Song of the Magdalene Read Online Free PDF Page A

song.
    As time went on, I knew I could unroll the Song of Songs whenever I wanted and read it at will. Yet I still worked to memorize the songs. If I knew a song with my eyes closed, it lived inside me. When I was at home, I padded in bare feet around the room, repeating the glorious words ina whisper to the bowls and table and stools, to the pillows and bed mats.
    Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?
    Who asked this question? And of whom was it asked? Hannah had begun to say that I was turning beautiful. She echoed Father. I wondered if anyone would ever consider me the fairest among women.
    How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!
    I wore shoes — at least, in the presence of all but our household I did — and sometimes, when I thought of how much Father and I had and how little Hannah and Abraham had, I did feel like a prince’s daughter. Hannah promised that soon, very soon, she would weave me proper dresses. Hannah was as skilled a weaver as anyone. No shop in town carried better than Hannah could make herself. I fingered the soft, familiar cloth of my shift, which by now had faded to peachypink. Shifts were for peasants and children. I was not a peasant and soon I would no longer be a child.
    I sang even in my dreams and in those dreams I wore the womanly dresses Hannah had made for me and basked in the light of love from my beloved. But I never saw my beloved in my dreams. I never touched his hand. I never breathed his scent. I only heard his voice. A thin, keen voice that sang whatever I sang.
    And, thus, my reading lessons and my knowledge of the canticles progressed, just as Abraham’s knowledge of nature progressed. My only regret in these months was that Abraham was tone-deaf. He had heard all the canticles sung many times. Daniel used to take him regularly to the house of prayer, never failing to be there when the lesser clergy, the Levites, passed through town and sang. Abraham told me all about it. And Abraham had even heard the songs that belonged in the taverns. Someone had apparently taken him there, too. Abraham wouldn’t tell me who. No one could ever accuse Abraham of being indiscreet. It was funny to menow that I had ever worried that Abraham might tell people if he saw me have a fit. He didn’t talk to most people. He said they didn’t care what he had to say, that most of them thought he was an idiot. I knew there was no idiocy in Abraham. And I knew, just as well, that there was not one note of musicality in him. Abraham had definitely heard all these songs, yet he couldn’t teach me a single tune. And I desperately wanted to sing the songs the way they were meant to be sung. There were a couple I had heard at wedding festivities. But weddings were infrequent in a town so small as Magdala, and my memory didn’t serve me well.
    I tried guessing, singing first one way, then another, asking Abraham which sounded most right to him. But he laughed away my questions. Soon I stopped guessing because I knew his stone ear embarrassed him. Perhaps he wondered, as I did, whether it was connected to his paralysis.
    So we passed the long, hot, dry months in songs, coming home to dine on the fruits and nuts we gathered. Abraham had always loved fruits and nuts. When he felt poorly and ate little,Hannah had the habit of coaxing his flickering appetite with fruits and nuts and, oh yes, honey — he sucked it right from the comb. But now his hunger for those foods was even stronger, augmented by the joy of seeing them growing, of telling me which to harvest for him.
    One late afternoon as we were coming home from the valley, Abraham called out, “Pomegranates, Miriam.”
    I pushed on. There were no pomegranate trees around here. Shouldn’t I have known? I was the one Mother taught to collect the bark for dye, after all.
    â€œStop.”
    I stopped the cart unwillingly. Father would be home soon, and we needed to beat him