“And he said: If you don’t remember, ask her. Maeve of Magdala knows.”
“There!” she said as triumphant as if she had just bested the chief Pharisee in an argument. “That is why you have to be present at the meetings, Maeve. He doesn’t want everything left to Peter and the men. He wants you to speak for him.”
She took my arm and started leading me from the alley.
“I’m not sure that’s what he meant,” I fretted. “Anyway, Mary, I don’t understand what exactly it is we are trying to do in these meetings.”
“We meet in his Name. To decide how best to continue his work.”
“What? Healing people? Loving people?”
“Well, yes, that of course. But more than that, restoring the house of Israel.”
I was quiet a moment. “I don’t know if I am welcome in that house, Mary.”
“That is one of the questions under debate. Whether Jesus’s message is for Jews and proselytes only. You have a duty to speak, Mary. You were his wife.”
I noticed she used the past tense this time. It was confusing. He wants you to speak for him. You were his wife.
“But I wasn’t given the gift of other tongues,” I reminded her.
In case you are wondering where I was when the tongues of fire ignited the apostles, turning them multi-lingual in a flash, I was in the same alley. I did see the men spilling out onto the street, jabbering and staggering, laughing wildly, rushing up to strangers on the street. The word on the street is they were drunk, despite the early hour.
“You already speak five languages,” Mary countered.
“Not particularly useful ones,” I objected. “Lots of people speak Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. It has not been given to me to speak the languages of Parthians, Medes, and Elamites. And almost no one in Jerusalem speaks the Celtic dialects I know.”
Mary didn’t bother answering, just stepped up her pace and kept a firm grip on my arm.
“Where are we going?” I changed tack.
“Peter is going to preach at Solomon’s Portico.”
“But I’m hungry,” I protested. “I need to eat something.”
“Mary, you were just sick. Don’t you think you should give your stomach a little rest? It seems as if all you do lately is eat and throw up and sleep. You’re not yourself at all. I wonder if you have worms,” she speculated with as much curiosity as distaste.
I could almost hear her brain sifting through Leviticus for advice in such a case. The Most High concerned himself with minute details of diet and health. He not only numbered the hairs on your head but he knew if you had dandruff and what to do about it.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just a little overwrought.”
Mary B still hadn’t guessed my condition. No one had, so far as I knew. I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could. A secret that only I knew. A secret that I contained. Literally.
No matter how many times I’ve approached it, the Temple of Jerusalem always takes me aback. As you emerge from the warren-like streets with their pungent smells and donkey-cart jams and behold the vast southern steps, your sense of scale changes. All at once you are tiny, something to be swept away or crushed should that be the will of the invisible god who lives in the empty chamber at the Temple’s heart where only the High Priest enters once a year. But if you are accustomed to thinking of a temple as some place hushed and removed from the fray with dust floating in filtered beams of light, scratch that image. This Temple was alive, monstrous, breathing smoke and fire. And it was noisy, clamorous. A temple in those days was marketplace, school, court of law, as well as the site of bellowing sacrifice (animals did not always go quietly to their deaths) and loud prayer and praise.
As Mary led me up the southern steps—hot and fully exposed to the sun—I felt dizzy and also disoriented not in place but in time. The last time I had come to the Temple, I’d been dragged here as an adulteress to be judged by my own beloved. The mood was not as tense today, but something had happened to excite the crowd.
“What’s going on?” Mary asked a man at the edge of the crowd.
“Ssh! I’m trying to listen to the preaching.”
“A healing,” someone else answered. “A cripple, just got up and walked.”
“One of the Galileans healed him in the name of the dead Nazarene. Jesus.”
“Not dead. They say he rose again, just like it says in scripture.”
“That rabble rouser. I wouldn’t put it past him to fake his own death. I bet he’s hiding out in the desert laughing up his dirty sleeve.”
Mary and I began to duck and weave our way to the front. It was all so familiar. It had been our way of life for years, healing, teaching, debating, dealing with the press of crowds. For a moment I let myself believe: he’s here. He’s come back; he never left. Any minute now, I’ll hear his voice telling a story or turning a question on its head.
“Now I know, brothers, that neither you nor your leaders had any idea of what you were really doing, but this is the way God carried out what he had foretold, when he said through all his prophets that his Anointed One would suffer.”
But it was unmistakably Peter speaking in plain Aramaic, his voice a little hoarse, for he did not have Jesus’s knack of projecting to a huge audience without shouting. I also noticed that the Pentecostal tongues of fire had left his Galilean twang intact. But I had to admit something about Peter was different. He used to remind me of a big not-very-well trained dog who would bound up to you and lick your face, and then be ashamed and a little bewildered when he found he had knocked you over. Now that doggy impulsiveness had given way to a dogged determination. His nickname the Rock (as in Rocks for Brains) now seemed to describe his immovability.
“Now you must repent and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out,” he continued pausing to wipe away the sweat that was stinging his eyes, “and so that the Lord may send the time of comfort. Then he will send you the Anointed One he has predestined, that is Jesus, whom heaven must keep till the universal restoration comes which God has proclaimed, speaking through his holy prophets.”
“What’s he talking about?” I whispered to Mary.
“The coming again of Jesus as the Messiah,” she answered impatiently, as if it should be obvious.
“He’s coming back?” I said, hopeful and doubtful in equal measure. “When did he say that?”
“It’s in the prophecies. Ssh. Listen.”
“Moses for example said ‘From among your brothers the Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me; you will listen to whatever he tells you. Anyone who refuses to listen to that prophet shall be cut off from the people.’ In fact, all the prophets that have ever spoken, from Samuel onwards, have predicted these days.”
“What days?” I disturbed Mary again.
“The last days, of course. He talked to us about them.”
“I don’t remember—”
“That’s because you weren’t there. Have you forgotten what you did? Now hush.”
I had not forgotten, and apparently Mary hadn’t either. I had gone my own way, back to my old ways, in the upper room, under the sign of the dove. Jesus should have repudiated me at the very least. My adultery, according to Jewish Law, was punishable by death—although it was never clear if I was a legitimate wife. But my beloved had not only protected me and forgiven me, he had begged me to forgive him.
“Here is my sin, Maeve. All the things I’ve been saying, the horror I’ve been prophesying, I may have spoken the truth, but it’s not the