Free In the King's Arms by Sonia Taitz Page B

said her mother, returning to her awful calmness. “You think he proposed to me then? You think we fell in love and got married like a nice Romeo and Juliet?”
    “No, but—”
    “Did he raise the dead from the earth? The nightmare went on for many more years,” said her mother. “The nightmare is going on
still, in me. Do you think I don’t feel it now, when I tell you? Only now, over there, a forest grows from the bloody ground, and from there they cut their Christmas trees for their martyred Lord. One more dead Jew, more, less . . . .”
    “But don’t you feel better knowing that a German cried over you?”
    Gretta cut her: “Only a forest grows from the bloody ground,” she repeated. “And he’s alive to whistle in it. Unless some real Nazi eventually shot my junior soft-heart for his moment of weakness.”
    Lily had always hoped the poor man had survived somewhere. In her world, such incongruous people were precious and necessary, lovable and even holy.

15
    Europe, 1976
     
     
    T HE VOLUPTUOUS SPLENDOR of the holiday season had nearly hypnotized Lily by the time Christmas day arrived. Christmas left her to her own imaginative resources; the family had it all “under their belt,” and did not need to resort to conversation about meanings. Lily’s thoughts bobbed freely, a dinghy on the seas. It was precisely when she tried to see things through their eyes that she went furthest abroad, and away from their actual notions.
    For instance, she tried to see Jesus as she thought they must, as the martyred child of God. She tried to grasp the notion that death did not really conquer him (it helped her to think of the Jews; death never really conquered them, either). She thought of Mother Mary. She’d been summoned by God to a strange yet homely service: to augment the universal spirit with the warmth of her female body, to sacrifice her womb to the powers that must be. She had assented. Shy Miriam, Virgin of Israel, eyes bright with pure trust.
    If Jesus had sacrificed himself for mankind, why, so had Mary. She had said: if that’s what is needed to help my fellow wanderers on this painful earth, then here I am, Lord, open to your service. Mary, thought Lily, was like Queen Esther, the Jewish Queen of Persia. Esther had begun her life unassumingly, humbly. But then she had been called upon. In order to save the Jewish people from annihilation at the hands of King Ahasuerus (who had been evilly
counseled by Haman), she went before the King himself, parading her loveliness, and found special favor in his eyes. He took her into his arms and married her; he was smitten. (Julian had fallen under the same auspicious spell, thought Lily.)
    They took to their Jewesses, as God took to Mary, and a vast forgiveness became possible. After all, love allows the widest, most extravagant mercies. When King Ahasuerus was in Esther’s thrall, and she in his embrace, she told him: the people you are being counseled to destroy are my people, my flesh and my blood. Kill them and you will kill what you love. Be merciful and love will be infinite . The King listened and understood. He spared the Jews, and killed his remorseless advisor.
    So it was that one fragile Jewess had redeemed her kinsmen. So it had been with Mary-Miriam. Even God conceded that to make his own seductive son he would need a woman’s soft womb. He would not go it alone this time, plucking a rib as an afterthought. No. Now he saw the power of the magic vessel, Woman; in her, he could forge his mortal interpleader. A stern King needs his tender maid. This was not chilly old Adam’s time. Jesus was to begin life as a vibrant quickening egg, warmed to life by his mother’s compassionate flesh.
    Christmas was the day of Mary’s labor, the labor of universal love. She had a son so delicious you could eat him, body and soul, and live on it forever. This was called Holy Communion. The family of man would spare each other, and feast instead, together, on the son of