what, even then, the consequences would be. He had not seen what he saw for no reason, he said; he had been asked by one of his colleagues to accompany him on the Sabbath day to the pool behind the sheep market in Jerusalem because it was known that this was where my son and his friends congregated. This was where, in Marcus’s words, they caused a fuss and made a crowd gather and began to be noticed.

There was an old fool, Marcus said, who used to lie there among all the rest of them, the crippled, the withered, the blind, the lame and the halt, and
they were mad enough to believe that at a certain season an angel came down into the pool and disturbed the water and whoever was the first in the pool after the troubling of the water would be cured of whatever disease he had. And my son and his friends, the young men he had come to the house with, were there that day. Marcus saw all the commotion he and his friends were making, whipping up hysteria among the crowds. They must have known, Marcus said, how carefully they were being watched. From all sides, he said, there were spies, informers, middlemen. They were open in their watching, perhaps their being paid or rewarded depended on their being seen to watch. Marcus said that he stood close to the pool, close enough to see that the focus of attention was this idiot, half beggar, half imbecile, who was roaring out that he had been crippled for many years. Marcus heard my son as everyone around came closer. ‘Wilt thou be made whole?’ he was shouting. Some were laughing and doing imitations of his voice, but others were beckoning even more people to move silently towards the voice at the centre, near the pool, the voice booming: ‘Wilt thou be made whole?’ And the idiot began insisting that the angel was coming to trouble the water, but because he had no servant to help him, and only the first in the water could be cured, he was doomed to remain immobile for the rest of his days. And the voice
rose up again, and this time no one laughed or mocked. There was complete silence from all around as this time the voice said: ‘Take up thy bed and walk.’

Marcus did not know for how long the silence lasted; he could see the man lying there and then the crowd pushed back and still no one spoke as the man stood up and my son told him that he was to sin no more. And then the man moved away, leaving the stretcher there. He made his way towards the Temple with a crowd following him, and my son and his friends following too. They were creating a frenzy on the Sabbath. In the Temple, no one cared about the man and why he was walking, but they cared that he was shouting and pointing and that there was a large crowd following him and that it was the Sabbath. No one, Marcus said, was in any doubt about who had caused this breach of the Sabbath. The only reason my son was not arrested then and there, Marcus said, was because he was being watched to see where he might go next and to see who was backing him. The authorities, both Jewish and Roman, wondered where he would take them, what would happen if they made sure that he went nowhere without spies and observers.

‘Is there anything we can do,’ I asked, ‘to stop him?’

‘Yes there is,’ Marcus said. ‘If he were to return home, return alone, and not even be seen on the
street, not even work or have any visitors, just stay in these rooms, disappear, then that might save him, but even then he will be watched; but nothing else will work and if it happens, if he returns, then it must be soon.’

And so I decided to set out for Cana for the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, having decided previously that I would not go. I disliked weddings. I disliked the amount of laughter and talk and the waste of food and the drink flowing over and the bride and groom more like a couple to be sacrificed, for the sake of money, or status, or inheritance, to be singled out and celebrated for something that was none of anyone’s business, and then to be set up with roars of jollity and drunkenness and unnecessary gatherings of people. It was easier when you were young because somehow those days of smiling people and the general madness made your eyes dart in your head until you could come to love a buffoon if he came close enough.

I went to Cana not to celebrate the joining together with much clamour of two people, one of whom I barely knew and the other not at all, but to see if I could get my son home. For days before, I summoned what strength I had in my eyes and I
practised with my voice, worked out ways of keeping it low and insistent. I prepared warnings and threats if promises would not do. There must be, I thought, one thing I could say that might matter. One sentence. One promise. One threat. One warning. And I was sure as I sat there that I had it; I had fooled myself that he would come back with me, that he had had enough of wandering and that he was broken now, or that I could break him with some words.

When I arrived in Cana some days before the wedding I knew, or I almost knew, that I had come in vain. The only talk was the talk of him, and the fact that I was his mother meant that I was noticed and approached.