“If you hanker for anything,” Anne had said, on the first day when she knew that with any luck she was to become a grandmother, ‘you just tell me. Joseph is a good man, but no man can understand these things. Tell me, and I’ll sell a calf—after all I rear them, all by hand; and I’ll send to Sepphoris for whatever it is, whatever it is.” With her managing nature she had been slightly disappointed that Mary had never expressed any desire for something which, unobtainable in a village like Nazareth, would be for sale in a great new city like Sepphoris, only a good hour’s walk away, and the most completely Romanised city in Galilee. On the other hand, she had been pleased, and proud that her daughter wasn’t being fanciful and whimsical. Pleased and proud. Puzzled, too, by Mary’s disinclination to discuss her condition or the actual date when it might be expected to end.
“But you must know,” Anne had insisted, and she had gone in great detail into the intricacies of that calendar which; never written, never acknowledged, yet governed women’s lives. So many days and a doubt, so many more days and a certainty, so many more and a delivery. Every woman, however simple, could do that reckoning.
Mary had never contributed anything to Anne’s reckonings, she had never contradicted and Anne had thought—How fortunate that she will have me, and not be dependent upon the midwife! And every evening, every single evening, she had walked down the village street, always with some excuse, in order to make sure that Mary—we mustn’t fuss or treat this as anything but an ordinary happening, part of ordinary life—was well, needed nothing and was taking care of herself.
She had joined them now and was subjecting her daughter to keen but tactful scrutiny, speaking as she did so about the latest-acquired of her many remarkable bargains, a length of the very finest linen, straight from the loom and only needing to be bleached before being fit for a baby’s use.
“You’ll be surprised when you see it,” she said, ‘it’s not the kind of stuff you see every day; it’s more like silk. Fit for a prince!”
What was wrong with that? she wondered, seeing what she called ‘that funny look’ on Mary’s face. In the next second she had explained it to herself; Mary was frightened that the implied assumption of the child’s sex might be unlucky.
“Or a princess, come to that,” she added.
At that moment Hilliel, divested of his prayer shawl, emerged from the synagogue and moved towards the little mound out of which the sycamore tree grew. Joseph, in a lower voice repeated his question and Mary said:
“No, let us wait. It won’t be long.”
Hilliel cleared his throat and said:
“I’ve been asked to tell you, first that we’re all to be taxed anew.” There was an outbreak of groaning and Hilliel, when it had died down a little said, “Yes, it is unlikely that there’ll be reductions—I’ve never known them go down. The second thing is this—there’s to be a new register, and to help with its making every man is to go back and register at -the place where he was born.”
This was greeted by a brief astonished silence broken by one voice saying in dismay, “But I was born in Beersheba!”
Mary and Joseph looked at one another and each saw that the other’s face had whitened. They’d never spoken about the matter—though they had both heard the prophecies read and quoted often enough to know that Bethlehem, David’s city, was the destined place for the birth of the Messiah. The truth was that almost immediately after Mary’s return from her visit to Elisabeth, they had ceased to talk about the baby in any but the most ordinary human terms. This reticence had not come
aboutby arrangement, or by the imposition of the will of one upon the other; it had simply happened: as though the truth would have been too much to live with day after day and they must take refuge in the presence that everything was ordinary and normal. The people were now battering Hilliel with questions.
“When is this register to be made?”
“By the last day of the month they call December. For us mid Tebeth.”
Satisfaction stirred in Anne’s heart. As well as she had been able to reckon–with so little help from Mary—that would mean that Joseph, who would have to walk from Nazareth to Bethlehem and back again, might be away at the time of the birth. Men were nothing but a nuisance at such times, so she’d be glad to have him out of the way; and his absence would give her perfect excuse for having Mary home; with a little persuasion she would stay there until her purification rite. It couldn’t have been better arranged. The crowd did not share this feeling.
“What’s the idea behind all this?” a man asked.
“I know no more than you. But I can guess. I think the Romans are using the tax as a cover for a census taking.”
“By our Law forbidden. On them the guilt! But that could have been done without uprooting so many.”
“It’s a scheme to ruin us all,” said the disgruntled man from Beersheba who had just counted how long he would be away from his smithy.
“It can hardly be that,” Hilliel said.
“Ruined people can’t pay their taxes. It may have something to do with our names. I believe the Romans find them difficult. Maybe they thought that if all the David-son-of-Davids were together on a given day it would ease matters. But I don’t know. All that I was asked to tell you I have told you.” He stepped down.
Anne, losing no time, said, “Mary, don’t give a thought to being alone.
You must come and stay at home, with me, until it’s all over.”
Mary said, “Thank you. It was kind of you to think of that so quickly; but I shall go with Joseph.”
Surprise and the deepest possible consternation held Anne silent for some seconds; then she said, in a voice that made the dispersing congregation halt and turn and stare :
“Go with .. . Are you out of your mind? Ninety miles, on foot. In your last month! Child, it’s impossible. Never, in all my days, have I heard such a witless notion. Midwinter, too!”
Even as she spoke she realised that she was making no impression. To a woman of her competent, managing nature, not to be able to manage this—after her own marriage and child-bearing, the most important event in a woman’s life—seemed unbearably frustrating. The hurried, ill-attended wedding had been bad enough, but at least that had been a challenge, and to arrange things in a short time as well as most women could have done in a long one had given her a secret satisfaction. This was quite different. The possibility that her grandchild should be delivered and swaddled by other hands than hers made her feel positively ill. Angry, more vehement sentences began to form in her mind, but a glance at Mary’s face informed her that railing would do no good. So she tried cajolery.
“You didn’t mean that. You spoke without thinking. Suppose, just suppose that your time should come when you were far away from me. What would you do? How would you manage? You hadn’t thought of that, had you? You come back home, my dear; back to your own room, so snug and cosy, and let me look after you.” Then, without allowing Mary time to speak, she added a cunning touch.
“If for no other reason, you must think of Joseph. He could be there and back in the time it would take you to get to Bethlehem. You wouldn’t want to waste his time, would you now?”
Mary knew her mother. When chiding, and coaxing and craftiness failed, she could always fall back upon that reliable weapon, a fit of weeping. It would be horrible to see Anne crying because of her. Had they been wrong not to take her into their confidence? She said gently :
“Mother, I have thought of all these things, and I still want to go with Joseph.”
This would happen! Anne thought furiously. So good the girl had been
all through the early, the usually most trying days,while we can, let us cling to the ordinary. There’s so much to come that won’t be….”
So much, she thought. All those dreadful prophecies about being wounded, bruised and then slaughtered. One said, “He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.” .Surely, never before, in the whole history of mankind, had any woman conceived and carried a child whose fate she knew from the first. She’d known, of course, all along, but in the early days, especially after her visit to Elisabeth, she had been filled with ecstasy and mysticism. But day by day, as the child grew and weighed heavier, became more and more part of her, her sorrow for him, her protective feeling, grew. He would be great and glorious, he would be the Son of God; but human, too, vulnerable to pain, and she, his human mother, must grieve and suffer, for him.