Her skin lay in pleats on her cheeks and her right eye drooped as if wilted. Yaltha had lived no more than four and a half decades, but already her hands were becoming knotted and misshapen. If Jacob’s ladder reached all the way to heaven, so, too, did ours. She’d recounted stories of Jewish women there who led synagogues, studied with philosophers, wrote poetry, and owned houses. Huddled beneath the stars, my aunt had told me of Jewish girls in Alexandria who wrote on wooden tablets that contained multiple wax slates, contraptions I could scarcely imagine. Tonight was not the first time we’d sneaked to the roof after dark to escape prying ears. My aunt’s mouth was a wellspring of thrilling and unpredictable utterances. Mother said Yaltha had an impudent mouth. He would rather you think I dropped from the sky in the manner of bird shit.” “Your father made me swear not to speak of my past. They gave her a servant’s room that opened onto the upper courtyard, and they ignored my interrogations. Yaltha, too, avoided my questions. My father didn’t embrace her, nor did my mother. I’d not known my father had a sister until she’d appeared one day dressed in a plain, undyed tunic, her small body erect with pride, eyes glowering. She had come to us from Alexandria four months ago for reasons of which no one would speak. Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders. Unlike my mother, unlike every woman I knew, my aunt was educated.

She had forbidden us to go to the roof together, afraid Yaltha would fill my head with audacities. She was humming a Hebrew song about Jacob’s ladder, doing so rather loudly, and I worried the sound would tumble through the slit windows of the house and awaken my mother. I followed her up the ladder, eyeing the mysterious bundle, which was tied on her back as if it were a newborn baby, unable to guess what she secreted. My testament begins in the fourteenth year of my life, the night my aunt led me to the flat roof of my father’s grand house in Sepphoris, bearing a plump object wrapped in linen. What he heard was my life begging to be born. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. He said he heard rumblings inside me while I slept, a sound like thunder from far over the Nahal Zippori valley or even farther beyond the Jordan. I called him Beloved and he, laughing, called me Little Thunder. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.

The book of longing by sue monk kidd