“You should have known I would be about my father’s business.” Yeshua smiled, his young eyes animated by a fire that Miriam could not comprehend. She and her husband Yosef had spent the last couple hours frantically searching the city for their son — and when they find him this is how he responds? Stranger still, he had spent that time debating sacred law with the sages in the court of the temple. What child of his few years did that? Where had such intelligence and precociousness come from?
Certainly not his father. Yosef was a decent provider, a faithful and loving spouse, a gentle, solid and pious man. But sometimes she thought he had a head like one of those pieces of wood he practiced his craft on. He bought the story she told him about the visitation of the gold-winged and soft lipped angel of the Lord. Or if he didn’t buy it, he was too timid and good-natured to give voice to his suspicions. He brought her across the threshold of his home though everyone said he should beat her and drive her far away and he treated Yeshua in every respect as if he had come from his own loins. She could not have asked for a better man than Yosef. How completely different he was from the one who took her maidenhood and made her belly swell with Yeshua!
She met him that night in a dark alley, coming back from services at the temple where she sang with the other virgins pleasing songs for the Lord of the Mountain. To this day she cannot imagine what possessed her to take that different way home, the way that led her into the arms of that Roman soldier from Makedonia, the man who was named after the panther, the constant companion of the gentile god of wine. Perhaps it was her looming marriage to Yosef, the thought of all she’d be leaving behind, how she could no longer sing in the choir once she ceased to be a virgin — it was all too much for her. She needed to do something different, something crazed to show that she still had some control over her life.
It wasn’t long before she was lost. She wandered those alien streets like her ancestors in the desert, eventually leaving behind the safety of the Jewish quarter for the area of the Roman barracks, where no decent girl — Jewess or otherwise — would ever set foot.
And that’s when she ran into him.
His eyes were predatory, his grin more so. He was fair, with hair like fire and a band of ivy leaves tattooed around his wrist. He smelled of wine and animal heat and she could not resist him. She didn’t even try to. She was drawn into his desire and let him have his way with her, pressed up against the cool, damp walls of the alley, their noise heard by all who walked by. Afterwards they spoke in brief, clipped Aramaic, his accent so thick it made the few words he had at his disposal barely audible. She learned his name, that he had come from the land of King Alexander and that he had been a priest of Bakchos back there before enlisting in the legions. She didn’t have time to learn more about him and she didn’t want to. As soon as she was sure he would not react badly she fixed her clothes in place and pleaded that she must return home but would seek him out again later. She never did.
She tried her best to put her life in order. She told no one of what had happened and when she started to show, invented the fib of the angel. Yosef, sweet stupid man that he was, went along with it or perhaps was genuinely convinced — he was that sort of man, after all — and married her to silence the gossiping tongues. After the ceremony she faked the bleeding and made all the right sounds so that Yosef could think he was the first and only mortal man who had been there, distended stomach to the contrary.
But looking at the child at moments like this, Miriam began to wonder. What if there was some truth to her lie? Don’t the messengers of the Lord often wear strange disguises?
