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and me to the tallest building, the Temple Sanctuary itself.
    When we arrived, the Sanctuary seemed to float upon a slab of marble at least five cubits thick. Lines of kneeling and mumbling men curved before its steps. We stepped around them and made our way into the Sanctuary and through to a room filled with men standing and rocking and praying. Their tongues sounded rather familiar—I suspect they were varied dialects of Hebrew and Aramaic.
    Something was happening at the far end, but I could not see around the men in front of me. Joseph reached into the bag and removed two pigeons. Their soft heads stuck up between his scaly fingers—an unexpected image for me―I’d never seen something so rough touch any living thing with such tenderness. He stretched out his arm to a man in white with a tall hat who took the pigeons and gave them to another man, who placed them upon a long stone table.
    There he and more men held them beside lambs and, with smooth, swift motions, wringed the birds’ necks. They then took more of the birds and dispatched them with the same speed, ease, and detachment I had seen when Mother removed lentils from their hulls. These images grow dark to the mind of an old man, but the dying cries of those broken and knifed creatures will forever sound in my ears. I was at once fascinated by the efficiency of the process and repulsed by the massive slaughter demanded by our Lord (though I had many times witnessed sheep, cows, and goats killed in similar fashion). Why would the Almighty God require so much death? Was I to believe that we were actually feeding Him?
    Amid the carnage, the thought emerged in my soul: I am standing before the great altar, the destination for this sacred journey, and the closest I will ever get to God . Was this the lesson I should take from the Temple, that the presence of God is accompanied by death? At the edge of my vision, I saw Joseph whisk Joses and Simon away, and I broke from my contemplation to follow them through a door into a courtyard.
    Joseph seemed eager to get out quickly, and we left the Temple, my little brothers clinging to my hands among a flow of people, passed between more buildings and through a courtyard until we went through a gate decorated with peculiar symbols—serpents and rams and stars—and down stairs, after which we stopped beyond the outer wall. Hundreds of women and girls sat in the sun, waiting for their men and boys to emerge. I didn’t know what they had done in their portion of the Temple complex, but I was happy that my sisters had been spared the bloody sights of the sanctuary. We walked among scores of scampering little girls until we found Mother waving for us.
    Mother jumped to her feet and took my sisters by their hands. We left the Temple area together and were nearly back at the tents (where we were to cook our bread) when Mother halted, spun around, and strained her neck, searching. “Where is Jesus?” she asked, gasping and crossing her arms over her head. She must have thought him lost forever, for she collapsed to her knees and pressed her face to the ground, wailing like the old women at funerals. With her finger, she traced a circle in the dirt and pulled at my leg. I obediently drew a triangle inside the circle, then stomped in the center. Another of her superstitious rituals that I had participated in many times, this one was supposed to prevent an impending tragedy, which she foresaw with great frequency.
    Joseph asked, “Where is James?”
    â€œI shall find them,” I said, suspecting that Jesus had just tarried behind on his own as he sometimes did, and I didn’t care where James was. I retraced our steps, expecting to find them not far behind us, but I had to go all the way back to the Temple, weaving through the women and girls outside, squeezing against the stream of bodies coming out the gate, and darting around the men exiting the altar room.
    Inside, Jesus and James