The Book of Longings: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

this is a marriage of honor. You will want for nothing.”
    I will want for everything.
    She gestured for Shipra, who appeared beside us as if she might be called upon to drag me to my fate. The market closed in around me, the feeling of having nowhere to go, no escape. I was not like Judas, who could just leave. I was Ana—the entire world was a cage.
    I squeezed my eyes shut. “Please,” I said. “Do not ask this of me.”
    She nudged me forward. The howling in my head returned, but softer, like someone moaning.
    I walked toward my father, my feet the carapaces of two turtles, my sandals tolling.
    I was a head taller than Nathaniel ben Hananiah, and I could see he was repulsed by the need to look up at me. I rose on my toes even higher.
    “Ask her to speak her name so I may hear her voice,” he said to Father, not addressing me.
    I did not wait for Father. “Ana, daughter of Matthias.” I half shouted it as if he were old and deaf. Father would be livid, but I would give the man no cause to think me modest or easy to tame.
    He glowered at me, and I felt a smidgen of hope that he would find a reason to reject me.
    I thought of the prayer inside my bowl, of the girl beneath the cloud. Yaltha’s words: Take care what you ask, for you shall surely receive it.
    God, please. Do not desert me.
    The moments sagged beneath a thick, implacable silence. Finally, Nathaniel ben Hananiah looked at my father and nodded his consent.
    I stared into the dim, hazed light of the market, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, listening to them speak of the betrothal contract. They debated the months until the marriage ceremony, my father arguing for six, Nathaniel for three. Not until I turned away did grief close over me, a dark forsakenness.
    My mother, her triumph secured, turned her attention back to the cloth in the silk stall. I walked toward her, fighting to hold myself erect, but midway there the floor tilted and the world slid sideways. Dizzied, I slowed, my red cloak cascading around me, the hem snatching at the bells on my sandals, my foot torquing. I fell onto my knees.
    I tried to stand but slumped back, surprised by a sharp pain in my ankle. “She has taken ill,” someone shouted, and people scattered as if to flee a leper. I remember their shoes like hooves, the little dust storm on the floor. I was the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas—no one would dare touch me.
    When I looked up, I saw the young man from the yarn stall coming toward me. A tuft of red thread dangled from the sleeve of his robe. It drifted to the floor as he bent in front of me. It occurred to mehe’d witnessed everything that had transpired—the argument with my mother, the transaction for my betrothal, my suffering and humiliation. He had seen .
    He reached out his hand, a laborer’s hand. Thick knuckles, calluses, his palm a terrain of hardships. I paused before taking it, not from aversion, but fascination that he’d offered it. I leaned against him the slightest bit, testing the weight on my foot. When I turned my face to his, I found my eyes almost level with his own. His beard was so close I could, if I were bolder, nod my head and feel it graze my skin, and it surprised me that I wanted to. My heart bounded up, along with an odd smelting in my thighs, as if my legs might give way once again.
    He parted his lips as if to speak. I remember the eagerness I felt for his voice, for what he would say to me.
    What happened next would plague me through the strange months to come, raining down at odd moments and sometimes waking me in the night, and I would lie there and wonder how it might have been different. He might have led me to the yarn stall, where I would sit on the wood plank among the balls of thread, waiting for the throb in my ankle to subside. My parents would find me there. They would thank the kind man, give him a coin, buy all the yarn the girl had so carefully sorted and wound. My father would say to him: For your