The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [106]
This new year was especially bitter for me. Every piece of fruit I cut in half possessed a flavor I couldn’t abide. What was sweet, I had grown to despise. I ate bitter greens, and was accustomed to the taste of salt on my tongue. I went to the synagogue and stood with the women in the back. Men must not be distracted by women, but what of women who were distracted by their own thoughts? I recited the prayers I knew by heart, but my voice was hesitant, listless.
I had grown so pale that Yael asked if I had fallen ill. I said no, but I could no longer bring myself to go to the dovecotes in the morning. Instead I chose to remain on my pallet, my face to the wall. I saw shadows as my grandsons passed in and out of the threshold. I saw all that had happened in the desert every time I closed my eyes.
A year had passed since my daughter’s life had been taken. On the Day of Atonement, I went to the synagogue to say the prayers of lamentation, but my loss was like an arrow piercing through me, and these rituals were not enough to dull the pain. Melancholy was around me like a shroud, my sorrow sewn to me with the black thread demons are said to use. When I went back into the plaza, people avoided me. They could see the darkness I carried. Even my grandsons shrank from me, preferring to sit beside Yael and hear her stories. There was only one individual who might understand me, one who’d walked the same path and stood beneath the same sky.
Surely, Yoav was somewhere in a darkened corner, aching as I did.
IT WAS EVENING when I went to the barracks. I had not left my chamber for several days, other than to pray in the synagogue. If you do not leave your bed, you become unused to walking. If you do not forgive yourself, you cannot forgive anyone else. I had disposed of the beasts at the oasis, but they had disposed of me as well. The woman I had been, she who had awoken to the scent of bread baking, who swept the steps each morning with complete certainty that the new day would be like any other, had vanished. I was a shell, a beetle, a shock of flesh stitched through with demon thread.
The warriors were at prayer on this evening. I noticed an enormous pile of rocks had been chiseled into smooth, hard balls, to be used in a catapult should we be attacked. These rocks were piled high where before there had been lengths of wood. Now the wood was used up, and there was little enough of it to be found on the surrounding cliffs, only a few stray sunstruck bushes with bleached, scaly bark that smoldered rather than burned when tossed upon a fire. It was the planting season, but the air smelled like an oven in which bread had burned for days. No one worked the fields; protection from the elements and from our enemies occupied us all. I wondered what my husband would have thought of a world that was too hot for bread, too brutal for human kindness.
I waited beneath the remnants of a mulberry tree not far from the barracks. The leaves rustled in the dark. The sound echoed like a rattle, or perhaps it was more like a snakeskin shaken in the wind. I sat on the stump of a tree whose bounty had once fed a king. Soon the young warriors returned from their prayers. They took up their work even on this holiest of days. I spied the great assassin of Jerusalem, Bar Elhanan, cleaning the flat bronze blades of spears with rags and sand as though he were a slave himself. He had come to my home several times, only mumbling a greeting to me but lighting up when he saw Arieh, whom he sat upon his knee. I glimpsed Yael’s brother as well, out in the field where he vied with his friends in a contest to see whose eye and aim were best and who among them could shoot an arrow through one of the narrow windows set into stone, made for pouring hot oil and boiling water onto enemies should they be foolish enough to try to breach the wall.
I waited so long I began to hear the echoes of owls in the caves. The warriors retreated to the barracks. As the assassin crossed the plaza, I saw the age in his step, the heaviness of his burden, for he carried all