The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [112]
“I know what it is your son-in-law desires,” Shirah now said. “But what of you?”
“His wish is mine,” I assured her.
“No.” She was not convinced. When she gazed at me, I felt my throat tighten, perhaps to hold back the truth. “There’s something more.”
Shirah raised my hand to her mouth. Before I could think to pull away, she kissed the center of my palm. In that instant I let go of the truth, that which I’d kept from her and from God and from myself. I broke into a shuddering sob. The soldiers had been beasts and it had been a pleasure to kill them, but they had been men as well. They had walked on the earth and under the sky. The one who had pleaded with me was the one who had stayed with me, for he had begged for something I now longed for as well.
I wished to be forgiven.
“It was always so in the eyes of God,” Shirah told me.
She let her robe slip from her shoulders so that I could take in the full measure of the forbidden red tattoos on her skin that I had spied in the cistern. I knew what they represented: loyalty to the goddess, a life given in service, a woman’s deepest sacrifice, scorned by our own people.
“Should I judge myself?” she ventured to ask. “Or should I leave that to the Almighty, who forgives us all for being what He made us?”
Beneath the mulberry tree I had nearly been moved to renounce my faith alongside my son-in-law. Who was there to look down upon my trials and my transgressions? Who could heal a wound that might never be closed? Shirah had tasted my sorrow and had trusted me enough to reveal herself to me in return. If she could, and if God would allow it, my son-in-law would be granted his heart’s desire.
Perhaps then I could forgive myself.
I PRACTICED patience throughout the month of Tishri, for this virtue did not come easily to me. In truth, patience had never served me well in the past. If I’d had patience, my grandsons would have been beside the pool of green water when the renegades came to us, waiting like sheep to be slaughtered. If I’d had patience, my daughter’s murderers would still be walking this earth. I thought of my husband and how he had waited for the dough to rise, never rushing the loaves into the oven. He’d known the exact moment to take the linen cloths from the rising loaves, when to slide the wooden board into the red-hot oven. It was as if he was the challah as well as its maker, and therefore understood its mystery from the inside out.
I began to study the slave. He, too, was a deeply patient man. He waited without complaint every evening, settled upon the stones of the dovecote until Yael’s return the following day, as calm as the doves who waited for our return. But I took note of the heat in his pale eyes; he couldn’t hide that. Even his patience would last only so long.
It was a difficult season, and the heat had not dissipated. Sleep did not come easy to me, although the others beneath my roof slept well, including Arieh, who was more than two months old, a healthy, quiet little boy. There came an evening when I was tidying our chamber, setting new straw into our sleeping pallets, when I looked out to see movement beside our door. I noticed a shadow, as I had at the oasis when the darkness of the soldiers crossed the sand. That was my talent. I could observe what was only half there: the beasts on the ridgetop, the rat in the corner, the woman meeting her lover, the vial of poison behind the spice jars, the lanky form of a man lingering outside our chamber. I thought it was a spirit who had risen to walk among us, having left his slumbering body behind. But, no, he was flesh and blood.
*
WHEN I recognized him, I understood that the Man from the North was not as patient as I had imagined. Perhaps this was true for all men. I now remembered there had indeed been days