For Maryam, it was, at first, something in his eyes. When he touched her with the knowing in them. Out of time. That’s how she felt when he looked at her. Timeless. And it was his eyes that did that to her, lifted her out of the burgeoning insecurities of her late adolescence, those few times outside the synagogue, and that other time, at the spring festival, when he noticed her, and she noticed that, and his gaze elevated her to heights unknown – or more known.
Maybe it was the knowing, actually, that did it to her. Because the knowing wasn’t just in his eyes, it was in his hands too, and in his lips. In his tongue.
When they met, Maryam felt known like she’d never felt before. He made her promises in that intimacy; from the beginning, she trusted the rapture of those words. The very first time was at the end of the summer, at the end of a week of noticing (and then watching and then finally idolizing) his wife at the market. The woman was everything that Maryam, thirsty in her youth, was not: graceful and delicate and curvy and tempting. Maryam watched her barter with the vendors, day after day, her dark eyes dancing beneath her headscarf, trading the salesmen silent fantasies in exchange for cheaper produce. Allure and total command. The men were intoxicated by this woman so in touch with herself. She knew her magic.
Maryam craved that power.
And she took it.
A frenzied fantasy reel sweeping wildly through her mind, and she, sneaking through the neighborhood alleys toward his home. Sounds from the marketplace receding. She held her right hand against her heaving chest, to catch her breath, to confess perhaps; but only to herself. To know her lust and to feel his. She whispered a hurried prayer, some kind of desperate plea to pagan gods, and she pushed forward. And then she was at his massive, ornate door. It loomed above her, majestic. It promised her meaning.
Knock, knock.
The heavy sounds, a gamble for adoration – because who doesn’t worship the woman of a wealthy man? And what woman sits on that throne for free? Turning, making sure no one heard, looking at her own footprints that led backward to her very different, very poor life on the other side of town. Then, hearing the door open, turning to see him pulling her in.
That was the first kiss, his lips soft and welcoming, and it had only been a kiss. His wife had been on her way home. That’s what he’d said, and then he’d sent her away, and Maryam was too young to have caught the hollow tone in his voice, couldn’t have known the something else in his eyes that evening, something lurking behind his knowing. She couldn’t have figured it out. Some lessons need lived.
And then there were all the times after that. Six, seven times. More. Later and later in the night. Knock, knock, knock, the consummating sound of her temptation. In his home, every time. He would tell her the date, the hour; she would sneak through desolate streets. She never wondered where his wife might be. Then, at the door he always met her with the same kiss, and though his lips remained soft, time exposed a chapped and vicious hunger in him.
And Maryam began to feel ashamed.
She began to realize that it actually wasn’t in his eyes; there was no depth to his knowing.
He ate her. He drank her.
And the only reason she kept going back to the heavy door was because nobody else would use her quite so thoroughly as this ever again, and to be sucked dry of dignity was at least a type of identity, and the life of a rich man’s plaything was better than the squalor and starvation she could see around the corner…
…right?
But what about the death of a rich man’s plaything?
Until the very last, she’d still imagined he might make her his own, forever. Divorce wasn’t so hard for a man like him, and wasn’t he ready yet? For her? For what she could give him? She received his message at the end of the night, much later than was typical, and hurried to meet him with the sun chasing after her on the skyline. Right away, she knew something was different. He was almost apologetic, every caress worth a thousand empty words. He undressed her with painstaking languor, not with his former savagery, and his eyes had lost that which she had once mistaken for desire. He has no appetite today, she thought, and almost simultaneously heard the fists against the door of her brittle fantasy.
Death comes knocking.
Knock, knock.
And the hired men drag her naked, by the hair, out the door, into the street – but not before they have their sport, at least a little bit, while the religious elite watch and roll their eyes.
But it’s not the laughter or their hands or the dragging that really hurt. It’s that he watches the mockery they make of…whatever this was…
He watches, and in his eyes is a very different kind of knowing: perverted hilarity. He always knew this was coming. They drag her away and he watches.
And Maryam shuts her eyes as they pull her body through the city, but they don’t go as far as she expects, not backward toward the edge of town where she lives, but deeper in, into the center, until they finally drop her, and she doesn’t open her eyes because she doesn’t need to see to know there’s a crowd. She can hear the hum of accusation. And she doesn’t need to see to know she’s at the center of it all, in the temple courtyard, entirely alone. She doesn’t open her eyes. She rolls to her side, and she uses her hands to cover her body, and presses her face to the earth, but calloused hands yank her to her feet, and she is made to stand.
She lowers her head and can hear the pit groaning underneath the ground, yawning for her.
She can hear the mob hissing as a man shouts, and she only catches bits and pieces: “Rabbi!! See! What do you say?”
She can hear them gathering the stones they will use to kill her.
And then, she can hear something else.
A finger writing names in the dust.
Wind breathing through the courtyard. She shivers when it kisses her skin, and it’s eerily quiet. So, she opens her eyes.
Maryam would never again awake to such perfect silence. And then.
Daughter.
A voice. Where? She could still see the mob. They were clumped together, faces and bodies and fists. They were hysterical and full of teeth. They were definitely in ambush around her.
And they were frozen.
Maryam couldn’t resist. She lowered her hands, she turned in a half circle, head still bowed –
And nobody moved a muscle. She wiped the dust from her shoulder on which she had fallen just seconds ago; she could almost still hear the gnashing teeth.
And the writing!
Maryam.
No one had ever said her name like that. This was a new kind of man.
She spun around, holding her arms against herself again, hiding her vulnerability as best as she could, preparing to shield her body from the stones, and in the same breath she was covered head to toe in a billowing robe smelling of cedar, inhaling the fragrance like it might heal her, an aroma to save. Somebody’s hands holding her own.
Maryam, he said again, and he slipped the hood of the cloak back from her face, gently squeezed her two hands with one of his and rested his other against her cheek and let go; she was terrified – he took a step back. He waited.
When she looked up, it was finally in his eyes; a knowing in the eyes of this new man she’d never seen. A type of knowing that gave and didn’t take. A type of knowing that affirmed dignity instead of stripping it, and this knowing in his eyes was, at last, a naming free of condemnation.
Beloved, he said.
And the crowd was gone.
And new life with the risen sun.
Leviticus 20:10 • Jeremiah 17:13 • Hosea 14:4-6 • John 8:2-11