The Dovekeepers - Alice Hoffman [70]
I took the curving stairs, worn down by the tide of years and by the footsteps of the sages. I wanted to see the earth below me, a world that was so beautiful and so cruel, the land my child would walk through. There were women working at the looms even at this late hour. If I turned west I could identify their voices, but if I turned east I heard only the wind. Inside its roar were the voices of lions, of men who walked through the dark, of women who had been lost.
There were seven hawks circling above me, echoing the seven sisters, stars that gather in the sky. I wore the white garments of a dovekeeper. Perhaps they thought I was ready to take flight and considered me a sacrifice. I climbed onto Herod’s wall, balancing on the thick stone blocks edged with the mark of the king. I lifted my arms straight out. The wind went through me. It shook me to my core. There was nothing but emptiness before me, yet I was not alone.
Spring 71 C.E.
Part Two
Summer 71 C.E.
The Baker’s Wife
There was only one language we understood, one prayer we remembered, one path we walked upon, so far from the throne of heaven we could no longer hear your voice.
They say that women cannot know the ways of our God, but I have seen His truth with my own eyes. Our God knows all and sees all and has as much compassion for the sparrow as he does for the hawk that hunts it across the sky. Before Him, everything disappears in the wind. If you place a handful of grain on a rock and turn your back, it will fly away. If you leave a sparrow in a tower, it will not be there when you return. If you ask a hawk for mercy, your words will be rendered mute.
That is what happened in my life: I turned my back. I could no longer hear the voice of the sparrow. I asked for kindness from a creature who knew only cruelty. I didn’t understand what the wind was capable of and how we must bow before it, grateful no matter where it may take us.
*
AS A girl I lived in a village north of Shiloh, where it was said the spring water could prevent miscarriages and bring children to barren women, such was the pleasure of God in this land. We settled in the Valley of the Cypresses, where the fields were green and there were five black goats in every shed. I married when I was a young woman, too inexperienced to know there was evil in the world. I was happy and I thought happiness lasted. On my door I kept an intricately decorated mezuzah, a symbol that brings happiness and luck. Each time I passed by I felt fortunate, assured that God would deliver us from evil. I uttered my thanks to Adonai without thought and with the foolhardy conviction that wickedness would never come near. At night my bed was filled with straw so soft that I fell asleep as soon as I closed my eyes. My house was made of stone with beams fashioned of local cypress cut in the woods nearby. My husband was kind and good-hearted, yet still I was granted more. When my daughter was born, she was so beautiful people stopped in the marketplace to congratulate me on my good fortune. I should have begun to worry then, for as fortune comes to you, so does it slip away.
AS THE YEARS drifted by, my dreams were rich with the scent of bread, for below our sleeping chamber my husband had his bread ovens, the kind we called a tannur, made of mounds of rounded clay. The pale smoky clay glowed with orange heat when the ovens were stoked before daybreak. Throughout the years the fire that burned below our rooms ensured our warmth. There was a millstone in our courtyard, and two donkeys to pull it, grinding the wheat we stored in a tall, wooden granary.
My husband had learned the art of baking from his father, as he had from his father before him. No baker’s bread tasted the same as another’s, that was what my husband told me, for a baker’s life went into each loaf. Some baked with piety, some with prayers, some with the intent to