The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [51]
“Well, if you know what’s good for you, you won’t listen even if you’re able to understand us,” I cautioned our captive.
I kept watch and saw that he was clever; he had begun a new method of cleaning the dovecotes with a rake he had devised. The slave had found rusted nails on the floor and had used them to attach twigs to a twisted branch of the olive tree that had grown in through a space in the roof. Every time he realized I was studying him, he seemed abashed, cautious. He made me think of a Syrian bear I had seen once in Jerusalem, set in irons to perform tricks for his Roman owner. The bear had kept his eyes lowered, but once, when he could no longer restrain himself, he had bared his teeth, only to be slapped down. He had held his paws over his head, as though he were a man being beaten. Although others in the crowd laughed, I had recoiled and run away, my heart pounding.
“Do you have enough food?” I asked the slave at the end of one day.
I mimicked eating so he might understand. He shook his head, shrugged. I knew he slept in the fetid loft above the dovecote, where he was chained at night, that he was given grain and crackers as his ration and little more. I began to leave him piles of twigs, so that he might have a fire and warm himself when the nights were chill.
“Are you deaf?” I wondered aloud.
He looked up then. He was a stranger from a land covered with snow, something I had seen only once in my life, when I was a young girl and it fell in Jerusalem dusting the hills, sent by Shalgiel, the angel of snow. Some children had mistaken it for manna and eaten handfuls of it, freezing their lips.
The slave understood me. I was sure of it.
I knew what it was to yearn for a life so distant it seemed that it had never been anything more than a dream. Did he dream of snow and wild blue goats, or of his comrade, taken in chains across the Salt Sea?
I urged one of the doves out of its niche, held it until it quieted, then quickly broke its neck. I nearly laughed to see how startled the slave was. Perhaps watching me the way he did, he did not expect such an abrupt and deadly action. But I was not afraid of cruelty; I knew it was inside me, as it was inside the leopard who must catch his supper to survive. The slave was grateful enough when I handed the bird to him to cook for his dinner; he hid it away in the corner, where he might reach it when he was chained at night.
When Revka, always sour and ready to place blame, noticed a bird missing the following morning, I declared that I’d seen a hawk earlier that day. Such things happened often enough; a dove would arise through the narrow opening in the roof and be struck in midair. Then there would be feathers floating down, and if you narrowed your eyes, a thin rain of blood.
WHEN I WENT to the wall to look out at the far reaches beyond our settlement, I was often stunned by how set apart we were from the rest of the world. The wilderness appeared endless, the earth so distant it seemed impossible we might ever walk upon it again. If this was what it was to be an angel, to be Raphael or Michael or one of the sheydim who peered down upon mankind, then it was a lonely and terrible place to be. We were a city and a world unto ourselves, with more people arriving all the time. The desperate, the devout, the beaten, the lost. That was why there was so much gossip; it was difficult to keep secrets in such a crowded, unforgiving world. Families shared their lives, with only thin walls of rough fabric made of goat hair strung from ropes to separate us.
We heard what should have been private, lovemaking and arguments alike. We knew whose children wouldn’t behave and were scolded and whose wife muttered curses as soon her husband left their chamber. The baths were always teeming, with talk as well as with bodies. Shops were filled