him. She would come up close and look at all his scars—the slanted thin white line above his eyebrow, the one shaped like the lake on his forearm. His raspy questions made her pause, wide-eyed, and then she would just smile, touch one of the scars with her finger, go back to rubbing out the dust, and start writing again.
For a number of years as she grew up it was murmured that, despite her looks, she was too much like a boy, was too spirited, and that she would need to curb her tendencies to climb trees and run through the wadis with the boys, her skirts tied up around her thighs so she could throw her legs about more freely. But when she neared what should have been the time of coming into womanhood, Yohanon had observed that she did not start to separate herself off from the boys; she shunned the company of girls her age who would gather in groups to giggle and braid their hair and talk about others in undertones. She still came to stop by him as he worked, whatever the latest project on his knees. He would smile, not scold like the other adults who told her to behave more seemingly.
In bed late at night, Hepsabah, Yohanon’s wife, would whisper to Yohanon the local gossip, saying that she didn’t think the girl had started her cycle yet, and might not for a while because she was so physical – or maybe it was that she was so underweight. The older women knew that for some reason a girl had to have a certain amount of flesh on her to go through the regular monthly cycles; those who were too skinny never bled, nor did those, on occasion, who were more active. In any case, Aviel would still touch the boys or her father lightly on the shoulders or chest in talking with them. When her hands were not in the dirt they flew everywhere, drawing pictures in the air, as she talked and folded people into her circle, mixing and stirring her imaginative stew of human relationships.
People in the town assumed that she had not yet started as a woman, because she would have to stop touching men when that happened. Once a girl did begin her monthly cycle, she was also forbidden from going into the men’s areas in the places of worship, since it could never be known for certain when a woman was in her time of ritual uncleanness. From pre-adolescence a young woman’s circle became restricted to other women, but Aviel still appeared to not be bound in this way. At some point she would have to succumb to the laws.
In their private discussions Hepsabah and Yohanon had wondered if it was the sin of that freedom she took which had contributed to her current curse. No one in the town could say definitively in what way her parents must have sinned such that Aviel paid the price, because her father was a synagogue official, a Pharisee, a genuinely pious man, and a good man.
The first few days of illness Aviel had weakened, taking to her bed, pale. In the last few days, her unwellness rose to the surface as she drifted in and out of waking states. She had no delirium, but a sickness of spirit had fallen over her house, a house usually lively. Even the donkey seemed to sense something wrong and had quieted his periodic braying.
With the illness, Aviel had not come out for her normal chores, and she had stopped going to her daily scribal training. Learning this writing practice was a skill her mother and father had finally agreed was a path on which she could be encouraged, because it appeared she had a gift, and the desire to write. For all her liveliness, embedded in her writing was a profound stillness. Jairus, her father, had noticed this precious quietude that seemed to serve as a sort of breathing space from her typical rambunctiousness, even as she learned her letters as a child. Peace would cloak her as she bent over her tablet and rubbed out her mistakes with the flat end of her stylus in the wax layered on wood.
While the Pharisees valued oral tradition more than the written, Jairus recognized she had a talent that should be encouraged. So he had taken her aside one day and sat her down, given her his best stylus, pulled out a thick sheet of lower quality papyrus and the ink that scribes made from soot and gum. He added water to the mix and told her to write while her mother was out at the market. She wrote proudly, embellishing the Greek letters with the slightest of twists, detailing the thickness and thinness of each stroke precisely, writing over and over, Theos Hypsistos, the Most High God. Later, Jairus would teach her Aramaic and Hebrew—even a little Latin, though as a Jew he preferred to avoid the language of their occupiers.
One day Jairus stood in the corner, behind her, watching as her small fingers deftly worked the stylus. “Perhaps . . .” her father murmured, “perhaps you could write for us, help the family,” thinking of all the ways in which a scribe could be employed by Romans and Greeks in trade. “Let’s not let Eemah know just yet,” he whispered to Aviel, using the close name for her mother. “Do you like writing so very much, my little one?” She smiled secretively and nodded, then dipped the reed into the well again. “Yes, Abba. I prefer the ink and papyrus to the wax tablet. The papyrus talks to me,” and with a crease in her young forehead she looked up at him to see if he understood.
“And what does it say?” he smiled, playing along with her as he stroked her hair.
“It says there are marks already on the page, but I must write around them so that just the right ones are revealed. Most people can’t see the other hidden marks.”
“Ah!” He marveled at her inventiveness.
So Jairus had approached his wife about their daughter. As her husband spoke, Rivka’s eyes drifted and she raced ahead over the years to the possible paths this writing would take her daughter. After boring a hole in her husband’s face with her eyes, she had gone to a cubby and pulled out a small leather purse with money. So Jairus had crossed the street to ask Yohanon to create a series of special scribal tables for Aviel as she grew, and through the years the design in the corners had reflected what Yohanon thought a young girl would like. Today, as the carpenter worked, he prayed that the table’s owner would receive it in good health.
Rivka came to the door of the house and scanned for her husband, taking in the street as she raised her face to the fresher outside air. The breeze played at her prematurely graying temples. Her eyes were tired, and as she stood with them closed, praying and breathing in a single motion, she knew she would have to have some respite soon. The beauty of the day belied the desperation of her home’s interior, where Aviel lay bleeding her own river.
Earlier, in the anguished pre-dawn hours filled with the prayer of birdsong, Rivka had known she would have to send out Jairus to seek help, knowing from the wisdom of women through centuries of other women dying in childbirth that her daughter had only a short while to live. It was as if Aviel was laboring to birth something from a depth within her, even though she had not even started her menstruation.
Rivka reflected that just as people had the power to hurt most the ones they loved the most, so too did blood have the power to purify, as with sacrifices, and defile, as with a woman in her menses. Blood was a duality for Jews, the core of both life and death. Blood could save, as it had when Adonai had passed over their ancestor’s houses because of the blood painted on the slave doorposts of Egypt, when they were strangers in a strange land; blood could mean death through plague in that same strange land. Blood was to be respected, and feared.
Aviel wallowed in a strange land this day. Rivka didn’t know what was wrong with her daughter, and the physicians didn’t know either. The girl simply hadn’t started her womanhood, even though her years were appropriate. Rivka and Jairus had spent exceeding amounts of money on help. In the last effort, Aviel had been examined by a renowned midwife who came all the way from Safed to the west—an experience that, when her body wall had broken, had left Aviel crying and cursing that she would never let anyone, especially a man, touch her under her skirts. Rivka had explained to Aviel what they were checking, and she had stayed in the curtained-off room during the exam, but still the girl was angry for weeks and blamed her mother for the violation. She had run through the tall grass, coming back so late one afternoon that Daniel and Nathan, two of the town’s shepherds and friends of the family, had been sent out to look for her.
Now she was fifteen, and her flow appeared to have started as violently as a flash-flood down a
