But from no one did I really learn the answers to the questions that were now eating at my heart. I struggled to remember the things my mother had said to me. I did this while I was working at something, like the slow polishing of a table leg or while we were walking up the hill and down to the school. But even then we were all talking or singing, and I couldn't really think. I did remember, really, what she'd said. I remembered it in pictures. An angel had come, an angel to my mother, and no man had been my father, but what did such a thing mean?
I thought when I could, but ours was a busy life.
What time there was from work, I went to the Rabbis. I didn't want to leave them at all. Rabbi Berekhaiah was curious about Alexandria and asked me many questions. He liked to hear me talk, and so did his wife Miriamne, who was the rich one and not so old, and her father, whose hair was white, was often in the room listening to us talk.
Rabbi Berekhaiah had read the scrolls of Philo given him by our family, and he had questions about Philo which I answered, saying always how kind Philo had been, and how he'd taken me to the Great Synagogue just to see it, and how Philo studied the Law and the Prophets and spoke on them as a Rabbi himself, though he was a bit too young perhaps, said some. And I told all about Philo's house and how beautiful it had been, insofar as it was proper to say so.
A carpenter had to be careful what he said about the houses of those for whom he worked. A house was a private place. I'd always been taught that. But Philo's house had been full of young pupils, and the Rabbis of Alexandria had come and gone there, and so it seemed all right to describe the patterns of the marble floors, and the racks of scrolls to the ceiling.
We talked too about the harbor of Alexandria, and about the Great Lighthouse which I had seen most clearly when we'd sailed away. And I told of the temples, which even a good Jewish boy couldn't help seeing as they were everywhere and very fine, and of the marketplace where one could buy almost anything in the world, and one heard people speaking Latin as well as Greek, and so many other tongues.
I could speak some Latin, but not much.
They were happy to hear about the ships, too, and we had seen so many in Alexandria because it had not only the seafaring ships that went to Greece and Rome and Antioch and the Holy Land, but also the riverboats coming in from the Nile.
Sometimes I thought that I saw Alexandria more clearly than ever in these talks because in answers to the questions of Miriamne and the Old Rabbi, the father-in-law of Berekhaiah, I had to remember so much. I spoke of the library, which had been rebuilt after Julius Caesar had been so foolish as to burn it. And I spoke about the special Festival of the Jews when we had celebrated the translation of the Law and the Prophets and all the sacred books into Greek.
Now here in Nazareth, no one was going to teach in Greek, but many spoke Greek, especially in Sepphoris where all the soldiers of the King spoke it, and most of the craftsmen, and these Rabbis spoke it and read it. They knew the Scripture in Greek. They had copies of it. They said so. But Hebrew was the language of our learning here, and our tongue, Aramaic, was the daily tongue. In the synagogue, the Scripture was read out in Hebrew, and then the Rabbi explained it in the common tongue. That way, if someone didn't know the sacred language, he or she could still understand.
I could have spent all my time with my Rabbi Berekhaiah. But it was not to be.
Very shortly after we started work on the house, Joseph and I had to go into Sepphoris because there was so much work to be had there, and people were in need of shelter due to the terrible war, and they had the means to pay. Joseph would not take the double wages they offered him, one after another, but held to what we had made for a day's work in Alexandria, and took those jobs where he thought what we knew would be used for the best.
He and his brothers, and my uncle Cleopas, could walk through the ruins of a house, talk to the owners about it, and then put it back the way it had been, even going to the painters and the plasterers and the masons, and taking care of all of it as they'd done in Egypt with ease. James and I knew how to go to the marketplace and pick the laborers from the men who stood around.
But no matter what we did, there was a lot of lifting and holding and carrying, and coughing in the dust and the ashes, and I was frightened by the talk of the trouble in Jerusalem where men said that in the Temple a full rebellion was going on. The land of Judea was full of fighting, and there were bandits hiding in the Galilean hills.
There was talk even of some young men, in spite of all that had happened in Galilee, going up to Jerusalem to fight in this war, that it was a holy cause.
Meanwhile the Romans tried everywhere in Judea to put down the rebellion, and they still had the Arabs marching with them, and the Arabs burned Judean villages. And the whole family of King Herod was still in Rome fighting and disputing before Augustus, as to who should be King.
My teeth no longer chattered in fear no matter what I heard, and our family didn't talk of it very much. All around us buildings for a King Herod, whoever he might be, were rising up. Men came from everywhere too, to mend rooftops, to fetch fresh water for those who worked, to mix and daub paint and lay mortar for stones, and our clan had many friends among those who had so much work they did not know how to say yes to all of it.
My uncle Cleopas looked around and said: "Now Sepphoris will be bigger than ever."
"But who will be King?" I asked.
He made a sound which showed his disgust for the family of Herod. But Joseph looked at him and he didn't say the words he wanted to say.
The Romans were still in the city, moving about to keep the peace, on the watch for the rebels out of the hills, and hearing the constant complaints of the people - their woes as to this son who was missing, or that house that should not have been burned, and sometimes the soldiers threw up their hands and cried for silence because they didn't know what to do about it.
The soldiers drank in open taverns, and at the street corners where they bought their food. They watched us at our work. The scribes were busy writing letters for them to their womenfolk and their children.
This was a Jewish city. I saw it by and by. There were no pagan temples here at all. There were few public women to hang around with soldiers, only the older tavern keeper women, and sometimes they had their own men. The soldiers yawned and threw a glance at our women as they came and went, but what could they see? Our women were always in their proper robes, and with their shawls and their veils.
Very different from Alexandria where there had been so many Greek and Roman women always in the crowds. They were veiled many of them, too, and modest, but there was another sort that hung about the public houses. We were never supposed to look at them, but we could not help it sometimes.