She had forbidden us to go to the roof together, afraid Yaltha would fill my head with audacities. She was humming a Hebrew song about Jacob's ladder, doing so rather loudly, and I worried the sound would tumble through the slit windows of the house and awaken my mother. I followed her up the ladder, eyeing the mysterious bundle, which was tied on her back as if it were a newborn baby, unable to guess what she secreted. My testament begins in the fourteenth year of my life, the night my aunt led me to the flat roof of my father's grand house in Sepphoris, bearing a plump object wrapped in linen. What he heard was my life begging to be born. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. He said he heard rumblings inside me while I slept, a sound like thunder from far over the Nahal Zippori valley or even farther beyond the Jordan. I called him Beloved and he, laughing, called me Little Thunder. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.
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