The Liars' Gospel Read Online Free PDF Page B

ready for sleep, he said to her, “It’s not enough that he’s run away? Now he brings disgrace on the family?”
    She did not bother to argue. He wanted to lie with her that night, but she refused him, and he made that special noise again,
     of unconquerable exasperation.
      
    Those friends who loved her best told her simply that Yehoshuah was changed. That he seemed frightening sometimes, or frightened
     himself. Those who loved her best told her that it had been hard to recognize him, that something in him had begun to work
     differently, that even his face was changed. One said she heard he had been questioned by the Roman guard but they had not
     held him.
    “You should go to talk to him,” she said to Yosef one night.
    He looked at her.
    “It’s your job,” she said, because this sometimes called him to his duty. “You are his father. You should go and see that
     all is well with him. I’m worried about him.”
    “You’ve always worried about him over the wrong things.”
    “Rahav said she’d heard that the guard questioned him. You should go there. Talk to him. Bring him home. Please.”
    He stared at her levelly. His beard was all gray now, and his eyes wrinkled and his skin burnished, and where now was the
     young strong husband who had lifted her up with one hand? And had loved her? She had thought that he had loved her.
    “No,” he said, “he will have no more from me.”
    “Then I will go myself.”
    He breathed in and out. She saw in his face the same lines as Yehoshuah’s face. The same angry stiff mouth, the same twitching
     brow. They had the same anger, that was the problem.
    “I forbid it. Do you understand? You are not to bring disgrace upon us. I forbid it.”
    She looked at him. Whatever he had been, he was not it anymore.
    “I understand,” she said.
    It was around two weeks after that when Yosef went north to take a look at some lumber and to trade. And she called her grown
     sons to tell them what she intended, and they agreed to it.
      
    She will not go with her family to Jerusalem this Passover. Her brother Shmuel will make a sacrifice for her. She and her
     sister and Shmuel’s wife will stay behind, as they did when they were young women with many small children to care for. But
     still, although she will not eat the sacrificed lamb with them in Jerusalem, there are duties to be performed. The house must
     be cleaned, every jar that has held flour must be emptied and scoured.
    Gidon helps her, carrying the wool blankets back from the stream when they are heavy and sodden and throwing them over the
     rope she has tied between two trees. He climbs into the back of the clay-and-reed flour store and washes the stone floor,
     bent double, inhaling the flour dust, so that when he comes out his eyes are red and his back cracks as he stands up. They
     do not speak of the anniversary that is fast approaching until the very eve of Passover.
    The day before Passover is time to bake the matzot—the flat unrisen bread that they will eat for the next week. The flour
     cakes will last overnight, she will wrap them in cloth and put them in a stone jar to keep off insects and mold. She puts
     the flat stone into the fire to heat, takes three measures of flour from the jar and pulls up a bucket of cold clear water
     from the well. She begins to mix the water into the flour—swiftly, because her mother taught her that matzot should be made
     as quickly as possible—pulling it into a dough, forming round flat cakes, pummeling them out with the heel of her hand, stretching
     the dough to thinness. She makes dots in the surface of each cake with a wooden point, then quickly tosses them onto the heated
     stone, where they immediately begin to bubble and crisp, becoming fragrant with wood smoke and with flakes of burnt flour
     on the surface.
    When she looks up, she sees that Gidon is watching her. She does not know how long he has been there. He watches her so tenderly.
     He must have seen