Now all was done; the last service rendered. The heart which she had thought broken on summer evenings long ago, broke anew.
Something of her ‘dumb misery made itself known to Melchior.
He said, “You have served me so well, Senya, that I never missed the others. I think I shall call this camel by your name.”
The misery was not eased; he tried again.
“You will be safe and comfortable. I put it all in writing. You are a free woman and will be paid for what you do here; and when you can no longer do it, you will still be paid. You understand?”
She took his hand and bowed over it.
“May all the gods and the spirits of your ancestors and of mine, have you in safe-keeping, wherever you go, my master.”
He looked at her, seeing her properly for the first time now that he was unlikely ever to see her again. Poor old woman; poor faithful old woman, grown grey and bent in his service. He stooped and for a second laid his cheek against hers. A gesture of love. At last! she thought, and felt repaid for everything.
The relatives to whom Anne had referred with pride, Mary’s cousin Elisabeth and her husband, a temple priest, lived in a hill village within walking distance of Jerusalem; and there Elisabeth had made a garden which was justly famous. Elisabeth herself, by nature a woman somewhat silent and reserved, warmed when speaking of her flowers and herbs, her fruit and vegetables. She would say that the garden was her own creation; and that was true.” Just over forty years earlier, when she had come, a bride of seventeen, to this house the ground around it had been an unsightly waste, its thin soil trodden hard over the stones that lay near the surface, and nothing grew except a few tough weeds. Former occupants of the house had used the space as a drying ground for linen and a place to throw rubbish.
She had begun to work on the garden immediately after her arrival, for then she found time heavy on her hands. She had been the eldest daughter of a large family, always busy. Now, with Zacharias so often absent on his temple duties, she was much alone with little to do. She was not the kind of woman to make friends quickly.
Zacharias in his spare time had helped to clear away the rubbish and to remove the largest of the stones and to dig a little. He was a leisurely mover and teased her about the haste with which she worked herself. Gardens, he said, weren’t made in a year. She was too reserved and shy to tell him that she wanted all the heavy work done in a month or two because she hoped soon to be in a condition which would render digging and stone-hauling unwise. As she worked she often thought to herself-Next year! She saw a plump healthy baby lying on a
mat in the shade, then taking a few tottering steps.But at the year’s end she was still able to work; to gather basketfuls of stones and take them out and throw them amongst others on the hillside and then refill the baskets with the fine silty soil which the rain washed down from the hills. She had plaited trees, a fig tree near the house door, almond, apricot and plum and apple trees along her boundary; young trees that would, grow as the child grew. For she was certain of a child next year.
So year had succeeded year and hope had died a long-drawn-out death. By this time she’ knew her neighbours and had more than once heard women with several children mourn a new pregnancy.
“Another mouth to feed,” they said. Once, when her herb garden was well established and known, a woman had come to her and after some half-sentences and evasions had voiced an inquiry and a request.
“There are seven already and my man is poor; how shall we manage?” Elisabeth, explaining with some embarrassment, that she had nothing of that kind in her garden, had thought how inexplicable, how seemingly unjust God was. An eighth child to a woman already overburdened, and her own arms still empty.
The woman had found what she sought and almost died of the bitter brew and that child was never born.
Nobody, not even Zacharias, had ever heard Elisabeth repine. Only her garden knew how often, coming back from the well or from the market, she would walk with rapid, agitated steps and wring her hands and cry, “God, my God, why? What have I done? What has he, your servant, done that we should be cursed?” The flowers had held their innocent faces towards her, offered their perfume for comfort. Very slowly, grudgingly she had abandoned hope, and, without realising it, had allowed the garden to fill the empty place in her life. In some ways it was like a child; it needed constant attention; it progressed in little steps; it was something that she had made. In hot dry summers she would go twice, three times to the well; on the much-travelled road into Jerusalem she would gather dung. The garden flourished and was beautiful; even the fence that divided it from the road was a thing of beauty, thickly covered with morning glories, so gloriously blue, and thicket roses, coloured like a summer sunset. And all within the fence, the flower-beds, the herb patches, the vegetable strips were neat and tended and precise, the living embroidery which she had worked upon the stony hillside.
And it had been, appropriately, in the garden that the miracle had happened. It had been an autumn evening, mild and mellow, and she had been gathering fallen leaves and heaping them in a corner where through the winter they would rot into the cool, dark substance which in the early summer of next year, spread around the roots of trees and flowers, would help to prevent the soil from drying out.
Zacharias had come to her there, looking, as he always did after his spells of duty in the Temple, pale and tired. She had risen, rubbing her hands together and said:
“Supper is ready.”
And he’d mouthed at her, his lips moving but making no sound. He used his hands, touching his lips, beckoning her into the house.
She thought—He’s had a seizure! And a great weight of guilt fell upon her. She hadn’t valued Zacharias as he should have been valued. She’d thought always about the child, and then she had transferred her attention, to the garden, not realising that despite all she had been singularly blessed, having a good husband.
“You’re sick,” she said. But he shook his head and would not take the arm she offered to help him into the house. And she, watching him, saw that he walked-as usual, if anything more vigorously. ‘ “What is it?” she asked, and he shook his head and smiled.
Inside the house he had gone straight to his own special table, taken up a waxed tablet and his stylus and written something and held it out to her. She could read a little. Early in their marriage, sensing her unspoken discontent, he had taught her to read, even to write a few words. But her heart had never been with her studies, and his vague hope of turning her into another Anne, a woman he knew, childless, a widow, but happy because she was studious, had been defeated. Still, Elisabeth could read, and having read what he had written, and
reinexplicable, how seemingly read it, in case she had made a mistake, she had looked at him and said:
“Can you hear? Nod, if you can.”
He had nodded.
She said.
“It is impossible. I am too old.”
He snatched back the tablet and wrote, “Remember Sarah.”
She said, “Yes, I remember Sarah, but that was all long ago, “in the days of the Patriarchs. Nothing like that could happen now.”
She was expressing the feeling of many Jews of her time; the age of miracles was past. Zacharias wrote again.
“Great things impend. This child will be the forerunner.”
She read the words and looked at him a little fearfully. Except for her barrenness they had been a happy couple, but there were great tracts of his mind, even of his life which she could never hope to understand. He was a priest; he was allowed by right to enter the inner court of the Temple where no lay person could go; he was deeply religious, almost a mystic. She asked, “How do you know?”
Bit by bit, writing brief, succinct sentences, he told her how, in the middle of his duties at the altar, he had seen an angel, Gabriel, who had said that their prayers were to be answered and that she would bear a son, to be called John; a very special child who was to prepare the way for the Messiah.