Girl Mary: A Novel - Softcover

Popescu, Petru

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1416532633 ISBN 13: 9781416532637

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2009

Synopsis

A hauntingly beautiful novel, bringing to life one of history’s most mysterious characters, Mary of Nazareth, as a beautiful, complicated, utterly believable girl in love.

· In a bestselling tradition: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, Francois Mauriac’s A Kiss for the Leper, and Orson Scott Card’s Sarah all present biblical themes through the sensibilities of today. Girl Mary will similarly captivate readers of all faiths and backgrounds.

· A great character: For centuries, Mary has been the Virgin—but isn’t she also the ultimate female, whose life and passion have never been told? Girl Mary introduces us to the human girl who beguiled even God with her simplicity. So what exactly is Girl Mary? Answers the author: it’s a love story of biblical proportions.

· Great storytelling: Petru Popescu recounts this epic through the eyes of famous characters. Pontius Pilate, already Rome’s agent in Judea at the time, meets Mary and falls under her spell. Years before the massacre of the innocents, King Herod senses that Mary signals the end of his reign. Other heroes of the scriptures appear in Girl Mary at their very debut in history. Described with surreal accuracy, Judea and Rome become the birthplace of Christianity.

About this title

About the Author

Petru Popescu was one of Romania's leading young authors when he immigrated to the United States in 1974. He is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Amazon Beaming and Almost Adam, and the critically acclaimed memoirs The Return and The Oasis. Petru lives in Beverly Hills with his wife and two children. Visit him at www.petrupopescu.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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Part 1

The Girl in the Desert

He spurred his horse, which pulled behind it another horse, loaded with water skins and bales of hay.

Five nights in a row, the young Roman, King Herod's envoy, had chosen a campsite in the desert, poured water from the skins into a bucket, and watered the horses, then broke hay and spread it on a tarp of flax before them. He ate heavy barley bread and ripe cheese and figs. Then he tied the horses' front legs two palms above their ankles, as if handcuffed. If they spooked and took off during the night, the hooves banging on the sand would awake him.

When jackals approached, the horses whinnied and awoke the envoy, who bolted and waved his arms and shouted until the jackals withdrew. He lay back to sleep. When the dawn cracked the dark open, he was in his saddle already, horse leading horse. Each day, he rode the horse he'd spared the day before. The sunlight scalded his face. His cape fluttered behind him, like an angry flame billowing off his shoulders. Scanning with narrowed eyes the shadows of the dunes, and riding against them, east.

On the third day of riding, bones started cracking under his racing hooves. Skulls, hidden under shallow sand, exploded under his passage like blasts from catapult shots. The man stopped the horses, jumped off his saddle, and hunkered down. He dug the ground with his ornate Roman pugio. In an instant, the short heavy dagger revealed more skulls, with hair mixed with shreds of striped fabric still clinging to them -- the dead had been wearing tallits, male prayer shawls. The hair was dark. Those slaughtered men were young.

The Roman grinned at the desert's fiery air; he was on the right course.

He would find the Jews of the Desert, and there would be enough of them to bring back.

Hope swelled inside him. He got on his horse and rode on.

Ahead of the Roman man, hour after hour, the desert dried up more. It looked like a moon face, as in that old tale whispered before the writing of the Torah:

God made the earth, fertile and wet he made it. Then, just to play, God made the moon, but it came out barren. God slammed it to the ground, where it broke into a thousand shards.

God made another moon. Again, it came out barren. God flipped it with the back of his hand, off into the sky: Hover up there, and light up the humans' night, or what good are you? Obeying God's wish, the second moon shone silently in the sky. And the first moon, God let its shards mix with the earth, and they became the earth's deserts.

The envoy knew many stories of the Jews, even some not written in books. In the few months before sailing from Italy, he had learned so much about God's chosen people.

Across that shattered moon, he rode until he glimpsed palm trees. The oasis was no mirage. Had he not found it, he might have lost his way, using up his supplies until he died in the desert. But here he was. The awe of being alive twinned him with those unknown desert dwellers. He rode into that cluster of trees.

The water wheel was moved by a capstan, whose bars were pushed by girls walking in a circle, like donkeys toiling on a farm. Clay pots tied on the rim of the wheel brought up the clear flow, emptying it into a cistern large enough to water a caravan. The Roman counted the desert girls: eight, in wet robes of unfitted flax, treading that muddy rut. Small and malnourished, they urged each other on with brief, guttural cries. As the Roman hissed, tsstss, to slow down his horse, a girl jumped into the wheel and walked inside it, like a hamster in a cage.

Amused, the Roman stared at the camp beyond. A jumble of tents patched with rags. Rock walls, beehived with puffing holes. They live in those holes, he marveled. That smoke is from cooking pots.

The girl in the wheel started to run. The spokes creaked, the pots splashed water onto the other workers. The impatient girl flicked the hair off her face with a tanned hand. Cries of "stop," "slow down," made her run faster -- until the visitor sat up in his saddle and called out, "The rabbi, who is the rabbi here?"

The girls stopped pushing the capstan. Halting abruptly, the wheel threw out the prankster -- she flew to the ground, landing by the visitor's horse. Dizzied, she looked straight at him. Ite me dei, the man swore softly in Latin, so help me, gods! -- I've seen her before! Though he knew he had not. But since for five days he'd seen only barren sands and the flanks of his horses, maybe she reminded him of all that was nurturing and feminine. She was tall and wore the istomukhvia, the all-purpose shift of flax of women from Galilee. It was old and worn-out, likely handed down from her mother. Looking at her, he imagined a body without an ounce of fat under her shift.

He took in her face. So baked by the sun, it had the tint of ripe carobs. Freckles dotted the sides of her small, straight nose, a few above each delicate nostril. Her eyes seemed lilac in the shade, but when she stood up against the late sunlight, her eyes were brown. When she spoke, he felt that he knew her voice.

"My father's the rabbi here, and who are you to ask?"

"I am an envoy with a message from your king."

"Orpa!" the tallest one called out to a girl even darker and wirier. The one named Orpa nodded, then both of them whistled, while the other girls pulled out the capstan's ribs. In a blink, these children were armed with bats. The Roman's hand went to his sword, but he caught himself. Easy, he thought. The lips of the freckled girl were thin, but so finely drawn. "What's your name?" he asked her. His voice, thank the gods, was calm.

"Mary-amneh," she replied, a little defiant. But the Roman guessed that she blushed, as her skin started to shine under her tan.

A shadow drew close: a jackal, low-bodied, brightly fanged, followed by three more. The Roman gasped -- tame jackals! One of the animals put up its muzzle, and the girl stroked it. Were they trained to attack? If they jumped him, he'd be easy prey...

Seized by fear, he blurted out, "Herod the Great sends word to the tribe of Joachim ben Ahaz ben Matthan...Are you his tribe?" The brown-eyed girl nodded. "The king forgives you all! You're no longer in exile, you can return to your homes in Nazareth!"

They gaped at him. The silence dripped with the water from those pots.

Then Mary-amneh threw her head back. She gave a high, ululated call, like a desert bird.

There was a rush of voices from people lunging out of tents and caves.

The Roman jumped off his horse. Dizzy. He'd been in the saddle since dawn.

A crowd was hurrying over. Older men and women, boys with fuzz on their upper lips, a gaggle of children. They wore old clothes, discolored from use and washing; only one tall, gray-haired woman wore an apron smeared with bright color stains -- that's the girl's mother, and she's a dyer, the Roman remembered. The mother did not look much like Mary-amneh except for her height, but the bearded man running next to her had the girl's nose, her thin, expressive lips, her freckles even. Casus patris certi, unquestionably her father by blood, the envoy thought, silently enjoying the Latin words. He was lonely for home. He spoke Latin to other Roman soldiers in Jerusalem, mostly when they banded together to visit a whorehouse outside the walls, in the Kidron Valley.

The pale old man and his wife surged at the fore of the crowd. Here they are, he thought, Joachim and Anna. He was informed of these people's names, and alert for anything they would say -- speculator vigilans semper, a spy is forever at work. He glanced back. By the cistern, the girl pulled a hair slide from a fold in her shift and forked it into her rich hair. The crowd yammered in Aramaic, with harsh khh sounds, as if spit boiled in their throats. How many of them had survived King Herod's wrath, fifty, eighty?

He remembered those skulls in the desert, cracking under his passage. The tribe's young males had all been killed, but some boys had been spared -- he spotted them in the crowd now, grown, with fuzz under their noses. But who had fathered these wailing infants? The visiting camel drivers? I'll find the answers to all those questions, he told himself, when Rabbi Joachim, pale, his beard grainy white, stopped right in front of him and gazed at him suspiciously.

Civil, the Roman said, "My name is Apella, special servant to the king. You may have guessed that I'm not Judean or Galilean though I speak your language and know your customs. The king's message is that you may return to Nazareth, as of right now."

Joachim and his wife looked at each other; the crowd looked at each other. It seemed that this message, once so desired, was coming too late. Then Joachim asked, "You have a writ from the king bearing out your words?"

"Of course." He walked to the stamping horses, unbuttoned a leather holster, and pulled out the king's scroll, tearing the bone clasp that sealed it.

Joachim lifted his arms. When his sleeves fell back, Apella cringed -- Joachim's hands had been beaten severely. Fingers knobby and crooked, nails missing, he gestured with a maimed hand that the wife should hold up the scroll before his eyes. Then he read like a learned man, quick, without glancing twice at a word, and shook his head. "It says here that we've been amnestied, but of what offense? We were never tried in a court."

Apella shrugged. "It's the king's will that you return to your homes. You should take advantage of his generosity."

Joachim turned to his daughter. "Mary-amneh?"

The name was common in Galilee. King Herod's late wife, his one Jewish spouse among a harem of ten, was also called Mary-amneh. Herod's other wives were Greek or Phoenician. But Queen Mary-amneh was Jewish and the king's favorite until he had killed her in a drunken fit of jealousy. Allegedly, she had stared out her window at a young captain of the guards. Herod had snuffed her with a pillow. He had also killed Aristobulus and Alexander, the two sons she bor...

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1416532633
• ISBN 13: 9781416532637
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368