The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [127]
These days you turn from me in the fields where the almonds will soon flower. You insist you belong elsewhere, but I will not abandon you. I see you dressed in white linen, in the rocky field, tending to six black goats, your head bowed, your feet bare, and I weep to see you taken from me in your fervor and your desire for a man who can never know you as I do. Perhaps you do not wish for him to know you. You keep your back to me and will not speak, not even when I knock on the rough wooden door of the goat shed where you live beside the people you’ve chosen as your own. They are paupers whose only desire is to praise the Almighty with prayers for peace, even though outside the confines of our fortress the world snarls with war. You will not sit at our table, for our practices are not as strict as those you now revere, and our ways are unclean in your eyes.
I sent a dove to you, one that was pure white, a favorite of our mother’s, thinking this creature would fill you with remorse and you would follow him, but the bird returned to the dovecote with my message unread. Inside the tube I had attached to the bird’s leg I wrote your name and mine intertwined, as our fate intertwined at the moment of your birth. I cannot imagine whom I could ever love more in this world we walk through.
When I see you at the wall, at prayer with the Essene women at the hour when day becomes night, you don’t glance at me, though my breath is inside you and yours is a part of me. No matter how you refuse me, our spirits combine to form a single thread. Even if you never speak to me, or raise your eyes to me, even if you are ashamed of me and of our past.
You are mine and mine alone.
YOUR FATHER was a wealthy man, and he knew what he wanted. Had this not been so, had he not traveled to Jerusalem from the far shore of the Salt Sea, our mother and I would have perished, cast out on the day I was born. I had no sister to comfort me as you did on the day of your arrival in this world, only the taste of my own blood in my mouth.
The man who was to be your father had come such a great distance to trade the riches he had amassed, piles of black myrrh and balsam, spices in heaps of ocher and red, baskets of frankincense grown from the white star flower of Edom, salt from the sea, limestone from the cliffs. Perhaps an angel stopped him on the street and whispered in his ear, suggesting that he turn his head. He wore a long scarf and the blue robes of his people, which were dyed with the root of the ginger plant. Although he was far from young, his eyesight was sharper than a falcon’s and he took note of my mother’s great beauty. Among the men he rode with, he was known for seeing what others could not. That may be why he spied us in a cart meant for sheep brought to the butcher as we were driven into the wilderness. The Angel of Death was waiting for us—Mal’ach ha-Mavet, who has a thousand glinting eyes—but he was defeated when your father followed us.
Your father gave the driver a handful of coins that he himself deemed worthless. He was a man who believed what mattered came from the earth, not from the treasuries of a temple or the workshops of men. He took us with him that very day, destined for the east, the ancient land across the Salt Sea, where the mountain is made of iron and mounds of black asphalt float along the shore, setting themselves on fire when the heat rises. Your father’s people collected nets full of asphalt to sell at a high