The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [103]
“Do you think I don’t remember how to use a knife?” the assassin asked when he saw her hesitation.
Yael raised her glance to him. “Oh no. I’m sure you do.”
Clearly that was her fear.
“Am I not your father?” the assassin said.
Yael gazed at him, unsure.
“Is that child not my grandson?”
Yael’s brother quietly urged her to have faith. It was he who had persuaded his father to come to the synagogue, and the two, who had turned away from one another, had made amends because of the birth of this boy. “This child belongs to us, and we to him, never more than on this day. He is not a burden, for he has brought us together.”
Only male relatives were allowed to be present at the ceremony when the child would be named. He was ready for the covenant, he had enough life and breath to shield him so that Lilith and her demons could not call to him as easily as they might have in the hours following his birth. Until this day he’d still had one foot in their world and the other in ours; now he was rooted, fed by his mother’s milk. This ritual would set the path for his entire life to come.
The assassin kept his head bowed as he waited for Yael’s decision, a sign of respect he had never offered to his daughter in the past.
“Take him,” Yael said. “But even when I’m not watching, God will be there.”
We waited nervously beside the western wall. Yael’s face was white. She refused to sit on a nearby bench and paced instead. When the baby cried out, she took hold of my arm.
“A cry is a good thing,” I reminded her, echoing Shirah’s words. “It’s silence we need to fear.”
Amram himself looked ashen when he at last carried the baby back to his mother. Yael’s worried expression broke into a grin when she saw her brother’s face, his usual swagger replaced by the weight of his immense responsibility to the newborn.
“You look worse than he does,” she teased.
“I think it was more painful for me,” Amram agreed.
Yael opened the child’s blankets. The cut was perfect, leaving only a slight flush of blood. The baby was already dozing in his mother’s arms, exhausted by his own cries and by the sudden flash of pain he’d known, as well as by the wine that he’d been fed to dull that pain. The old assassin was standing in the threshold. Yael, still unsure in her father’s presence, at last nodded her gratitude, but Yosef bar Elhanan had already disappeared, as if he had never been present. I gazed into the plaza. There wasn’t even a shadow to be seen.
“Did he speak of the child?” Yael asked her brother, curious despite herself.
“He blessed him,” Amram said. “Let that be enough.”
WE KEPT the wound clean, applying a balm of balsam and honey that would bring about healing more quickly. But there was more to be done to announce this child’s arrival in our world, later, and in secret.
We brought the baby into the field on a night when the moon was waning. Shirah was waiting for us. We three stood where the afterbirth had been buried to commit to a naming ceremony of our own. It was a starry night, but we avoided the light and gathered in the shadows so as not to be spied by the guards and questioned. Shirah had broken an eggshell into halves, onto which she had written the holy name of God as many times as could fit in tiny black letters, the ink drawn from crushed mulberries.
Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.
We lit a small fire of green wood. Yael placed the baby in the grass. He whimpered, then dozed. She removed her head scarf and her robe to stand before God as she had been on the day her mother died, the day she was born, in this very same month of Av. Shirah began to chant words of protection under a screen of smoke.
Redeem this child and save him from all afflictions. Allow him to become a man and sing glorious songs of praise to our Lord and king, the mighty God who created us. Amen Amen Selah, may God keep you from all evil and may He allow you to dwell in Jerusalem and in all holiness.
When the hymn was completed, Shirah buried the eggshells beneath the tree. The moonlight was yellow as it swept across the field. Already