I have little in common except for Joanna. Oh, and I’m not very religious either. When your brother talks to me, he looks around for someone more important. Except when he needs money! Ha, ha, then he pays attention to me!” He bounced again. “Oh, here he comes now.”
“Efron, so good of you to come,” said Chuza. “If Yona needs you to attend her, I hope you won’t feel obliged to remain longer.”
“That means I’m dismissed,” Efron whispered to me as Chuza left us.
“I wish you could stay,” I said.
He patted my hands. “Come by my shop when you feel up to it, and I’ll have some tunics and mantles made for you.” He winked. “And I’ll only charge Chuza double what I should!”
I was alone again in my corner. The afternoon wore on and on, lonelier and lonelier for me. Just days ago, I’d lived in a village where I knew everyone and was protected by my loving father and brother. Now I resided in a city, among strangers, where death struck senselessly and changed lives in an instant. Chuza and I didn’t know each other. I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me. Yet, since I no longer had a father, I was the legal property of my elder half-brother. Chuza now had the power to determine the rest of my life. He had the right to decide where and how I would live, when and whom I would marry. The rodent, some demon form, crept about inside my stomach.
From time to time, Joanna briefly joined me in my corner. But Chuza would always summon her back to their guests. I noted that Joanna had to be very careful with everything she said and did in Chuza’s presence. My brother’s sudden angers frightened me, as did his coldness towards Naomi. The rodent’s claws pinched as it prowled. Dodi jumped into my lap, and I leaned over her and placed her little panting body under my veil. With my face buried in her fur, I wept. She whined along with my soft sobs. I thought that no one could hear our strange animal dirge.
“I apologize for disturbing you, but are you ill? Can I help you?” I looked up—and up—at the man I recognized from the Temple Mount. The priest Tobiah, who had saved us. A dark bruise stained one side of his lean face, and his nose was swollen. Tobiah must have been caught up in the mob’s frenzy on the Mount. But he had survived. Maybe Judah had too.
“You’re not disturbing me,” I said, wiping my nose with the edge of my sleeve, hidden beneath my veil. The light through the windows was fading, and the lamps had not yet been lit. The reception room held only the two us and, at the far end, Chuza and a man wearing a toga.
Tobiah clasped his clean hands. They bore no calluses from the plow or the hammer. Scholar’s hands, like my father’s. “Permit me to . . . um, I know you are Micah’s daughter. . . . I am Tobiah.”
He looked over my head as he spoke. My face was shrouded by a veil, and, though I thought of lifting it, I dared not. Tobiah continued, “Your father’s death is a great sadness to me. Please accept my deepest sympathy. Micah was the best teacher I ever had.” Tobiah bowed. I thought I saw gray hair encircling a bald spot on top of his head. He began to walk away.
“Wait. I want to thank you for helping us escape the Temple Mount. And would you please tell me about my father? Tell me what you know about his life in Jerusalem.”
Tobiah stroked his unfashionably long beard. “Your father taught at the beth ha-midrash on the Temple Mount. He knew the Torah in such depth that many who studied with him became doctors of the Law. Chuza studied there as well, though not with your father, and, as you know, he has chosen not to serve in the high priesthood.”
Finally, someone who could prop the door open. I had so many questions to ask him. “Why did my father leave Jerusalem and go to Nazareth?”
Tobiah shook his head and turned his palms up. “That was the question we all asked. I know that corruption within the Temple leadership disturbed him greatly. His efforts to root it out failed. But it was more than that. Micah used to teach that we as a people would free ourselves from oppression not by warfare or accommodation, but by becoming more pious and righteous. He came to believe that communal village living was the way to attain such holiness. Other rabbis also taught this, but Micah was the only teacher I knew who actually tried this. After his wife died, he just took off to Nazareth.”
“Why Nazareth?”
“‘Because it is nowhere,’ your father told me.” Tobiah’s smile was kind, more than a polite formality.
The strident voices of Chuza and the Roman abruptly stopped our conversation.
“That soldier was ‘only doing his duty?’” shouted Chuza. “He murders my father, and his punishment is to be transferred to another province?”
“I did all I could, my friend,” said the Roman. He avoided Chuza’s eyes and concentrated on the creased folds in the front of his toga. “The new ethnarch wants all his subjects to know that no one is above the law, not even the family members of high officials.”
“Lucius, my father adhered more strictly to the law, every law, than any man who ever lived.”
“So you’ve told me, and I believe you. But some powerful people do not. Archelaus’s spies have linked your father to Judah ben Hezekiah.”
Chuza pushed out his words one at a time. “Father strongly disapproved of Judah. He opposed all violence!”
“Nevertheless, eyewitnesses say they saw your father and your sister with him,” countered Lucius. “I’m sorry, my friend. There’s nothing more I can do.”
“After everything I’ve done for you,” growled Chuza.
Lucius looked sternly at Chuza. “The truth is that it was all I could do to keep Archelaus from removing you from your position. Maybe someday you’ll see that you do owe me your gratitude. I would advise you to hold onto your friends and make more of them if you want to maintain your position.” The Roman’s leather boots flapped on the tiles as he stomped out of the house.
Chuza folded himself into a chair, then changed his mind and headed over to my corner. I thought he was coming to commiserate with me because we would have no justice for the murder of our father. Even a man as important as Chuza was subject to a higher power’s fickle will. I wanted to console him.
But Chuza was breathing heavily, and the vein in his forehead bulged. With its sharp nails, the rodent demon scratched at the pit of my stomach. Chuza pointed his finger at my veiled face. “You whore!” he said. “You and your ridiculous revolutionary notions. Father has paid for them with his life. And now you’ve dragged me into it as well. Curse you!” He raised his arm.
I flinched from the blow to come, but Tobiah intervened and stayed Chuza’s hand. “Your grief is so great that it clouds your judgment, Chuza. A cruel, ambitious soldier killed your righteous father. No one else is responsible.”
Chuza wrenched his arm from Tobiah’s grasp and pointed again. His finger touched my veil this time. “You, Danya. You had something to do with this.”
The demon slashed and ripped inside me.
Letters, Betrayals, Enslavement
After Father’s funeral, Chuza locked me in a storeroom off the kitchen. He claimed the reason for my confinement was to hide me from Roman soldiers who, believing I was also a member of Judah ben Hezekiah’s band, might kill me as they had Father. But I believed Chuza was punishing me.
Wine
