I Am Not an Adulteress Anymore

Chapter 12

Three hours later:

The cart is a definite upgrade, and although I am covered head-to-toe in a scratchy servant's robe with a scarf around my head, I still feel the breeze through my hair. The heat of the summer is still baked into the rocky terrain, but little by little the stones are giving up their fire, and the cool breeze is signaling that winter will come sooner than we know it.

Simeon looks at me. "So your mother is in Jerusalem?" he asks.

I nod. He has not asked much. I get the feeling he knows much more about Ephraim than he would care to let on. I shiver, thinking of what could happen to him if he were caught.

"Wandering in the desert," he says then. "A fitting way to start the festival of booths, isn't it?"

I frown. I know well why we celebrate this every year. The forty years of wandering after our ancestors were led out Egypt.

But Samaritans are not real Jews, we all know that well. When the Assyrians came they left not a soul alive in the hill country, and the foreigners who moved in had no idea of who our God was. What they know now, they had to be taught by exiled priests sent by the Assyrian king.

Or at least that is what I had been told.

I keep my face fixed forward. Simeon may be helping me. He may be risking himself greatly, but he is still a Samaritan, and even though they celebrate the feast of booths, they have never wandered even a day in the desert. That is our history, not theirs.

"Ah," he says, understanding coming into his eyes. "Hanna, answer me this. Why is it that you Jews think you are better than us Samaritans?"

I keep my mouth shut for a long moment.

"I am not better than anyone," I say finally. Because I married one of you.

But I do not add the last part, for Simeon is not like Ephraim, not at all.

For a long time, we do not speak, but then Simeon points ahead, over the next hill. "There," he says. "That's where I first saw the wild wandering man of the desert."

"You saw him?" I say. For I know to whom he is referring. For more than a year now there has been a flurry of talk. The crazy man wearing camel hair, eating locusts and honey, and wandering in the caves, and then the man he had proclaimed as the savior of the world. A crazy man, no doubt.

And yet so many had gone out to see him. Father would have been among them if he had been alive, but only to see what the fuss was about.

"What did he have to say?" I ask Simeon.

He pauses a moment, thinking.

"Repent," he said. "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near."

I shift in my seat. Talk of repentance makes me hot around the collar.

"And?" I ask. "Did you?"

Simeon lets out a long soft laugh. It is a sound I could listen to for days. "Repent of what?" he asks.

And the pain in his eyes, which has surfaced only three times by now, is back.

"I can think of plenty," I say.

And then for a while, we travel in silence, only broken by the bleating of the sacrificial lamb tied up in the rear.