The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [21]
When Ben Simon bade me to him I would run to him like a dog, but at least I was now a dog who chose my own master. I let him take me the way dogs take each other, and then the way lions do, face-to-face, entwined. When he insisted he was obliged to leave, I wouldn’t let him go. I satisfied his every urge, offering any favor to convince him to stay. I burned with him, hot and liquid in his grasp, our bodies a dark tangle, for we had become beasts for whom this was the only language. Salt tears stung my eyes, but they did not fall. Ours was a destroying sort of love. When he felt humiliated by his own needs, Ben Simon would heap insults upon me, then he would weep and take me again in his arms. I couldn’t get enough of him because I knew as soon he left me he would return to his family. He belonged to them. He never lied about that. I would watch his footprints when he went and mourn him before he was gone.
IT WAS THE TIME when we remembered the reconsecration of the Temple after the Syrians were driven off, when Adonai allowed a single day’s oil to burn for eight nights to mark our faith and our triumph. But now the Temple was lost to us, and our oil burned with plumes of black smoke. The rocks were our ovens as flames leapt from the few twisted boughs we could find. A pale rain fell and spattered our fire so that even cooking was difficult. Our feast was a dove I had trapped in my scarf. The creature sang tirr tirr, a lovely song that sound like tor, our word for turtledove. I looked upon a bush of myrtle and saw the dove’s mate waiting there. Later in the season when the turtledoves would migrate south, I wondered if the one perched on the branch would leave alone, or if she would stay and mourn. I thought of Solomon’s words to his beloved, Behold thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes. I saw grief staining the dark eyes of the one perched in the bushes, and a tenderness I had never seen in humankind. I walked toward the lone dove, wondering if I should do away with its loneliness, but it flitted off to a higher branch, its pale feathers gleaming, too lovely a creature for me to destroy.
A portion of water served as our wine that evening, for there were no grapes, and no time to try to ferment the figs we occasionally found growing wild. I had become accustomed to the way we lived and found solace in silence. I’d grown to love the scent of the desert at night, fragrant and harsh at the same time. We went from place to place, following the possibility of finding water, chasing after the tracks left by quail. I continued to live removed from the others so that Ben Simon could easily come to me while his wife and children slept. Once, when Ben Simon was off hunting, my father came up to me and asked if it was my desire to be a zonah. I felt that he had slapped me. He compared me to the prostitutes who lived at the edge of Jerusalem and were willing to pull off their cloaks for anyone who would pay them, even Roman soldiers.
“If that’s who I am, then that’s who you made me,” I informed my father, the man who had murdered so many with his curved dagger, who had ignored me and used me as he would a dog, who hadn’t flinched when he brought me into the desert, where I could have no future other than the one that had already been written.
I HAD STOPPED counting off days. I did not wish to be elsewhere, even though there was still no sign of my brother and the fortresses of the rebel Jews. The heat had lifted and the rains had begun in earnest. Soon there would be pools forming in the nechalim; the ravines between the cliffs would rush with iridescent waterfalls. I was