Chapter 33
Their coffee cooled in the cups her father had poured as the three of them sat around the box at the table.
Mira didn’t really know what she’d expected to hear after a lifetime of her mother’s refusal to speak about her family.
She supposed somehow her grandmother must have been a shrew or a harsh woman, judging by her own mother’s moods and exacting demands, but the woman her mother described was nothing like that.
Zaneta described a happy childhood—a large, warm family and a busy life in the community of weavers.
Their work had been revered and honored.
They were renowned, tapestries and other pieces requested from faraway places—for churches, dignitaries, altars, and burials of important people.
The pictures in the box gave Mira a glimpse of aunts and uncles she’d never seen and heard little about.
There’d been two sisters who had often looked after her mother as the youngest, teaching her letters, sharing their hair ribbons.
Her two brothers had been typical boisterous fishermen, tossing her about like a bundle of nets to make her laugh.
They were strong, Zaneta recounted, always joking and making mischief that had her father laughing and her mother shaking her head.
A strange calm seemed to have come over her mother as she sifted through the long-hidden memories.
Mira found herself holding her breath and keeping still, making herself smaller, as if that would keep her mother talking.
She was reluctant to ask questions, though she was burning with them.
Now and then, her father reached over and draped an arm on the back of her mother’s chair or nodded encouragement to her.
He’d known them, too, in his way, and he smiled at her recollections as if to remind her mother that her memories held joy as well as pain.
Mira studied her grandparents’ wedding photo while her mother described how hard they worked, how their home—the very same house her parents lived in now—was always full of visitors, family, and women from their community because of her mother’s position.
She was a maestra, her mother said, wise and adept at weaving the byssus.
She was their historian, keeper of the few records they had and some of the oldest weavings of byssus still in existence.
The box held some of these pieces, wrapped in layers of linen and tissue paper for safekeeping, labeled with what her mother said was the spiky handwriting of Mira’s grandmother.
As Zaneta told it, her mother was proud to have been able to read and write and made sure her daughters knew the skills as well.
In their rural Sardegnan island town, literacy wasn’t always a given for the residents, especially the women, but school had never been a question for Mira. Her own mother had seen to that.
When Daniella started to fuss, her father pushed back his chair and picked her up. He made silly faces at her and let her grab at his beard as he walked her around the small kitchen.
Zaneta pulled the sheaf of letters across the table and untied the worn ribbon that bound them.
“These I’ve never seen,” she said. “They wrote to each other while my father was a soldier in the first war.” Slowly, she read through them, placing them in order when she was finished.
“I can hear their voices in these letters. Certain phrases he’d use or ways she’d pronounce a word.
I’ve often thought what I’d give to hear a real recording.
If only we’d had those tape machines they have now.
In some ways, though, you always carry your mother’s voice in your head, you know? ”
Mira gave her mother a rueful smile. Yes, that she certainly knew.
Luccio broke in. “What do you say, Mira, if I take Daniella for a walk down by the quay? We can watch the catch come in.”
“Would you like that, Dani? A walk with Nonno?” She handed him the small bag she’d packed and gave her daughter a kiss.
“Back soon,” he said, closing the door. Mira heard his deep voice singing nonsense songs to Daniella as they headed down the path. Her father made a perfect nonno, and she loved seeing them together.
“Would you like to take a walk, too, Mamma? We could go down by the shoreline and breathe the air.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll bring this scroll with me.”
The shore wasn’t far, and they followed the worn path through the rocks and grass until the sea came into view.
Her mother was quiet, obviously lost in the thoughts and memories the box must certainly have stirred up.
Mira’s shoulders relaxed at the sight of the water.
She felt more at ease here than anywhere else.
Together, they walked to the water’s edge, kicked off their sandals, and let the water wash over their toes. The tide was out.
“There’s a good flat rock.” She pointed. “Let’s sit there and you can translate the scroll.”
Zaneta tucked the folds of her long skirt around her legs and unrolled the leather binding.
Mira hiked her skirt to her knees and let her feet trail in the shallow water of the tide pool along one edge of the rock.
The paper of the scroll wasn’t like anything Mira had ever seen.
Yellowing and stained from what she imagined must have been the fingers of generations past, she could see that someone, at some point, had mounted the fragile original onto a firmer surface to help preserve it.
She wrinkled her nose as she caught a woody aromatic whiff as the sea breeze swept across its surface.
“It’s Hebrew,” her mother said. “You should have studied more.”
“Probably,” Mira admitted. “I could do it, but it would take me longer. You just read it.”
Smoothing the first page, her mother read “Letter of Berenice Agrippa” and stopped short. “Do you know what this is?” Her mother sat up straight and thrust the binding at her. Her hands were shaking.
“The Berenice?” Mira asked, her mouth hanging open. Hers was the first name they recited when they chanted the litany of weavers who’d come before. The first-century queen who’d brought the knowledge and weaving of the byssus thread to Sardegna.
“Who else? It has to be.”
“What does it say?” Mira urged.
Her mother cleared her throat and began to read:
Letter of Berenice Agrippa,
Princess, Widow, Traitor, and Exile. I’ve quite a list of monikers, depending on who tells the tale.
Now, my daughter Titia, at my life’s end, I tell you the story so you can weave traces of it through the fine byssus garments and tapestries your fingers create.
All of us build a life from the material we’ve been given.
The trick is to know which patterns need embellishing and which should be abandoned or removed.
For us, Titia, and our daughters to follow, our strength comes from being bound to one another through the sea and creating beauty.
That’s the legacy I leave. That, and you, my dearest.
“Amazing,” Mira breathed. “It’s the beginning of everything.”
Her mother’s eyes scanned the text. “She says her father, Marcus Agrippa, Herod I, was king and in the line of her great-grandfather, Herodes Magnus, Herod the Great. She was taught to read and write, even then. She writes of the byssus. How her mother taught her. Not much has changed since then. It sounds like what we do still.”
“What else?”
“This bit is faded, hard to make out. It’s something about her brother Agrippa being called to the palace. Another brother, Drusus, falling from a horse. Here, she goes on.”
Mother prayed with him endlessly until he died, while my father ordered the animal killed, one grieving via silence and the other rage.
For months, palace mirrors remained draped in black cloth.
We ate our meals without seasoning and barely left our chambers, far more than the days of shivah required.
Mother and I wove our sorrows into the most beautiful tapestry, cliffs dashed by an angry sea teeming with fish.
A lone vessel teetered on those broiling waves, and when the breeze caught the edges of the cloth, it appeared that the sea actually rose and dipped with the wind.
Mira nodded along. Weaving her own emotions into the cloth felt familiar. She knew that lone vessel well. She’d woven plenty of her own.
Zaneta traced the text with a finger. “Here, she recounts her marriages. She was a young bride the first time, then widowed by sixteen. Married again to an uncle, another king, and once more widowed by twenty, with two sons. Then to live with her mother and brother, now king.”
“By twenty?” Mira marveled. “Not quite the same as our slow, simple island life, is it?”
“She had no say. It was for politics and alignments. She was literate, though, and a princess.”
“We’ve always called her Queen Berenice,” Mira noted. “How did she become a queen?”
“Ah. Here it is. She says. She married a king named Polemon. That’s where her title comes in.” Zaneta mumbled to herself, scanning the parchment for highlights, occasionally reading bits aloud.
I was able to offer my brother reasonable counsel.
Unlike my husbands, Agrippa turned his ear to my words and thought them worthy.
Others fuel rumors, Titia, that your uncle and I had an unholy union, a thought borne of jealousy rather than truth.
He didn’t marry, it’s true, but he hadn’t need: plenty of temple concubines were available to him.
I often accompanied him on official trips.
On one occasion, together we heard the court testimony of a Roman Jew named Paul, one who had been a follower of that Nazarene, Jesus.
Imagine! The defendant, Paul of Tarsus, dared to try to persuade Agrippa to become a follower also.
Agrippa was amused by the man’s folly but impressed by his courage.